Symbol Analysis
Some little kids can really get down with gross. Why do you think Gak and Slime were so money for Nickelodeon? There's just something appealing and intriguing about stinky and slimy stuff. Maybe it's because our parents spend so much time trying to keep us clean as kids that when life presents us with some high-quality gnarly nature we can't help but be psyched. That's precisely the state we find out speaker in as we enter this poem. The flax dam is rotting and gurgling and the slimy frogspawn is the prized bounty of this stinkpot, and Heaney uses his most strikingly vivid imagery to convey the gleefully gross stuff.
- Line 5: The gurgling mud and muck is described as something pleasant! You can tell the speaker is enjoying the strange sounds of the rotting flax dam, otherwise Heaney wouldn't have chosen the word "delicately." It's kind of like saying, "the mud was farting pleasantly." It's almost humorous.
- Lines 8–9: Heaney describes the frogspawn in a perfectly disgusting way. "Warm thick slobber" and "clotted" make you think of dog slobber or mucus, or any myriad of nastiness. The twist is that in front of this disgusting image he says, "Best of all" to let us know that our speaker is totally into the muck that mother nature has provided.
- Lines 11–12: "Jampotfuls of jellied specks"—doesn't that sound lovely! Kind of reminds us of tapioca pudding, or some other sundry delight. Until you think about what exactly it is that's in those cute little jars chilling on his windowsill: frogspawn—slimy, green-gray frog goop.
- Lines 14–15: Again, something nimble-swimming sounds so graceful and lovely, like synchronized swimmers, or leaping dolphins. But here, Heaney's describing the little slimy tadpoles this way. The image is vivid and unexpected. Our speaker clearly sees the gross natural phenomenon that is frog reproduction as something exciting and pleasant.