" This poetic technique serves to make the rising tension flow through the stanzas. This rising tension is also developed through the sentence structure as the first two sentences are relatively short and they build tension by revealing a serious situation of a dead infant being found in the waters. .
In line six, the "But" indicates a shift in focus from the setting to the mother and sets up a contrast in the remainder of the second stanza. "But I'm sure/As she stood in the shallows/ Ducking him tenderly/Till the frozen knobs of her wrists/Were dead as the gravel,/He was a minnow with hooks/Tearing her open" (6-12). Here it is revealed that the mother killed her infant, most likely because it is "illegitimate." However by using the word "tenderly" and by using metaphors to illustrate both the physical and emotional pain the mother experienced, "the frozen knobs of her wrists/Were dead as the gravel" and "He was a minnow with hooks/Tearing her open", Heaney implies that the mother still loved her child and most likely did not wish to drown it, but due to the pressures of religion, she felt the deed was necessary. There is another fish to infant metaphor and religious allusion as the infant is portrayed as "a minnow with hooks". In line twelve, the last line of the third stanza, Heaney says the infant was "Tearing her open." This has both a literal and a metaphorical understanding, because as the baby is born, the mother is physically torn open, and it is also a common saying to say someone is "torn up" emotionally. There is another enjambment between the second and third stanza, again maintaining the flow of tension and pain, but this time releasing the pain from the buildup of tension in the first two sentences. This third sentence is a long sentence that released many of the mother's emotions and pain through its contrast of the mother's delicate treatment of the baby despite the need to kill him, and through the metaphors that describe the physical and mental pain such as ".