This poem draws from Heaney’s childhood experiences in rural Ireland; however, the location is not specified and so can take place in any countryside setting. The poem opens with a description of a boggy, swampy area dominated by rotting flax and alive with fauna: “bluebottles / Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. / There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies” (Lines 5-7). And, of course, frogs. The speaker is comfortable in this area in the first half of the poem, but then becomes defensive against their place in it in the second half. In this way the setting becomes its own metaphor for human growth and experience.