Heaney uses sound a lot in this poem.
Firstly, the enjambment makes you read it as if Heaney is speaking, so that it sounds as if he is sharing a childhood memory with you. Then it is divided into two sections - the first is a happy childhood memory, with sounds like bubbles which "gargle delicately", as if they are too polite to do it loudly, and the "gauze of sound" with another suggestion of delicacy, and the "z" sound, like the buzz of insects.
Heaney also uses alliteration, to make certain phrases stick in the mind, "jampotfuls of the jellied specks", which sounds like something sweet, and thus attractive.
Then there is the second stanza, with very different sounds.
The croaking is now "coarse" and the alliteration there makes sure we remember the nature of the sound. The "bass chorus" sounds like a choir, or the chorus of an opera, and bass voices do sound more powerful and threatening, and that is made clearer with "slap" and "plop", as heaney uses onomatopoeia to suggest the rather ugly sounds the frogs makwe as they move about in the flax-dam. The final sound is their "blunt heads farting" which suggests that their heads are their anuses - a disgusting image, and one that comes complete with the idea of a forbidden sound and a nasty smell.
It's interesting that his other poems incorporate childhood memories, or sounds; he clearly gets a lot of his material from his sense of sound, and from his childhood. Do you remember things via sound, or smell? Or are your memories mainly visual?
If I were to be asked to compare this poem with another in the anthology, I'd look for poems which include a lot of sound, or are to do with death or childhood memories.
Firstly, the enjambment makes you read it as if Heaney is speaking, so that it sounds as if he is sharing a childhood memory with you. Then it is divided into two sections - the first is a happy childhood memory, with sounds like bubbles which "gargle delicately", as if they are too polite to do it loudly, and the "gauze of sound" with another suggestion of delicacy, and the "z" sound, like the buzz of insects.
Heaney also uses alliteration, to make certain phrases stick in the mind, "jampotfuls of the jellied specks", which sounds like something sweet, and thus attractive.
Then there is the second stanza, with very different sounds.
The croaking is now "coarse" and the alliteration there makes sure we remember the nature of the sound. The "bass chorus" sounds like a choir, or the chorus of an opera, and bass voices do sound more powerful and threatening, and that is made clearer with "slap" and "plop", as heaney uses onomatopoeia to suggest the rather ugly sounds the frogs makwe as they move about in the flax-dam. The final sound is their "blunt heads farting" which suggests that their heads are their anuses - a disgusting image, and one that comes complete with the idea of a forbidden sound and a nasty smell.
It's interesting that his other poems incorporate childhood memories, or sounds; he clearly gets a lot of his material from his sense of sound, and from his childhood. Do you remember things via sound, or smell? Or are your memories mainly visual?
If I were to be asked to compare this poem with another in the anthology, I'd look for poems which include a lot of sound, or are to do with death or childhood memories.
4 comments:
As we discussed in class, it seems that this poem symbolises the death of a hope or aspiration to pursue nature as a career. He may have been keen on the idea at first, but as soon as he ventures out to the pond, the sights suddenly became sickly, like his statement about the frog's 'blunt heads farting'. This is a highly off putting phrase, and can instantly cause people to vision the scene as sickly and disgusting.
He also expresses fear of the place, as he ran away from the scene, and he felt that if he dipped his hand into the pond, 'the spawn would clutch it'. this is laso an off putting phrase further lowering any kind of good image of the scene.
In class we talked about how this poem is related to death of a naturalist and how it refers to nature. It starts out as a guy that wants to become a naturalist and is fascinated by nature, but at the second stanza after seeing those frogs, the naturalist within him dies. He uses many words and imagery in his poem to bring the reader in.
Dillon,
The poem has a fairly simple structure. In the first section, Heaney describes how the frogs would spawn in the lint hole, with a digression into his collecting the spawn, and how his teacher encouraged his childish interest in the process. In the second section, Heaney records how one day he heard a strange noise and went to investigate - and found that the frogs, in huge numbers, had taken over the flax-dam, gathering for revenge on him (to punish his theft of the spawn). He has an overwhelming fear that, if he puts his hand into the spawn again, it will seize him - and who knows what might happen then?
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