[‘The Fisherman’; a TV script]

I’m going to read a poem of mine that I wrote a while ago. I chose it to read and talk about, because on the whole it’s a simple poem that anyone should be able to get the guts of by hearing it once. It is called ‘The Fisherman’. And this is the way it goes –

Between the day and evening
I fish from Barney’s Rock
And watch the weedy channels fill
And hear the small waves knock,
And feel below their ledge’s roof
The tugging greenbone flock.

When spiring seabirds mingle
Between the wave and sky,
The ka’wai chase the herrings in
Like soldiers dressed to die,
And on the beach for hands to pick
In flapping shoals they lie.

Upon an army pension
It suits a single man
To take from the sea’s full cupboard
Whatever food he can.
The wound I got at Passchendaele
Throbs with the dying sun.

While loud across the sandhills
Clangs out the Sunday bell
I drop my line and sinker down
Through the weed-fronded swell,
And what I see there after dark
Let the blind wave tell. (CP 158)

Who is the man in the poem? He is certainly not myself. Is he somebody I know well, then? In a sense – Yes; in a sense – No. When I was a boy I often watched my father and my uncles fishing on the rocks below Brighton. Brighton is the township I grew up in, about twelve miles south of Dunedin. Nearly all the pictures in the poem are what I remember from the time – the channels among the rocks; the herrings flapping on the beach; the church bell ringing in the evening; the men swinging their lines and sinkers out into the deeper water . . . . It used to be a curse if the hooks got caught on the bottompage 433 or the line got tangled with the weed. Sometimes they even had to cut the line to get it free. And then there is Barney’s Rock – it is an actual place I know – a bald high bit of rock where old Abe Barney, the storekeeper, used to come down to fish. I never knew him. He probably died before I was born. But the rock was called after him.

Who is the man in the poem? He is a single man – that is, he is unmarried. He was wounded at Passchendaele in the First World War – so he would probably be getting on for seventy years old, at least. He is probably a solitary man. He does not say anything about other people – at least not directly. He is my picture of a certain kind of New Zealander.

‘The Fisherman’ is a rather cold poem. People are inclined to like more life, more jump, more variety in the poems they read. Why does the fisherman have so little to say about himself and other people? I think – because he is a poor man. There are a great many things other people take for granted which he hasn’t got – marriage, money, religion, good health even – these are like circles within which people recognise each other. But he is standing outside all the circles. In a way the poem is about his particular kind of poverty.

The poem could have been given a different name. It could have been called ‘The War Hero’. After all, he belongs to that group of men in honour of whom our War Memorials were built – though of course he did not die in the war – he is still alive. But in some ways the poem is putting on one side the usual idea of what a war hero is. This man is the real hero. He has a pension; but not quite enough to live on. To keep on going in age and poverty and solitude may be very difficult for him. To put it very mildly: a person who read this poem of mine very carefully might suddenly have a different view of war and soldiers and War Memorials. He might say to himself –‘Yes; we honour the dead – but do we give much care, mercy, friendship, honour to the living?’ There is a touch of anger about this somewhere underneath the poem.

A lot of my poems are beach poems. That is, I will imagine I am walking along a beach – usually the beach at Brighton where I grew up – and this helps the pictures and the words that make a poem to rise up in my mind and take shape. In a poem everything means both itself and something else. So when the tide is rising at the beginning of the poem, it can mean both itself and the rising of old memories in the mind of the fisherman.

And when the herrings are thrown up on the beach, the fisherman thinks of them as ‘soldiers dressed to die’ – they are brightly coloured as some soldiers are in uniform – they are helpless like the thousands upon thousands of men who fell into the mud of Passchendaele and never came out again. The fisherman is not just thinking about English or New Zealand soldiers. He is thinking about soldiers anywhere. Just soldiers. Whether they are English or German or American or Russian or Japanese doesn’t really matter at all. They are just human beings in uniform who were born and have to die.

page 434

The fisherman is fishing while other people go to church. Perhaps in his own way – by staying and fishing – he is holding a service over the dead soldiers who are more real to him than the living people round him. He prefers the wave that has no eyes – that will not intrude on his private thoughts – to the company of people who will understand his situation even less than he does. And he has his wound to keep him company. Not only a wound in the body – a wound in the mind as well – for the deepest wounds left by wars are always in the mind. So I leave him with his own kind of pain and his own terrible peace.

[1960?] (229)