A poem about perch

[SussexMan]

Just discovered a beautiful poem by Edmund Blunden, the poet more famous for his epitaph on the carnage of the First World War:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

He lived in Yalding, Kent and often celebrated Kentish life and village cricket. The poem is called Perch Fishing and can easily be found on the internet. He cleverly describes how another perch will often follow or accompany a hooked perch.

[John Milford]

I've just looked up Blunden's Perch Fishing SM. Marvellous - thank you for sharing.

The voraciously and apparent fearlessness of the perch is mentioned in a favourite book of mine The Young Angler (1940) by W. Carter-Platts.

He wrote of them (from memory) "If you find perch in a hole, they can all be caught one after the other - they being like the wicked of this world, unafraid, though their companions perish in their sight".

[Liphook]

Here it is, a lovely piece on the biggest of all fishes


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.