The Fishermen

Up from the sea a flaky, dank,
Thickening fog rolls up, and chokes
Windows and closed doors, and smokes
Upon the slippery river bank.

Drowned gleams of gas-lamps shake and fall
Where rolls the river's carrion;
The moon looks like a corpse, and on
The heaven's rim its burial.

But flickering lanterns now and then
Light up and magnify the backs,
Bent obstinately in their smacks,
Of the old river fishermen,
Who all the time, from last sunset,
For what night's fishing none can know,
Have cast their black and greedy net,
Where silent, evil waters flow.

Deep down beyond the reach of eye
Fates of Evil gathering throng,
Which lure the fishers where they lie
To fish for them with patience strong,
True to their task of simple toiling
In contradictory fogs embroiling.

And o'er them peal the minutes stark,
With heavy hammers peal their knells,
The minutes sound from belfry bells,
The minutes hard of autumn dark,
The minutes list.

And the black fishers in their ships,
In their cold ships, are clad in shreds;
Down their cold nape their old hat drips
And drop by drop in water sheds
All the mist.

Their villages are numb and freeze;
Their huts are all in ruin sunk,
And the willows and the walnut-trees
The winds of the west have whipped and shrunk;
And not a bark comes through the dark,
And never a cry through the void midnight,
That floated, humid ashes blight.

And never helping one another,
Never brother hailing brother,
Never doing what they ought,
For himself each fisher's thought:
And the first draws his net, and seizes
All the fry of his poverty;
And the next drags up, as keen as he,
The empty bottoms of diseases;
Another opens out his net
To griefs that on the surface swim;
And another to his vessel's rim
Pulls up the flotsam of regret.

The river churns, league after league,
Along the dikes, and runs away,
As it has done so many a day,
To the far horizon of fatigue;
Upon its banks skins of black clay
By night perspire a poison draught;
The fogs are fleeces far to waft,
And to men's houses journey they.

Never a lantern streaks the dark,
And nothing stirs in the fisher's bark,
Save, nimbusing with halos of blood,
The thick white felt of the clustering fogs,
Silent Death, who with madness clogs
The brains of the fishermen on the flood.

Lonely at the fog's cold heart,
Each sees not each, though side by side;
Their arms are tired, their vessels ride
By sandbanks marked on ruin's chart.

Why in the dark do they not hail each other?
Why does a brother's voice console not brother?

No, numb and haggard they remain,
With vaulted back and heavy brain,
With, by their side, their little light
Rigid in the river's night.
Like blocks of shadow there they arc,
And never pierce their eyes afar
Beyond the acrid, spongy wet;
And they suspect not that above,
Luring them with a magnet's love,
Stars immense are shining yet.

These fishers in black torment tossed,
They are the men immensely lost
Among the knells and far aways
And far beyonds where none can gaze;
And in their souls' monotonous deeps
The humid autumn midnight weeps.