from Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems, edited by Joy Katz and
Kevin Prufer
The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit
TO A FISH
You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be,—
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste:—
O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is't ye do? What life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles?
A FISH ANSWERS
Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
For ever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!
O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth? What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by! linked fin by fin! most odiously.
THE FISH TURNS INTO A MAN, AND THEN
INTO A SPIRIT, AND AGAIN SPEAKS
Indulge thy smiling scorn, if smiling still,
O man! And loathe, but with a sort of love;
For difference must its use by difference prove,
And, in, sweet clang, the sphere with music fill.
One of the spirits am I, that at his will
Live in whate'er has life—fish, eagle, dove—
No hate, no pride, beneath nought, nor above,
A visitor of the rounds of God's sweet skill.
Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:—
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
Albert Goldbarth on Leigh Hunt's
"The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit"
Leigh Hunt was a busy man-of-letters, well known in his time (1784-1859) as a poet, critic, editor, general shaker-upper and seeder of the arts, and an acquaintance of many, if not most, of London's important writers and thinkers.His various literary projects, both successful and failed; his gently shabby-bohemian lifestyle and difficult marriage; his years of hobnobbing with a community of seminal artists and philosophers; and his almost naively unworldly ways (and financial distresses)... these are all the grist of literary legend (he appears tellingly in Neighboring Lives, the historical novel by Disch and Naylor that enters the social circle of Thomas and Jane Carlyle). But the poem of his under consideration here stands—as I believe most fine writing does—independent of the need for any biographical support.
Occasionally some piece of writing seems to embody a future sensibility, as if a time traveler had journeyed into history and inadvertently left a poem or a novel on those wayback shores. That would be technologically marvelous—the traveler, I mean, and his centuries-eating machine. But I think the other possibility, the psychological one, is even more marvelous: that someone's mind in past-time A, against all odds and anomalously, can resonate in empathy with our current-moment Zeitgeist.
One example—minor, but endearingly charming—is Leigh Hunt's poem "The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit," an inspired piece of intelligent whimsy that blends a serious "nature poem" from the guidebook of the Romantics with a few jiggy Edward Lear molecules; provides that mix with a weird, presiding "spirit" out of William Blake (by way of Walt Disney); and charges the whole concoction with a jolt of dream logic straight out of Borges or Isabel Allende or Gabriel García Márquez.
Where did this triplet of sonnets come from? Its sense of ecological codependence—its implicit holistic vision of an Earth where the life-force flows with equal worth through every partum of life—is less that of the anthropocentric Great-Chain-of-Being mentality that would still have been thundered from pulpits in Hunt's own day, and more of the mindset driving Greenpeace. "Equal rights for Fishes!"—long before even the women's suffrage movement had started to profitably coalesce. Fishes. It's a big big deal when Wordsworth's manifesto asks for using the language of lower-class men and women in our literature... and here's Hunt asking—before the Starship Enterprise was the scantest of dreams—to mind-meld with the fishes.
And he does great, detailed, empathetic justice to that finny tribe—those last three lines are a wonder. Keats's nightingale (of his famous Ode) is only the idea of a bird: we never hear it make the slightest real-world rustles in its bough; we never stop to think that it mates and preens and craps in fear of predators. But Hunt's fish is (just as D. H. Lawrence's fish will be, a bit later on in the poetry timeline) a credible creature, with dreams and stinks of its own. And Keats doesn't linger all that leisurely in the head of his twittering bird: he's in, he ponders Grand Stuff, and he's out again. But Hunt, although his poem is more brief, is clearly in for the long haul: he's interested in the actual nitty-gritty, silt-and-milt, fishness of things.
Keats's is surely the greater poem, for a host of reasons. But I wouldn't want to do without Hunt's mini-tour of the levels of Creation, his tri-fold letter of love to existence, that carries such interesting intellectual baggage and yet has the eldritch sparkle of something discovered under a leaf in the deeps of a fairy forest. It's like... what is it like? Like sitting around with Thoreau in his cabin, discussing the glories of Nature in a slow and steady way, while through the window one sees a parade of drunken Monty-Python vicars reciting favorite sonnets into the air.
I admire the wide embrace of its cuckoo cast of characters, and (for this is a small trilogy, with a plan—a shape, a direction) the way that, after the bickering gets finished, they contribute toward one final, abiding tenderness. I admire the democracy of voices—let's say: evolution's version of an Ellis Island of voices, as lyrically scripted by Gilbert and Sullivan. I admire the way those voices, high and low, predate the brilliant twentieth century crazy-quilt chorus of John Berryman's Dream Songs. I admire Hunt's ability to wed so smoothly the skin of formal constraint with its unlikely partner, the zany personality of a 1940s Hollywood screwball comedy. And I particularly admire the aerial currents of "magic realism" on which the "spirit" is borne, as it clears its ethereal throat and brushes the particolor dusts from its garments—dusts that it picked up, I swear, a day earlier in the future as it flew through a shtetl painted by Chagall in his signature rose and sea-blue.
About the Author
Albert Goldbarth has twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His newest book, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems: 1972-2007, will appear in March, 2007, from Graywolf Press.
edited by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer
University of Illinois Press
Champaign
Copyright © by Board of Trustees, University of Illinois
Reprinted by Poetry Daily with permission
