Perch-Fishing

On the far hill the cloud of thunder grew     And sunlight blurred below; but sultry blue     Burned yet on the valley water where it hoards     Behind the miller's elmen floodgate boards,     And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed     In the vole's empty house, still drove afield     To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees     And build their young ones their hutched nurseries;     Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison     Nor had the whisper through the tansies run     Nor weather-wisest bird gone home.                     How then     Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken     Lightning coming? troubled up they stole     To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole,     Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair.     As cunning stole the boy to angle there,     Muffling least tread, with no noise balancing through     The hangdog alder-boughs his bright bamboo.     Down plumbed the shuttled ledger, and the quill     On the quicksilver water lay dead still.     A sharp snatch, swirling to-fro of the line,     He's lost, he's won, with splash and scuffling shine     Past the low-lapping brandy-flowers drawn in,     The ogling hunchback perch with needled fin.     And there beside him one as large as he,     Following his hooked mate, careless who shall see     Or what befall him, close and closer yet,     The startled boy might take him in his net     That folds the other.          Slow, while on the clay,     The other flounces, slow he sinks away.     What agony usurps that watery brain     For comradeship of twenty summers slain,     For such delights below the flashing weir     And up the sluice-cut, playing buccaneer     Among the minnows; lolling in hot sun     When bathing vagabonds had drest and done;     Rootling in salty flannel-weed for meal     And river shrimps, when hushed the trundling wheel;     Snapping the dapping moth, and with new wonder     Prowling through old drowned barges falling asunder.     And O a thousand things the whole year through     They did together, never more to do.