Curated set · answers marked
Which Irish poet penned the collection Death of a Naturalist (1966), featuring the poem of the same name that recounts a childhood experience with frogs at a flax-dam?
AW. B. Yeats
BPatrick Kavanagh
CSeamus Heaney✓
DPaul Muldoon
In the poem "Death of a Naturalist," what event causes the speaker's childhood sense of wonder and delight about nature to change into fear and disgust?
AHe sees a fox kill a rabbit in the flax-dam.
BA swarm of frogs takes over the flax-dam, and he imagines them as a threatening, vengeful army.✓
CHis teacher cautions him about the risks of collecting frogspawn.
DA sudden storm wipes out the frogspawn he had gathered over the summer.
Rationale
The speaker joyfully collected frogspawn from the flax-dam as a child, inspired by his teacher's lessons. However, upon returning to find the dam filled with frogs—described in aggressive, military-like terms ("gross-bellied," "poised like mud grenades")—he experiences fear and disgust, marking a shift in his innocent connection with nature.