Yes, I remember reading this one before. I think the victory belongs to both the man/woman and the fish. The fish swam away happy (relieved, anyway), the fisherperson went home happy. A win/win.
I actually thought that the victory that filled up the boat was the fact that the fish was caught but could also be freed.

Some context for today's poem ... it's drawn from the authors second book of poetry, The Lost Son and Wikipedia says the following:

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) wrote of his poetry: The greenhouse "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." Roethke drew inspiration from his childhood experiences of working in his family's Saginaw floral company.

Early on, the chief influence was W. H. Auden. Later, Roethke turned to Walt Whitman - who ... seems to have directed Roethke back to the intent scrutiny of nature that marked his early, so-called "greenhouse" poems. In Roethke's second book, The Lost Son, there are several of these greenhouse poems and they are among the best things he wrote; convincing and exact, and rich in loamy detail.


The Flight

At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

Fished in an old wound,
The soft pond of repose;
Nothing nibbled my line,
Not even the minnows came.

Sat in an empty house
Watching shadows crawl,
Scrtaching.
There was one fly.

Voice, come out of the silence.
Say something.
Appear in the form of a spider
Or a moth beating the curtain.

Tell me:
Which is the way I take;
Out of what door do I go?
Where and to whom?

Theodore Roethke
From "The Lost Son"

Hmm, pretty bleak and lonely I'd say, almost self-pitying, but I can see the 'scrutiny of nature' thing.

Yes, it is bleak and meloncholy, but a very good poem. It is like the scrutiny of nature is mirroring the scrutiny of soul.

I love this current poem.....To me it's about the mystery of life as displayed in nature.

I don't find it melancholy because I would rather have the mystery than know what it is all about....

The sweetness of life is in its transience.

Some different perspectives on this poem, doesn't seem so bleak now!

And Penny, Happy Birthday!!

... the imagination of one who has spent time herding on the moors. faeries and monsters and everything the imagination can serve up in a lonely place where nature's dominance is near absolute ... I like the way the poet conveys the torrential power of flooding water, it seems to have a mind of its own, unstoppable, like the journey to eternity.


The Flood

On Lolham Brigs in wild and lonely mood
I've seen the winter floods their gambols play
Through each old arch that trembled while I stood
Bent o'er its wall to watch the dashing spray
As their old stations would be washed away
Crash came the ice against the jambs and then
A shudder jarred the arches - yet once more
It breasted raving waves and stood agen
To wait the shock as stubborn as before
- White foam brown crested with the russet soil
As washed from new plough lands would dart beneath
Then round and round a thousand eddies boil
On tother side - then pause as if for breath
One minute - and engulphed - like life in death

Whose wrecky stains dart on the floods away
More swift than shadows in a stormy day
Straws trail and turn and steady - all in vain
The engulfing arches shoot them quickly through
The feather dances flutters and again
Darts through the deepest dangers still afloat
Seeming as faireys whisked it from the view
And danced it o'er the waves as pleasures boat
Light hearted as a thought in May -
Trays - uptorn bushes - fence demolished rails
Loaded with weeds in sluggish motions stray
Like water monsters lost each winds and trails
Till near the arches - then as in affright
It plunges - reels - and shudders out of sight

Waves trough - rebound - and fury boil again
Like plunging monsters rising underneath
Who at the top curl up a shaggy main
A moment catching at a surer breath
Then plunging headlong down and down - and on
Each following boil the shadow of the last
And other monsters rise when those are gone
Crest their fringed waves - plunge onward and are past
- The chill air comes around me ocean blea
From bank to bank the waterstrife is spread
Strange birds like snow spots o'er the huzzing sea
Hang where the wild duck hurried past and fled
On roars the flood - all restless to be free
Like trouble wandering to eternity

John Clare

And a short poem from James Joyce. I like it ...

A Flower Given to My Daughter

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time's wan wave.

Rose frail and fair-yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

James Joyce

Thanks for the birthday greetings giselle. Much appreciated.

I am wanting to read 'The Flood' over an over again.....I just love it. So evocative and just what poetry should be imo.

Not so thrilled with the James Joyce....but I don't know why. I have a warped view of father/daughter relationships so it probably sours my comprehension of this one.

I wonder about the Joyce poem. Is his daughter sick? 'blue-veined' makes me think that, along with 'frail' being repeated. Or perhaps this is not about his daughter at all.

Two more 'flower' poems ('trundling' buffaloes?):

The Flower-Fed Buffaloes

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
In the days of long ago,
Ranged where the locomotives sing
And the prairie flowers lie low:-
The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass
Is swept away by the wheat,
Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by
In the spring that still is sweet.
But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
Left us, long ago.
They gore no more, they bellow no more,
They trundle around the hills no more:-
With the Blackfeet, lying low,
With the Pawnees, lying low,
Lying low.

Vachel Lindsay

Flowers by the Sea

When over the flowery, sharp pasture's
edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form-chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement - or the shape
perhaps - of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem

William Carlos Williams

Interesting combination of the images of sea and flowers.

The Fly

She sat on a willow-trunk
Watching
Part of the battle of Crecy,
The shouts,
The gasps,
The groans,
The tramping and the tumbling.

During the fourteenth charge
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.

She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.

With relief she alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.

When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies

and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,

she began to lay her eggs
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.

And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.

Miroslav Holub
From the Czech (trans. George Theiner)