Where It All Goes Down
Heaney establishes a strong sense of place right away: "All year the flax dam festered in the heart / Of the townland" (1-2). The poem is set in a rural area, in close enough proximity to nature for the speaker to be completely immersed in it come springtime. The speaker is all about becoming one with the natural setting. He celebrates the strong sounds and smells that mean the arrival of his absolute favorite thing: frogspawn (sure, some of us might celebrate the arrival of warmer months when we hear the first ice cream truck, but this kid's a little different).
The speaker takes a quick jaunt to school (to learn about frogs' reproductive practices), but eventually returns to the flax-dams where he can follow the progress of frogspawn to adult frog. The scene is rich with all elements of springtime. The good (butterflies and sprouting greenery) and the bad and ugly (rotting flax, and steaming cow dung) that Heaney describes in vivid detail engage nearly every sense: "Then one hot day when the fields were rank / With cowdung" (22-23). He hits us with a one-two steamy and stinky punch there. Luckily he spares us the experience of taste. We don't want to imagine what a "jampotful of jellied" frogspawn would actually taste like going down. Yuck.
The setting really never changes for our young naturalist. It's the same flax-dam, same frogs, same muddy grossness it's always been. What's telling, then, is the change in how the speaker relates to this setting. He goes from an enthusiastic celebrant to a fearful observer. Yup, that's what growing up can do to you, alright.