Digging, Death of a Naturalist and Mid-term break are about Seamus Heaney’s childhood and the issues  he faces which range in these poems from where he fits within his family, his loss of innocence and to the sad death of his younger brother. The poems capture true life situations in close detail.

The three poems are set in the Heaney family farm (Mossbawn) in Northern Ireland. Heaney has a strong attachment to this landscape which inspires and influences his poetry. In all three poems Heaney describes the landscape vividly in great detail. For example in Death of a Naturalist the first nine lines describes a pond where flax is soaking “But best of all was the warm thick slobber of the frogspawn that grew like clotted water in the shade of the banks”. Just in this single line we can vividly see everything Heaney is writing about, each word is chosen to trigger the senses. It is as if we can see and feel the warm frogspawn. The family farm is brought to life in the poem Digging: “The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head.” While reading this line you can put yourself in the shoes of Seamus Heaney treading through the soggy peat with his father cutting turf. Mid-term break is set in Heaney’s family home amongst his family and mourners. Heaney evokes death in the house with the line. “Snowdrops and candles soothed the bedside I saw him for the first time in six weeks.”  

Seamus Heaney’s poems are mostly about himself, his family and his close community. Because all the characters Heaney writes about are real people they seem very believable and you can relate the personalities of these characters with people we have met in our own lives. For example “Miss Walls would tell us how the daddy frog was called a bullfrog and how he croaked and how the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs”. This is the patronising teacher. In the poem Mid-term break he meets his father crying on the front porch and his mother coughing “angry tearless sighs”. Heaney is painting a picture of the emotions his family members are experiencing.