A DREAM by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN

UNRIDDLE this. Last night my dream
Took me along a sullen stream,
A water drifting black and ill,
With idiot swirls, and silent still.
As if it had been Pactolus
And I of gold sands amorous
I went determined on its bank,
Stopped in that breath of dim and dank,
And in my hand (in dream's way) took
A living fish to bait my hook,
A living fish, not gudgeon quite
Nor dace nor roach, a composite.
Then ghoulishly with fingers, yet
With aching mind, I strove to get
The pang of shackling metal through
The mouth of that poor mad perdu,
And (ran the bitter fancy's plot)
To tie his body in a knot.
While thus I groped and grasped and coiled
And he in horror flapped and foiled,
I saw how on the clay around
Young shining fishes leapt and clowned,
And often turned their eyes on me,
Begging their watery liberty,
Most sad and odd. But, thought I, now
I have no time for helping you.
And then at length my bait was hooked,
His shuddering tail grotesquely crooked:
Black was the secret-dimpling stream,
I flounced him to the line's extreme.
And then, his mercy, gladdening me
Who just had been his agony,
Some monstrous mouth beat out his brain,
The line cut wide its graphs of strain.
I knew my prize, and fought my best
With thought and thew -- then the fight ceased.
Sobbing I feared the quarry gone,
But no, the deadweight showed him on,
Slow to the mould I pulled the huge
Half-legend from his subterfuge,
And as he from the water thrust
His head, and cleared its scurf and must,
Two eyes as old as Adam stared
On mine. And now he lay unbared:
My glory! -- On the bleak bank lay
A carcass effigy in clay,
A trunk of vague and lethal mass
Such as might lie beneath filmed glass,
Where on the pane the buzzing fly
Batters to win the desperate sky.

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