The Lung Fish
Andrew Barton Paterson 1864 (Orange, New South Wales) – 1941 (Sydney, New South Wales)
The Honorable Ardleigh Wyse
Was every fisherman's despair;
He caught his fish on floating flies,
In fact he caught them in the air,
And wet-fly men -- good sports, perhaps --
He called "those chuck-and-chance-it chaps".
And then the Fates that sometimes play
A joke on such as me and you
Deported him up Queensland way
To act as a station jackaroo.
The boundary rider said, said he,
"You fish dry fly? Well, so do we.
"These barramundi are the blokes
To give you all the sport you need:
For when the big lagoons and soaks
Are dried right down to mud and weed
They don't sit there and raise a roar,
They pack their traps and come ashore.
"And all these rods and reels you lump
Along the creek from day to day
Would only give a man the hump
Who does his fishing Queensland way.
For when the barramundi's thick
We knock 'em over with a stick.
"The black boys on the Darwin side
Will fill a creek with bitter leaves
And when the fish are stupefied
The gins will gather 'em in sheaves.
Now tell me, could a feller wish
A finer way of catchin' fish?"
The stokehold of the steamship Foam
Contains our hero, very sick,
A-working of his passage home
And brandishing a blue gum stick.
"Behold," says he, "the latest fly;
It's called the Great Australian Dry."
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:11 min read
- 71 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABABCCDXDBEE FGFGHH IDIDJJ XKGKLL MJMJNN |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,257 |
Words | 238 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 12, 6, 6, 6, 6 |
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"The Lung Fish" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 18 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/2658/the-lung-fish>.
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