This is a poem written or published by English poet Elizabeth Moody (nee Greenly) in 1798.
For vacant hours of man's destructive leisure
Were sports invented of the barbarous kind;
But tempt not me to share thy cruel pleasure--
No sports are guiltless to the feeling mind.
And thou, who know'st the charms of lettered taste,
Whose treasured memory classic stores commands,
Shalt thou thy valuable moments waste,
Sauntering by streams with fish-rods in thy hands?
Shal I who cultivate the Muse's lays,
And pay my homage at Apollo's shrine,
Shall I to torpid angling give my days,
And change poetic wreaths for fishing-line?
Sit like a statue by the placid lake,
My mind suspended on a gudgeon's fate;
Transported if the silly fish I take,
Chagrined and weary, if it shuns the bait?
From Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Roger Lonsdale, Oxford University Press, 1990
recommend this
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 22
"Shall I to torpid angling give my days,
And change poetic wreaths for fishing-line?"
What some fisherman do (most often fly fishermen, fishing streams, I believe) is to throw the fish back after they catch it. Sometimes that is the only kind of fishing they are allowed to do; and they must fish with less-damaging hooks. Still, ouch!! But guys (and some gals) have this hunter-gatherer thing......it's a thrill.....