"Death of a Naturalist" is one of a number of Seamus Heaney's poems that place heavy emphasis on location and landscape. Writers from all over the world are interested in exploring bonds to their places of origin or their ancestral homes. In the case of Ireland and the Irish people, the last several centuries have seen many struggles and instances of dispossession or oppression. Though Heaney certainly meant for more readers than just the Irish to connect to his work, his interest in place shaped his poetic identity.
In order to understand Heaney's interest in place and land, one must understand the broad strokes of Irish history, which is famously complex. In the 1500s, after several centuries of dispute between the invading medieval ruling class of England and Irish chiefdoms, Henry VIII declared himself ruler of the Kingdom of Ireland. Over the next century, the English reconquered Ireland through both negotiation and warfare. The 17th century also saw much conflict, most famously Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland on the behalf of the English commonwealth. Cromwell's methods were brutal; crops were burned, fifty thousand people were sold into indentured servitude, and much of Irish Catholic land was confiscated for British settlers. Ireland was an autonomous kingdom in name, but in reality, Great Britain controlled it, and most commoners were very poor. Following the Irish Rebellion of 1798, an uprising against British rule, the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland were united. The 19th century saw great economic booms, but also a terrible famine caused by the concurrence of potato blight and land enclosures that left many Irish people with insufficient land to feed their families. Thousands upon thousands of Irish peasant farmers died or left the country, and Irish became a language spoken by a minority of the population.
After this, demands by Irish nationalists to self-govern mounted even higher. This culminated in the Easter Rising of 1916, an armed rebellion. The British army suppressed the uprising, executed most of the movement's leaders, and arrested many others, increasing Irish hostility toward them. From 1919 to 1921 the Irish Republican Army and British police forces launched attacks on each other, often with civilians caught in the crossfire or deliberately targeted. This Irish War of Independence ended with a treaty, and Ireland was split into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, another conflict, the Irish Civil War, quickly followed in 1922, because many did not believe the treaty would truly grant Irish independence. After many deadly clashes, the pro-treaty forces won, leaving the Irish people bitterly fragmented.
Even more recently, Ireland saw conflict in the 1960s through the 1990s between unionists who wanted Northern Ireland to stay part of the U.K. and nationalists who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland. This time period is known as "the Troubles." Violence rose between armed Irish republican groups and British and Northern Irish security forces, particularly in the late 60s and early 70s. Acts of police brutality by the Northern Irish police sparked a large riot known in the town Derry, which had a majority Irish nationalist population but, through gerrymandering, was controlled politically by unionists. More Northern Irish police forces and then, for the first time since Ireland's partition, British forces were sent in. In 1972, the British Army opened fire on an unarmed group protesting the arrests without trials of suspected Irish Republican Army members, killing fourteen people. In 1972, around 480 people died due to the conflict in Northern Ireland, including over 100 members of the British army killed by the IRA. Though fatalities peaked in that year, the violence continued. In 1984 the IRA bombed the Conservative Party Conference in England, killing five. In 1998 the Good Friday Agreement was reached, creating a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly and an arrangement for cooperation between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
To turn back to poetry, preoccupation with the physicality of land is common in Irish poetry; Heaney was neither the first nor the last Irish poet to take a deep interest in the land and to perform a kind of archaeology through writing, though Heaney of course intended for people outside of Ireland to connect to his poetry. In a 1979 interview for the magazine Ploughshares, he says, "I had the name for being a poet but I was also discovering myself being interviewed as, more or less, a spokesman for the Catholic minority during this early stage of the Troubles. I found the whole question of what was the status of art within my own life and the question of what is an artist to do in a political situation very urgent matters." Though he was clearly wary of the connections drawn between his poetry and the politics of the time, he did not reject the way political conflict sometimes lurks in the backdrops of his poems.
Several of his poetry collections contained "bog body poems," which revolve around the well-preserved bodies found in the bogs of Northern Europe; he was specifically inspired by the book The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, written by the Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob. One of the bodies was the famous Tollund Man, a mummified man from the fourth century B.C. who appeared to have been a human sacrifice. Heaney's poem, called "The Tollund Man," compares that man to those who died in the violence of the Troubles. Heaney says of his writing in the Ploughshares interview: "I tried, not explicitly, to make a connection between the sacrificial, ritual, religious element in the violence of contemporary Ireland and this terrible sacrificial religious thing in The Bog People." He describes how even the scent of the bogs stirred nostalgia in him, how it became "written into your senses." Politics inevitably plays a role in Heaney's exploration of the physical Irish landscape, but that exploration also stems from a deep, wordless nostalgia, from what he describes as "an illiterate pleasure."
