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Derek Coyle published Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 poetry award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster is due in 2023. He has published poems in The High Window, The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Texas Literary Review. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s in Ireland.

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A Tale of Two Fish:
Montague’s ‘The Trout’ and Heaney’s ‘Perch’

In ‘Elegy VIII: A Comparison’, a poem about romance and seduction, John Donne concludes on a commonplace of the time, ‘comparisons are odious’. Still, in spite of this warning, in this essay I venture to compare two poems, John Montague’s ‘The Trout’ and Seamus Heaney’s ‘Perch’. By doing this I hope we will reach a clearer view of the distinct achievements of each poem, consider their common and distinctive concerns, but, more importantly, I hope that we can discover something about how each poem goes about its poetic business, and come to appreciate how form and theme are intrinsically linked and work together in unison to generate the distinct utterance that is each poem. It is reasonable to compare these two poems, we have solid grounds for comparison. Both poems are literally concerned with fish, and in terms of the ideas the poems explore through the vehicle of the fish, there is common ground here as we will see. Both poets are from the same region of Ireland, and both are of the same generation, with only a decade between them. ‘The Trout’ is an early poem by John Montague, first published in his 1967 collection A Chosen Light, while Heaney’s ‘Perch’ is a late poem by Heaney, published first in Electric Light (2001).[1]

John Montague’s is an elegantly constructed poem, consisting of four sestets, a regular rhythm, and consistent line lengths. Interestingly, this medium length lyric is made up of only six sentences across those four sestets. The first two sestets are self-contained, ending with the full stop that indicates the sestet is a unity syntactically speaking. The third sestet is where things start to change and a new energy emerges. This third verse is end-stopped after the first three lines, and then the second half of the verse runs across the end of the sestet and into the next one for two lines, suggesting energy, dynamism and momentum, as the poem gathers its forces as it heads toward a conclusion. And so the final sestet ends with two relatively shorter sentences, finishing out the poem, slowing the rhythm and momentum, giving time for a pause, some space for deliberation or thought.

Here is the poem:

THE TROUT

(for Barrie Cooke)

Flat on the bank I parted
Rushes to ease my hands
In the water without a ripple
And tilt them slowly downstream
To where he lay, tendril-light,
In his fluid sensual dream.

Bodiless lord of creation,
I hung briefly above him
Savouring my own absence,
Senses expanding in the slow
Motion, the photographic calm
That grows before action.

As the curve of my hands
Swung under his body
He surged, with visible pleasure.
I was so preternaturally close
I could count every stipple
But still cast no shadow, until

The two palms crossed in a cage
Under the lightly pulsing gills.
Then (entering my own enlarged
Shape, which rode on the water)
I gripped. To this day I can
Taste his terror on my hands.

Having considered the poem’s overall architecture or shape, it is worth noting the many felicitous details that furnish its individual rooms or stanzas. We can begin with the well-judged run-on line that sees the ‘I parted/rushes’ suggest the physical action actually being described. So, the idea conveyed is the parting of rushes, as we run over the line and thus experience a type of formal parting, a type of opening. A space is opened up at the end of the line and we enter the ‘rushes’ as we pick that word up the far side of the space, across the enjambment. The fish sits like a ‘tendril’, a filament of sorts in the water. Indeed, a fish might appear like that. And we encounter the first really elegant or heightened phrase in the poem, ‘in his fluid sensual dream.’ A quotable line, a memorable line, where the poet lifts slightly to ascend to poetry. After this first sestet, we know where we are, we have a clear sense of who and what is involved: by the bank of a river a speaker has placed his hands in the water and is ready to capture a trout.

Continuing on from the elegant phrasing that closes this first sestet, Montague describes the speaker (who may be a version of himself) as a ‘bodiless lord of creation’ in the opening sentence of his second sestet. And so a major theme of the poem is announced, the god-like presence of the human as a figure from the airy world above water as he enters the fluid world of water that is the domain of the fish. The airy realm is suggested with ‘I hung briefly above him.’ And we have the first oxymoron of the poem, ‘savouring my own absence.’ We have the paradoxical thought of tasting an absence. Something that is not there can be almost tasted on the lips. This line develops the god-like idea suggested earlier; the speaker is a figure in the world of water, but is not quite there, he is a looming presence to the fish, but not quite the fully human figure he is in another dimension. The following phrases suggest calmness, the focus of the human figure as he approaches the fish, intending to catch it with his hands. This action requires calm and assured deliberation.

The third sestet opens with another fine run-on line, with Montague making the most of the opportunity given him by the line-break. Once again, the rhythm and movement of the words across the line and onto the next imitate the action described: ‘the curve of my hands/swung under his body.’ ‘Swung’ is a very energetic word to open the second line. And line three opens with ‘he surged’, a fine verb, aptly placed, suggesting a surging action given how it is emphasized rhythmically by its exact point of placement. So the words and lines and breaks combine here to embody the physical action being conveyed through them, as the poem takes on an almost physical aspect. Montague lifts the diction with his use of ‘preternaturally’, his first multi-syllabic word, a word drawn from the lexicon of theology, and one which sees the ‘lord of creation’ theme developed and extended. The speaker is so close to the fish, almost beyond any type of natural closeness, verging on the divine, another order of knowing, such that the speaker is able to ‘count every stipple’ on the fish; almost like, in biblical parlance, the Christian God can count every hair on your head. He casts ‘no shadow,’ being of the light and air that he is, an unseen presence but there. We can see why the formal choice of an oxymoron was such an appropriate mode for this poem, paradox being one of the classic modes of negative theology. We understand the godhead by a via negativa route, by saying what he is not; he is a type of present absence.

And then we encounter the run-on across the third sestet into the fourth, beautifully judged with the ‘until’, which leaves us hanging there for a moment. The word suggests waiting, and we have to wait for a moment until the phrase is completed by ‘the two palms crossed in a cage/under the lightly pulsing gills.’ And with that ‘under’ being another well-judged choice. As we move across the line-break before it, our tongues virtually slip under this, completing part of the phrase.

And now we are poised to undergo the dramatic climax of the action of this poem as the speaker captures the fish in his hands. We have an interesting conflation of the speaker with his image in the water, distorted and almost magically floating on the water. This short sentence ends with the syntax inverted, the verb placed at the end for emphasis, ‘I gripped.’ Years after the events related in the poem, the poet can still feel, can still recall the terror of the trout. We end on the synaesthesia of ‘to this day I can/taste his terror on my hands.’ The terror (an emotion of the fish) is so palpable that it can be tasted on the hands of the speaker, as if on his tongue. This is another strikingly memorable, climatic, and quotable line. We have the ‘taste’ and ‘terror’, two words that begin with the same letter and are roughly of the same length, with the second syllable of ‘terror’ suggesting elongation, a prolongation. These two words work off each other powerfully. The poem concludes with empathy for the fish, as the speaker recalls the palpable memory of its fear.

John Montague’s ‘The Trout’ is a well-constructed and elegant poem. This poem exhibits many fine traditional virtues: solid sestets, with dynamic run-on lines at appropriate junctures. The poet has set up an expectation or pattern with his form, and then finds the right places to disrupt that expectation or play with it. And so we see how the sestets provide a shape that the syntax can work with and against; just as the lines grant a formal stability that the syntax can work with and against. Also, Montague constructs elegant and memorable phrases, as well as deploying oxymoron and synaesthesia intelligently and thoughtfully. ‘The Trout’ is a really good poem, displaying a confident craftsmanship, intelligent design, a deft use of form working in conjunction with the elaboration of the poem’s thematic concerns. The poem asks us, perhaps, to empathize with the figure of the fish, its world transgressed by the dark human god who plucks it from out of its realm, its contented life; this fish which experiences ‘terror’ as he is whipped from ‘his fluid sensual dream.’ Montague, a sophisticated verse maker, is in confident control here, from start to finish: a turner of fine phrases, displaying judgement as to just the right place to put a well-chosen word. By these means this poem has earned its place in the canon of contemporary Irish greats, part of a swell of fine poems that emerged in the post-war period from Ireland, both north and south, but with a great many of them coming from poets who originated in the North.

And now we turn to consider ‘Perch’ by Seamus Heaney, a poem somewhat less well known than the more established ‘The Trout’ by John Montague. First off, we are struck by the formal difference between the two poems. Heaney’s poem is a good deal shorter, coming in at five couplets. These are either full or half-rhymed: ‘river’/’waver’, ‘ready’/’body’, ‘pass’/’adoze’, ‘slur’/’air’, and concluding with ‘hold’/’world’. Taking a closer look we are struck by the fact that the poem consists of one sentence; so the entire piece is something of a syntactical feat as Heaney manages to hold this sentence together, as he keeps us moving along, combining a complex array of poetic elements, and still managing to make sense. Heaney’s poem describes a small perch defying the onward rush of the river, taking a moment of pause as it decides what to do next. And so the poem is open to a very immediate metaphorical interpretation. The perch, like us, faces onslaughts in life; we, like the perch, often have to hold our ground against forces arrayed against us; in moments like this we must take stock, then get ready to forge ahead against these very forces that appear to be decidedly set against our progress forward. So, the position of the perch in the river, its situation in life, shares a metaphorical similarity to something in our own; and hence a comparison is drawn; and so, inspired by the struggle of the perch, we might keep persisting in our own trying circumstances. Still, when we examine Heaney’s poem more closely, we can see that, whilst all this is true, there’s a good deal more going on besides.

Here is the poem:

PERCH

Perch on their water-perch hung in the clear Bann River
Near the clay bank in alder-dapple and waver,

Perch they called ‘grunts’, little flood-slubs, runty and ready,
I saw and I see in the river’s glorified body

That is passable through, but they’re bluntly holding the pass,
Under the water-roof, over the bottom, adoze,

Guzzling the current, against it, all muscle and slur
In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air

That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold
In the everything flows and steady go of the world.

The first significant formal feature we encounter in ‘Perch’ is the hidden medial caesura that exists between ‘water-perch’ and ‘hung’ in the first line. You can’t see it, but you hear it as such. Reading this poem out loud you have to pause here. And so we are forced to ‘perch’ here in the middle of the line as the poem’s form starts to capture something of the reality it is describing. We perch for a moment in the middle of the line, rather like the fish in the river. In this opening couplet Heaney establishes a definite location. We are by the clay banks and alders of the river Bann. Heaney captures the distinctive atmosphere of the place, almost a hazy reality, all ‘dapple’ and ‘waver’. We note his use of two compound words: ‘water-perch’ and ‘alder-dapple’; the first of many doubling effects that Heaney will repeat, and which will become significant, as the poem unfolds.

In the second couplet Heaney builds on this doubling effect, the perch in this river are described as ‘runty and ready’, and Heaney mirrors this with the unusual phrasing of: ‘I saw and I see in the river’s glorified body.’ Heaney suggests past and present, the real and imagined, through this phrasing. We take it he has seen this fish in the past in real time in the river; in real life as it were. Here now, he is seeing it in vision, or imagination, in this poem. And so two different realities or realms are suggested, and this will be key to the poem as I read it. The phrase ‘the river’s glorified body’ sounds biblical, suggesting Christ’s body after resurrection, a point where the corporeal and incorporeal meet. And we think then of the upward and downward movement of a see-saw too; of rising to air from ground, and descending to the ground from air.

These ideas or suggestions are developed further in the third couplet, with the phrase ‘that is passable through’; a phrase suggestive of solidity and of fluency, the tangible and intangible, the firm and the permeable. And so Heaney suggests there are at least two realities existing side by side, or even intertwined. The river is solid in its way; but you can journey through it; rather like our world of air, outside, above and beyond the river. And Heaney doubles up on the ‘pass’ and ‘passable’ to suggest this; two words with similar components, where one actually exists inside the other; yet each is distinct and different too. Again, his focus on the perch here suggests they are strong, as they hold their place in their world of flux, despite the force of the energies pitched against them, the rush of the current. We see an effective doubling in ‘under the water-roof, over the bottom.’ The ‘under’ and ‘over’ here matches or mirrors the ‘saw’ and the ‘see’ from earlier. We have the suggestion of roof and ground, the airy and the terra-firma, which is congruent with the poem’s developing concern with the co-existence of two distinct worlds. The phrasing suggests too that the fish have their home in the river, much as we live and are at home in our world of air. This perch is comfortable and at ease in its world or realm; so much so that it is ‘adoze.’

The sonic texture of ‘adoze’ is echoed in the verb which carries the poem forward in the next couplet; ‘guzzling’, a dynamic and lively verb. The perch stands firm, almost relishing its defiance of the current of the river. It is all ‘muscle and slur’, another doubling. And now the poem rises to its most explicit elaboration of what it has been suggesting all along: ‘in the finland of perch, the fenland of alder.’ And now the two realms are explicitly drawn out: that of water, that of air; that of fish, that of humans. This is a very memorable and striking double, with the ‘finland’ and ‘fenland’ suggesting similarity and difference; all that keeps them apart is an ‘i’ and an ‘e’.

And how the ‘air’ leads on into ‘water’ in the final couplet. The Bann stream has ‘carpets’, again suggesting a similarity between the world of the fish and the world of the human. There are two worlds, but both exist together or side by side. What lives in one world may not survive in the other. Each really has little understanding or comprehension of the world of the other. Given the religious undertones of the earlier ‘glorified body’, it might not be unreasonable to think that Heaney is hinting at a wider suggestion here. And so the fish is pausing in the ever moving, ever changing dynamic world; as this poem concludes on its final double: ‘the everything flows and steady go of the world.’ One can almost imagine the fish darting off at this point, as it disappears into the hustle and bustle of its world as such, so like ours as the poem suggests.

And so Seamus Heaney manages to suggest so much in such a dense space in these ten lines, these five couplets. We can take it now that this one sentence most likely represents the continual flow of the river, the onward rush of the world, with the poem’s syntax mirroring the push and pull, the pauses and pulsing forward that constitute the energies of the world. This continuous sentence might also suggest the unity of different realms too; there is a link between air and water, the physical and spiritual; they are joined by this thread, this line that runs through both. And so, we see once again, a very deep and thorough connection between the formal dimensions of a poem and its thematic concerns. In the finest poems both are indivisible, both are inseparable. Heaney’s form is dancing with his theme from the opening phrase, when we land on that first hidden medial caesura, something not seen but the presence of which is felt, right up until the moment the fish darts off and out of the poem at the end.

It is clear that there is a remarkable poetic intelligence at work in Heaney’s poem, matched by an equally sophisticated skill or craft. As there is too in Montague’s poem. Both poems present us with fish, both poems explore the world of the human and the world of the fish, and both poems manage to suggest a realm that is typically the concern of theology. Is one poem better than the other, more thorough, more worked through, or is this a churlish question before these two distinct and complete in themselves works of art? Maybe Donne was right, comparisons are odious? Still, they are both so similar and different that they invite comparison. Does Heaney suggest a deeper, closer, more entwined alliance of form to thought or theme than Montague does? Does Heaney’s poem suggest a greater synthesis of idea and its expression? Perhaps. Either way, I hope this essay does something to bring Heaney’s small poem ‘Perch’ to wider attention, as I am confident it deserves to sit beside the now well established ‘The Trout’ by John Montague.

[1] John Montague, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1995), p. 213. Seamus Heaney, Electric Light (London: Faber, 2001), p. 4.

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