When he mentions the bubbles gargled delicately; delicately contrasts with the flax festering and gargled is onomatopoeia.
Also he mentions that the “Bluebottles wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell”, gaze is a very powerful and effective image. It unites two sensory images that are sight and sound. The smell is off the rotten flax.
The listing effect Heaney uses; dragonflies and spotted butterflies show the child’s attraction, he also uses the listing effect in Blackberry picking.
The word slobber he uses is onomatopoeia and he uses onomatopoeias quite often in his poems.
He talks about the clotted water which is thick water that has black dots in the middle. “Grew like clotted water” is a simile.
He recalls “here, every spring” and this shows specific detail like in the poem autobiography by Louis MacNeice.
Jampotfuls gives us this homely which we also get a sense of in Blackberry picking.
The alliterative effect adds to the sensory experience of the frogspawn.
Heaney mentions the fattening dots, the fattening gives us a hint of what will happen in the second stanza. Nimble doesn’t create any sense of threat. There’s an innocence conveyed in weight and watch.
We can see the child Heaney’s use of voice and memory when he mentions Miss Walls and he used child’s language like “Daddy frog and Mammy frog.
There’s an anecdotal effect here which is something stuck in by piece of interest by the teacher Miss Walls.
When the 2nd stanza starts, the language differs. The description of the frogs gets grosser. The language here constrasts with that of the language in the 1st stanza. The 1st stanza shows a more gruesome, less sanity effect of nature. He is alarmed now by nature.
The word rank with stanza one, rank is an offensive smell.
When he mentions the word Invaded it suggests attack and invasion.
Coarse croaking is onomatopoeia. They combine to emphasize the ugliness of the frog. It contrasts with the better sounds in the first stanza. The alliteration and onomatopoeia combine to create the ugliness of the sound.
The “Air was thick with a bass chorus”, this is a harsher sound than in the first stanza and it is more stereotypical feminine. There is a threat of male violence in stanza two.
“Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked on sods” this is a gross image compared to the warm thick slobber and jellied specks that we met in the first stanza.
The simile “Pulsed like sails” shows a sense of waiting.
“Some hopped” is the poet’s observation.
“The slap and plop were obscene threats” is onomatopoeia and it links with cow dung, rank and gross.
“Poised like mud grenades” gives us this sense of violence.
The “blunt heads” images are worse images than those images in the first stanza.
“I sickened turned and ran” is Heeny’s reaction of fear and terror.
The word vengeance links with obscene threats and the poet has a sense that the frogs would attack him after what he has done.
The poem ends fearful, we know that Heeny will never collect frogspawn again and he realizes that nature is violent and isn’t benign.
