All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
These first lines of the poem show how central to the narrator's memory the flax-dam is. The process of decay implies a life cycle in the dam; the use of the word "festers" indicates that the dam is brewing with energy. By saying the flax-dam is in the "heart" of the town, the speaker indicates how central this location is in his childhood memories. These lines also mention strong downward motions; the flax is "heavy headed" and "weighted down," mirroring how these memories have permanently anchored themselves in the speaker.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
Here the language is gentle and nurturing. The word "gargle" sounds like the noise of the bubbles that it represents, while the word "gauze" echoes the buzzing or drone of bugs. By describing the sound as woven around the smell, the speaker creates a sense of unity of the senses, signaling the peacefulness the speaker feels in the scene. The word "wove" may invoke comforting domestic memories in the reader, as weaving is a repetitive and soothing action and is associated with soft materials.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks.
These lines reflect the original childlike attitude of the speaker, who organizes the animals through his preferences. The words "best of all" evoke the speaker's simple, innocent delight in capturing the frogspawn. The word "slobber" is most commonly associated with a dog, a domesticated and loving animal, contributing to the comfortable familiarity of this first stanza.
Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window sills at home,
The jampots mentioned here are another detail that nods to domestic life in this stanza. With this one word, the speaker is able to evoke nostalgia. The word "jellied," which appears on the same line, does similar work by continuing the childlike tone of the earlier lines.
Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn.
The speaker does not tell the reader exactly who Miss Walls is; this is a subtle way of showing the speaker's childlike ignorance of context, by assuming that such context isn't necessary. By doing this, the speaker fully immerses readers in the world of his childhood and has the readers experience these scenes just as he did. Unlike the previous sentences, this one lacks any commas. In writing this way, the speaker takes on the breathless, excited voice of a child. The words "daddy" and "mammy" emphasize this impression.
You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
These lines continue the breathlessness of the ones before them by excluding any commas. The speaker also addresses a "you," though the "you" is a hypothetical person, not the reader. The tone of this sentence is conversational in a way the first lines of the poem were not.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam;
These lines introduce the second and final stanza of this poem and almost immediately betray the darker tone that this stanza takes on. The differences between the description of the flax-dam here and in the first stanza are subtle but significant. Where the first stanza described the temperature in the flax-dam as "sweltering," this one calls it "hot." The one-syllable word sharpens the line, as opposed to "sweltering," which, while indicating that the heat is uncomfortable, more importantly echoes onomatopoetic words like "gargle" and "clotted," becoming one with the noises of the flax-dam.
The next word that shows the shift in tone is "rank," another one-syllable word that cuts the scene like a knife. Again, the mentions of rotting, festering flax in the first stanza does the same work of describing the smell of the flax-dam, but this shorter manner of description captures the reader's attention and dampens the whimsical tone of the poem. The mention of cow dung provides a more specific and repulsive smell for readers to imagine, whereas in the first stanza the smell of rot was more in the background.
By describing the frogs as "angry" the moment they are mentioned, the speaker both indicates the certainty he felt on the state of the frogs and primes the reader to know what sorts of descriptions are to come. The word "invaded" emphasizes the frogs' anger.
