This is a fascinating poem. While we know from the title that Lampman is describing frogs, he does not explicitly state this anywhere within the poem itself. Instead, he uses lush, ethereal imagery to depict the frogs as "quaint uncouth dreamers," whom the personified earth, "our mother," has made "her soul, and bade you pipe for her." The frogs are a representation of nature's unchanging and endless beauty, which can capture the minds of humans and distract from all else that might be going on around us:

Morning and noon and midnight exquisitely,
Rapt with your voices, this alone we knew,
Cities might change and fall, and men might die,
Secure were we, content to dream with you

The nature scenes Lampman depicts are accordingly dreamlike; the frogs are anthropomorphized as "flutists of lands where beauty has no change." "Wintry grief" has no place in this sublime incarnation of nature, "when spring was in her glee." The frogs and their song, the speaker says, seem to represent the "spirit's inmost-dream" of the earth herself, reflections of a certain unchanging aspect to her, "ever at rest beneath life's change and stir."

The metaphor of the frogs as strange pipers or flautists recurs throughout the poem: "ye piped with voices still and sweet and strange." The imagery here is vivid and almost eerie; the way the frogs, in their role as the voice of the earth, call forth the beauties of spring. Their piping recalls the Pied Piper leading away the children into the mountain. It alludes to the concept of the fairy piper which recurs in folklore. Nature responds to the song of the earth through the frogs, as if it is a world of spirits awakening: "the spirits of first flowers awoke and flung / From buried faces the close-fitting hoods." The flowers, including "spring-beauty with her perfumed bell," are feminized, like sleeping ladies waiting only for the piper to wake them.

The poet repeatedly uses words like "dream" and "reverie" to underline the fact that this unchanging, sweet depiction of nature, in which the quiet spirits of flowers and plants "whisper," "nestled and slept," is an idealized one, untouched by winter. As night comes, the "enchanted reveries" of the frogs do not stop, "only your voices grew / More high and solemn." The frogs, "watching with fathomless eyes," are like minor deities in this "divine sweet wonder-dream" of nature, and the magic of their piping seems to entrance the poet as well as it does the flowers it calls forth. We are "content to dream" with the frogs, living in this illusion of the natural world, because this is a place where "dreams are real, and life is only sweet."