Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
• Miss Wall’s explanation of the names of the frogs and their methods of
reproduction seems slightly patronising when contrasted to Heaney’s
almost scientific interest in the subject.
• The second verse marks the change in Heaney’s attitude to the flax-dam.
Then one hot day when fields were rank This is signified not only by the fact that the two verses are physically
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs separated, but by the word ‘then’.
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard • His attention was drawn by the ‘coarse croaking’ of the ‘angry frogs’
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. who had ‘invaded the flax-dam’. The sound of the frogs is emphasised
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked by the alliterative ‘c’. The description of the ‘angry’ frogs as ‘invading’
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: the flax-dam makes them seem like an organised force. Perhaps, as a
child, Heaney thought they were ready to enact ‘vengeance’ upon him
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
for taking the ‘jampotfuls of jellied specks’.
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings • Again he portrays the sound as something which was tenable: ‘The air
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew thick with a bass chorus’.
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
• The potential danger posed by the ‘angry’ frogs is made apparent by the
image of them ‘cocked/ On sods’. It is as if they were guns ready to go
Seamus Heaney off. They were also ‘poised like mud grenades’. This simile portrays
the frogs as weapons, and is particularly appropriate when you consider
the colour and shape of frogs.