The knowledge behind this poem seems to be the poet's awareness of the damage that we, as humans, have done and continue to do to our environment. It (the poem) was published in a collection entitled Thawing Frozen Frogs, published in 1990. Patten has said that he wrote the "The River's Story" at the request of a teacher "for a group of children who were doing a project on pollution." The poem is specifically about the pollution of a river.

As regards the figures of speech in the poem, there are quite a few, such as personification, metaphor, simile and symbolism. For example, the insects are described, using a simile, as "weightless as sunbeams." This simile suggests a lightness, in both senses of the word, which contributes to the positive, peaceful mood at the beginning of the poem. In the same part of the poem, there is also the personification of the fish, as they are said to have "Gossiped" beneath the lily-pads, and the metaphorical description of the "damselflies" which the speaker says "were my ballerinas." Both the personification and the metaphor contribute to the sense of a lively, vibrant setting.

In the second part of the poem, which describes the factories taking the place of and ruining the environment, the speaker personifies the bricks of the factories as "greedy," suggesting that the factories were greedy to take up more and more land. The factories are also said to cast "monstrous shadows" over the speaker and over the peaceful, vibrant setting described earlier. The shadows are compared, using another simile, to "drunken giants," implying how careless and also how large these factories were. The factories are then personified further as "vomit(ing) their poisons" over the speaker.

In the third and final part of the poem, we become certain, if we weren't already, that the speaker is, in fact, the voice of the river, which the factories have overshadowed and polluted. The river, personified, says that "I, who have flowed through history . . . am reduced to a trickle of filth." The metaphor in the first part of this quotation, describing how the river has "flowed through history," emphasizes how the factories, which symbolize the broader process of industrialization, have destroyed something which has been around for centuries.

"The River's Story," written by Brian Patten, is a brief life history of an unnamed river, presented in the first person voice of the river. It describes the river's birth high in the mountains, where "life was good" as it ran through meadows filled with nature's beautiful variety of life. However, now the river is surrounded a different type of life and is filled with the pollution poured into it by the factories. As it dies because of the "filth" being poured into it, the river calls out to all those listening to its story to recognize the loss of beauty and to mourn that the future will not inherit a clean river.

The poem uses many similes to explain its surroundings at different points in its life. "Lilypads like medals" adorned the river during good times; factories hover over it "like drunken giants" as it dies. Kingfishers "disguised as rainbows" quietly revealed the glories of the clean river.