Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
The temporal connective ‘then’ announces a change in the young naturalist’s attitude to the rampant fecundity of the flax-dam. Significantly, the memorable specificity of ‘one hot day’ suggests that the epiphany is linked to some excess in the weather that makes his disgust palpable and therefore unavoidable. It may also communicate a form of shame on the young boy’s part, as his awareness of the sexual vitality of the flax-dam’s creatures is represented through a form of sensory overload. What he had celebrated before now appears monstrous in its sexual connotations. The strongly influential Catholicism of Heaney’s childhood now overshadows the naive enthusiasm of the innocent naturalist at play.
What strikes me as I read the poem again is how much the feelings of disgust are evoked through the auditory sense. It appears as if the creatures of this landscape are actively assailing Heaney’s ears to remind him of their sexual intentions. Their chorus mocks the poet’s younger version of himself and drives him into a form of near hysteria. It is easy to conflate the frog spawn now with the ‘mortal sin’ of human ejaculation and this condemns the young Heaney, oppressed by Catholic guilt, into a disgust that verges on the neurasthenic.
Maybe the noise of the flax dam is exaggerated by Heaney, as he has competing thoughts in his head about his sexuality that he finds emotionally disturbing? The noise could thus be a mental rather than literal noise indicating great anxiety about any future intimacies.
On the other hand, the hypersensitivity could also be linked to Heaney’s awareness of mortality, tragically foisted upon him by the loss of his four-year-old brother who was killed by a milk float. This tragedy is described movingly in another poem collected with the Death of a Naturalist and entitled Mid-term Break discussed here on Tusitala. The disgust of Heaney could really be a mask for his impotent rage that his beloved little brother’s life could be so cruelly and randomly destroyed. What is so compelling about this poem is that all these possibilities are convincing and that Heaney is giving memorable sensory representation to the complexity of human experience and remembrance.
