Seamus Heaney’s poem, Death of a Naturalist (from which this title is taken) offers, among many things, a meditation on the natural sounds of a new season: initially hopeful, they soon echo as a closed cycle, a sad, recurrent loop.

For those men working below stairs, life was a closed loop, too: a life of waiting, serving, and waiting to serve, the low hum of their deep, sonorous voices forming its own kind of refrain, its own bass chorus.

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