My Frog Sings: Thoughts and essays from the garden

Which brings me to the animal beloved by so many 19th-century writers: I choose a line, a stanza, or a whole poem, and I take out some of its words usually nouns and adjectives, but sometimes verbs as well , and I simply leave blanks where those words were. Then I ask the students to fill in the blanks.

I tend to switch up which poems I use, even though I know several that work particularly well.

Students go ahead and put in the blanks what is expected: Grief is a pain, Grief is a bitch. The ones who want to take imaginative leaps deliver up: Grief is a thunderstorm, Grief is a tidal wave. Which brings me back to the frog. But it did occur to Dickinson, and for good reason. And this implies that Dickinson would have considered such repetition as some form of degraded speech — sound echoing, as it does, off the mucky environs into which it is uttered. But just a little digging into the matter of these creatures shows us that Dickinson quite liked frogs, as we can see from a letter that she wrote to her friend Mary Bowles shortly after drafting this poem.

As part of a joyous description of Amherst in springtime, Dickinson extols: But as I looked further into Dickinson and frogs, I came across two late poems one from and one from in which she writes even more thoughtfully about this creature. The following year, Dickinson wrote her final poem about the frog, and this time she sent it to two different people, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Susan Huntington Dickinson.

In the letter to Higginson, she prefaces the poem with this sentence: This, it seems, is the very essence of frog sound, now in the form of a sigh.

And, probably most deeply, Thoreau did. In Walden , Thoreau writes, in what feels like a state of reverie, a paragraph that I like to imagine Dickinson read as she batted around her own frogs in prose and verse:. Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges — a sound heard farther than almost any other at night — the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard.

In the mean-while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake — if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there — who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention.

The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r — oonk, tr-r-r-oonk!

They are the noises that transport those who hear them. If Dickinson was listening to frog-sound with the same attention as Thoreau, which I think she was, then what is it that she learned from them? What do these old, lazy creatures have to say? But what lurks in both acts of listening is the awareness that there is a kind of beauty to nonsense sounds, a beauty that only the bog itself and maybe the poet in the bog can recognize. Multiply this by the hundreds or even thousands of individuals calling in a single marsh, and lo and behold, your woods have become about as soothing as the inside of a jet engine.

The air is shredded. Confronted with such a sound, we can keep our distance, or put our hands over our ears. But how does a peeper, right in the thick of it, avoid blowing out its eardrum? Its whole body is quaking. The air inside its lungs is already turbulent, even before it gets pumped out into sound.

(Sung in honour of Rikki-tikki-tavi)

The playwright Aristophanes won first prize at the festival of Dionysus, four hundred and five years before the birth of Christ, for his Frogs , a comedy in which Dionysus himself appears on stage. The god is trying to make his way across Lake Acheron to pay a visit to the Underworld.

His purpose is to bring back from the dead the playwright Euripides, who, as the best of the tragic playwrights, will bring glory to him, patron god of the theater. Who knows something about death? Who knows how to come back and tell us about it? Who knows how to fill their lungs with the temperament of the earth and express it? Stop rowing—look no further.

Field Notes From the Woods , written by Henry Walters, shares observations and ruminations on plants, wildlife, weather, and other facets of nature. Henry Walters is a naturalist, a teacher, and a falconer.

I find the songs of the woodfrogs and spring peepers most beautiful. They sing spring awake,they sing a different song to celebrate rain and yet another chorus to warn of intruders,and it gets more intense if they are predators. I live in upstste NY and we hear the spring peepers every year, especially near the woods and ponds. I love their sound. Spring is finally here and the sounds of nature are back. Animated plush love sick Frog by Cuddle Barn.

Press his foot and he sings the song Fever, his mouth opens, his head moves and his cheeks light up red. Approximately 18 in tall. Please see photos for m Good used condition with original tag Frogs mouth moves and the hearts also move with the song Works fine No batteries included Measures 12 inches tall All items come from a pet friend I won't list anything that I wouldn't use myself.

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Normal wear for a used item should be expected. Sings the song while opening his robe. Sings the song in a higher pitched voice. Press his foot and he sings the song "Polly Wolly Doodle".