The Pike-Edmund Blunden 1896-1974

IN CANADA

From shadows of rich oaks outpeer

The moss-green bastions of the weir,

Where the quick dipper forages

In elver-peopled crevices.

And a small runlet trickling down the sluice

Gossamer music tires not to unloose.

Else round the broad pool's hush

Nothing stirs.

Unless sometime a straggling heifer crush

Through the thronged spinney where the pheasant

whirs;

Or martins in a flash

Come with wild mirth to dip their magical wings; 

While in the shallow some doomed bulrush swings

At whose hid root the diver vole's teeth gnash.

And nigh this toppling reed,still as the dead

The great pike lies, the muderous patriarch

Watching the waterpit shelving and dark,

Where through the plash his lithe bright vassals thread.

The rose-finned roach and bluish bream

And staring ruffe steal up the stream

Hard by their glutted tyrant now

Still as a sunken bough.

He on the sandbank lies,

Sunning himself long hours

With stony gorgon eyes: 

Westward the hot sun lowers.

Sudden the gray pike charges, and quivering 

poises for slaughter;

Intense terror wakens around him, the shoals scud

away, but there chances

A chub unsuspecting; the prowling fins quicken,

in fury he lances;

And the miller that opens the hatch stands amazed at 

the whirl in the water.

--Edmund Blunden