THE PIKE
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 whence 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. 10
And nigh this toppling reed, still as the dead
The great pike lies, the murderous patriarch,
Watching the waterpit sheer-shelving 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 20
With stony gorgon eyes :
Westward the hot sun lowers.
Sudden the grey pike changes, and quivering poises
for slaughter ;
Intense terror wakens around him, the shoals scud
awry, 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
153