Classic Poem

Sic Semper Piscibus!

There by the window where the ivy throws
Its tender stems about the casement, see
Child, there upon a slender table stands
Your bowl of goldfish gleaming in the sun.
A wreath of seaweed trails against the glass,—
Within the limpid water's crystal depths
A castle looms and glints beneath the wave;
Its windows are of pearl, its battlements
Frown with a lordly air; it is the same
As one from which Lord Ullin's daughter fled
By night to be the bride of Death,—as one
Where Sister Helen burnt her effigies,
Save that it knows a deep and rich sea-change.
Beneath the rais'd portcullis darkly floats
One of the lazy dwellers of this globe,
This little world; his thin recurving fin
Waves at the gate, his bright translucent tail
Fans the green mazy gardens of the deep.
There! child, see now that other one who drifts
Apart wrapped deep in thought; how solemnly
He broods and ponders on reality
Beyond his crystal sphere, as if it lurked
Not there within his narrow globe but here
In the Beyond . . He is a very young
And philosophic fish,—be kind to him!
Your dear familiar head glows in the shaft
Of summer sunlight playing through the leaves,
And as you point your finger at the bowl,
And as you tap the clear and tinkling glass,
See how he starts—the meditative one—
And whirls in terror round about the globe!
Child, vex him not but let him dream in peace
Of Time and Space, of sequences and things
Within themselves dim, distant, and desired,
Of blue sea-glens where water-breezes blow
And waving gardens bloom on twilight hills,
Of sunlit shoals—a shell-starr'd paradise! …
But he has seen upon his lucent bowl
The shadow of your teasing finger, child,
And heard a fearful tapping on his world;
His deathless soul is shaken, made aware
That it has glimps'd and heard omniscient God,—
The Deity, a vast, dim silver Fish!
While we, child,—you and I who put him there,
Who closed him in his shining crystal sphere
To gaze at for our pleasure, and to tease,—
We stand outside and laugh at his despair;
'Tis well he knows not, dreams not, that we laugh !