"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike
"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Don't call me no star in the bronc bustin' game— Sech words is plumb natcherly wrong. Us cowboys jest say, when a feller is game: "He'll do, boys, fer takin' along!"
Don't call me no "prince of good fellers" nor say I'm 'bold, brave an' fearless" nor such! Don't claim I'm no "marvel"—no fine "sobrikay" Like "world-beatin' champeen"! Not much!
Fer I never hanker fer high-soundin' praise A cowboy can't half understand. I'd ruther be told, in the old puncher phrase: "Say cowboy, yuh'll shore make a hand!"
Big words never warm up no cowpuncher's heart In praise of him doin' his best Like them simple phrases. A man does his part -
Just after sunrise on the Big Springs Ranch in northeastern Nevada, saddle leather creaked, spurs jingled, coyotes yipped. The sounds of the West. Then one more sound of the West was heard - a cowboy reciting poetry:
"There ain't no squall the banshee makes will make your neck hair rise,
Like that there bovine blood call as it echoes to the skies . . ."
The cowboy was Larry Schutte; the poetry was "Cowpen Moo-sic," a Western classic written by S. Omar Barker.
Schutte, 39, wore fringed chaps, a black cowboy hat and a blue neckerchief as he moved cattle in a pasture of rye. He, his horse and his dog worked in unspoken synchronization. As the herd moved, it seemed to generate its own weather system, raising a cloud of dust and the rumble of thunder.
Schutte tends to 1,000 head of cattle. He also tends to two children, makes horsehair ropes by hand and is a poet, singer, and musician in his own right. All that left him with little time to get into the town of Elko, Nevada, just 75 miles away, where more - much more - poetry was being recited.
For five days in January the rhyme was the reason as more than 40 cowboys recited and more than 8,000 fans listened during Elko's 10th annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
The term "cowboy poet" might conjure up a conflicting image: the strong, silent type and the sensitive, expressive type - an unlikely cross-breed of John Wayne and John Keats. But, indeed, most poets at Elko were, like Schutte, working cowboys.
They were genuine crack-of-dawnin', cigarette-rollin', dust-eatin', manure-troddin', sweatband-stainin', finger-freezin' wranglers who rope and ride, even if the hoofbeats of the cattle drives have been replaced by the whine of 18-wheelers hauling herds on asphalt "trails."
...And they recite at the drop of a Stetson.
At Elko they versified about bravery and tragedy, about uncanny cowhands, recalcitrant mules and "wrecks" (accidents on horseback). Their poems about practical jokes and tall tales evoked laughter from the audience; their poems about having to shoot a faithful horse brought tears.
Elko's Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held in winter when ranch duties slacken, is the oldest and biggest of its kind. But more than 150 other such gatherings are held throughout the year. Some include barbecues, others offer rodeos and collectible shows, still others conduct workshops where people can learn how to braid rawhide, engrave silver or prepare roundup recipes for hungry hands.
Elko featured all that and more, including scholarly panel discussions on ranching issues and a "Gathering of Gear" exhibit and auction that displayed the bridles and bits, quirts (short braided whips), bosals (bitless nose bands) and mecates (horsehair ropes) that are essential to a cowboy's day at the office.
And like most cowboy poetry gatherings it was family-oriented, with PG-rated language and special activities for children such as a puppet show, a poetry session for cowboys under 18, and a mechanical steer that young wranglers could try their hand at lassoing.
A Western Woodstock
But whatever its program, a cowboy poetry gathering is a kind of Western Woodstock, a celebration of Western culture and the words and music that express it. Each gathering presents a picture of the West as cowboy poets paint with words just as deftly as the classic Western artist Frederic Remington did with colors.
Their oral landscape reminds listeners that although prosaically the West is where hamburgers come from, more romantically the West is where America's original heroes - cowboys - come from.
These cowboys ride across a West that is as varied as it is vast, a West where ranches with names like the Pitchfork, the Four Sixes and the Circle-R hunker in mountain valleys or sprawl over plains near small towns with names like Hereford, High River and Recluse.
It is a West where for every city the size of Los Angeles, Calif., there are a thousand the size of Los Angeles, Texas (population 150). In fact, the combined population of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah is less than that of New York City.
Elko is typical of the Western small town - its main drag, Idaho Street, serves as a linear cornucopia of souvenir shops, boot shops, tack stores, steak restaurants, motels, mini-malls, and, this being Nevada, wedding chapels and casinos.
Demographically, Elko is a town of 27,000, a number swelled by a boom in gold mining in the area. And being rated No. 1 in the book "The 100 Best Small Towns in America" in 1993 didn't hurt, either.
Geographically, Elko is a notch on Interstate 80, which stretches like a belt 2,900 miles from New Jersey to San Francisco. During the poetry gathering, travelers came from both ends to learn about real cowboys.
One traveler, Randy Hale of New York City, learned that "the biggest problem to them is losing their ranches. The biggest problems from a New York point of view are drugs and guns and kids dropping out of school. . . . Their way of life here is completely different from mine. And some of these people are darned good poets."
Those darned good poets spent most of their time in Elko at the Convention Center. Featured poets recited in the auditorium, sitting on the stage in a row like birds on a wire. Other poets recited in three meeting halls during sessions that were open to anyone.
Some were relaxed veterans; some were nervous newcomers, standing banjo-eyed behind the podium and gripping the microphone tightly like a saddle horn. Poems ranged from classics to original works. Some were polished, some were ragged, all were sincere.
There were no winners or losers. Elko was just a forum for self-expression. If a cowboy forgot the words of a well-known classic he was reciting, a sympathetic voice in the audience likely would prime his poetic pump by calling out the next line.
Cowgirl Poets
Elko was a forum for cowgirl poets, too. Western writer and editor Teresa Jordan said, "Ranch women's writing has exploded in the last four or five years."
One cowgirl poet, Georgie Sicking of Nevada, has been a rancher most of her life (when she was 19, she was late to her wedding because she was roping wild burros). She is 72 now, and time, like prairie rain, has washed soft ravines in her face. Back when she decided to become a cowgirl, she was discouraged by less-liberated women. She wrote of those days:
"When I was young and foolish, the women said to me,
Take off those spurs and comb your hair if a lady you would be.
Take off that Levi jumper, put up those batwing chaps,
Put on a little makeup and we can get a date for you, perhaps' ...."
But she stayed in the saddle and eventually got her own ranch. "I do all the work myself except for plowing and haying. And neighbors help me with the branding."
Amid all the poetry, occasionally was heard a discouraging word. Cowboys, ever at the mercy of the elements, lately feel buffeted by winds from Washington, D.C. Much of the land in the West is public, its use regulated by the federal Bureau of Land Management under Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Many ranchers graze their cattle on more public than private land. They pay a grazing fee, but fear fee increases and worry about land-use restrictions that result from recreational and ecological considerations.
These changes leach out into the poetry. Baxter Black of Colorado wrote:
"If you've been losing sleep at night about the public land,
Yer not alone. We're all concerned with changes wrought by man.
. . . A wall! We need a giant wall to hold the riffraff back,
But since they own the public lands, we'll prob'ly catch some flak."
And there's one more change wrought by man. The growing interest in cowboy poetry has elevated it to the status of a business. At gatherings such as Elko's, dozens of books and tapes of poetry are sold. A few poets even make a living at it.
Waddie Mitchell of Nevada, for example, has recited on "The Tonight Show" and makes about 120 public appearances a year. He hopes to earn enough money to buy a ranch so that he can return to "buckarooing.
Cowboy poetry has even evolved to the point that these sagebrush literati sit in two camps: traditional and free verse. Hal Cannon, a founder of the Elko gathering, said of traditional verse, "You can trace cowboy poetry pretty directly back to England, to the old ballad form of poetry."
Traditional cowboy poetry is easily understood. It rhymes. It often has a four-beat cadence, like the gait of a horse.
Nevada cowboy Rod McQueary writes some free verse. When he recites, his words are spaced as regularly as fence posts:
"When they ask of Life, what will I say?
Can I describe time that swirls,
With fickle castanets,
And disappears?
A shrinking, self-swallowing serpent? ..."
But whether the form is traditional or free verse, a cowboy cannot live by poetry alone. He must have music. So at night in Elko, after the day's poetry sessions had ended, more sounds of the West were heard.
A few blocks down Idaho Street from the Convention Center, at the Stockmen's Motel, cowboys and cowgirls gathered in a meeting hall to listen to jam sessions as pickers and singers sat in circles with guitar, fiddle and mouth harp. They played "Git Along, Little Dogies," "Red River Valley" and "The Streets of Laredo." There were waltzes, ballads and square dance tunes.
By 3 a.m., cowboys and cowgirls began to leave the Stockmen's in twos and threes and fours. On Idaho Street a few cars and pickups cruised. A horn honked. From within one car the bass of the stereo thumped like a heart.
And then amid these city sounds came once again the sound of the West: A cowboy meandered through the Stockmen's parking lot repeating aloud lines recited earlier in the night by poet Buck Ramsey:
And all the dead bequeathed from pale estates
Lies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood,
Like senna stirs along the ravaged roots.
O all I owe is all the flesh inherits,
My fathers' loves that pull upon my nerves,
My sisters tears that sing upon my head
My brothers' blood that salts my open wounds
Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop,
My fallen filled, that had the hint of death,
Heir to the telling senses that alone
Acquaint the flesh with a remembered itch,
I round this heritage as rounds the sun
His winy sky, and , as the candles moon,
Cast light upon my weather. I am heir
To women who have twisted their last smile,
To children who were suckled on a plague,
To young adorers dying on a kiss.
All such disease I doctor in my blood,
And all such love's a shrub sown in the breath.
Then look, my eyes, upon this bonehead fortune
And browse upon the postures of the dead;
All night and day I eye the ragged globe
Through periscopes rightsighted from the grave;
All night and day I wander in these same
Wax clothes that wax upon the ageing ribs;
All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.
Then look, my heart, upon the scarlet trove,
And look, my grain, upon the falling wheat;
All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion" and "Fern Hill".
Early Life
Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.
Dylan is pronounced 'd?lan in Welsh, and in the early part of his career some announcers introduced him using this pronunciation. However, Thomas himself favoured the anglicised pronunciation /'d?l?n/. A review of a biography by Andrew Lycett (2004) notes: "Florence, the boy’s mother, had her doubts about the odd name: the correct Welsh pronunciation, which the family used, is “Dullan,” and she worried that other children would tease him by calling him “dull one.” Later, when broadcasting on the Welsh service of the BBC, Dylan Thomas had to instruct the announcers to say "'Dillan,' the way he himself pronounced it". His middle name, Marlais, was given to him in honour of his great-uncle, Unitarian minister William Thomas, whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles.
His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to visit his maternal aunts' Carmarthenshire farms. These rural sojourns and the contrast with the town life of Swansea provided inspiration for much of his work, notably many short stories, radio essays, and the poem Fern Hill. Thomas was known to be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and asthma. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He was considered too frail to fight in World War II, instead serving the war effort by writing scripts for the government. Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's Dame school, a private school which was situated a few streets away on Mirador Crescent. He described his experience there in Quite Early One Morning:
Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime — the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.
In October 1925, Thomas attended the single-sex Swansea Grammar School, in the Mount Pleasant district of the city, where his father taught. He was an undistinguished student. Thomas's first poem was published in the school's magazine. He later became its editor. He began keeping poetry notebooks and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He left school at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper, the South Wales Daily Post, only to leave the job under pressure 18 months later in 1932. After leaving the job he filled his notebooks even faster. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these first years. He then joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now Known as Swansea Little Theatre), but still continued to work as a freelance journalist for a few more years.
All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.
How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse's lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.
II
Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.
III
All all and all the dry worlds couple,
Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
With the womb of his shapeless people.
All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
Square in these worlds the mortal circle.
Flower, flower the people's fusion,
O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
And the flame in the flesh's vision.
Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
Flower, flower, all all and all.
Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea, South Wales. His father was an English Literature professor at the local grammar school and would often recite Shakespeare, fortifying Thomas's love for the rhythmic ballads of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Thomas dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. By December of 1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on his poetry full-time. It was during this time, in his late teens, that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems.
In 1934, when Thomas was twenty, he moved to London, won the Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first book, 18 Poems (The Fortune press), to great acclaim. The book drew from a collection of poetry notebooks that Thomas had written years earlier, as would many of his most popular books.
Unlike his contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, had more in common with the Romantic tradition.
Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."
Two years after the publication of 18 Poems, Thomas met the dancer Caitlin Macnamara at a pub in London. At the time, she was the mistress of painter Augustus John. Macnamara and Thomas engaged in an affair and married in 1937.
About Thomas's work, Michael Schmidt writes: "There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular later poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality."
In 1940, Thomas and his wife moved to London. He had served as an anti-aircraft gunner but was rejected for more active combat due to illness. To avoid the air raids, the couple left London in 1944. They eventually settled at Laugharne, in the Boat House where Thomas would write many of his later poems.
Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, narrated, or assisted with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In one show, "Quite Early One Morning," he experimented with the characters and ideas that would later appear in his poetic radio play Under Milk Wood (1953).
In 1947 Thomas was awarded a Traveling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. He took his family to Italy, and while in Florence, he wrote In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (Dent, 1952), which includes his most famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night." When they returned to Oxfordshire, Thomas began work on three film scripts for Gainsborough Films. The company soon went bankrupt, but Thomas's scripts, "Me and My Bike," "Rebecca's Daughters," and "The Beach at Falesa," were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).
In January 1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as a new medium for the art, are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination—he was theatrical, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.
Thomas toured America four times, with his last public engagement taking place at the City College of New York. A few days later, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking bout at the White Horse Tavern. On November 9, 1953, he died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City at the age of thirty-nine. He had become a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. He was buried in Laugharne, and almost thirty years later, a plaque to Dylan was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,
And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.
Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold
Of fields. And burning then
In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men
Stumble out with their spades,
The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,
The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
And all the woken farm at its white trades,
He knelt, he wept, he prayed,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,
In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.
He knelt on the cold stones,
He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky
May his hunger go howling on bare white bones
Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties
And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone
Into the home of prayers
And fires where he should prowl down the cloud
Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.
His naked need struck him howling and bowed
Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air
But only the wind strung
Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed
In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.
And his nameless need bound him burning and lost
When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among
The rivers mouthed in night,
And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught
In the always desiring centre of the white
Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought
By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.
Deliver him, he cried,
By losing him all in love, and cast his need
Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,
Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed
Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.
Listen. The minstrels sing
In the departed villages. The nightingale,
Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.
The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring
Is telling. The wizened
Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings
On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.
Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.
It was a hand or sound
In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide
And there outside on the bread of the ground
A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.
A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.
Look. And the dancers move
On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved
Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.
The carved limbs in the rock
Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old
Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.
And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold
Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.
And the wild wings were raised
Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice
Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised
And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced
That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,
In the mantle and calm,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.
And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed
Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight
Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.
In the poles of the year
When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row
And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,
Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow
And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,
Rags and prayers down the knee-
Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,
All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-
Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.
Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,
The sky, the bird, the bride,
The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond
The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,
The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.
In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,
And the bird descended.
On a bread white hill over the cupped farm
And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended
Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm
And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.
The dancing perishes
On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,
The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes
That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread
And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes
Flying. The rite is shorn
Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither
Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.
Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather
That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.
For the bird lay bedded
In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,
And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,
And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed
Bird, he was brought low,
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.
She who was who I hold, the fats and the flower,
Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,
Hell wind and sea,
A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,
Rose maid and male,
Or, master venus, through the paddler's bowl
Sailed up the sun;
Who is my grief,
A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,
Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud
Shot through the leaf,
Was who was folded on the rod the aaron
Road east to plague,
The horn and ball of water on the frog
Housed in the side.
And she who lies,
Like exodus a chapter from the garden,
Brand of the lily's anger on her ring,
Tugged through the days
Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,
On field and sand
The twelve triangles of the cherub wind
Engraving going.
Who then is she,
She holding me? The people's sea drives on her,
Drives out the father from the caesared camp;
The dens of shape
Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
That she I have,
The country-handed grave boxed into love,
Rise before dark.
The night is near,
A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;
I tell her this: before the suncock cast
Her bone to fire,
Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid
Draw in their seas,
So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,
And close her fist.
In Our Time is a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway. Each chapter consists of a vignette that in some way relates to the following short story. It was published in 1925, and marked Ernest Hemingway's American debut. It contains several well-known Hemingway works, including the Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler", and introduces readers to Hemingway's distinctive style. "On the Quai at Smyrna" was first published as the introduction to the 1930 edition.
A year earlier in 1924, Hemingway published a much shorter book named in our time (in lower-case) in Paris. It consisted of just 32 pages and was published in a small edition of 170 copies. in our time contained only the vignettes later used as interchapters for In Our Time, though some of these vignettes, like "A Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist," were treated as full short stories in the later collection.
The title comes from the English Book of Common Prayer: "give us peace in our time, O Lord." This origin was first suggested by Ezra Pound and then later confirmed by Hemingway.
At the time of its publication, the book was recognized as a significant development in prose fiction, for its spare language and oblique depiction of the psychological states of the characters portrayed.
The Big Two-Hearted River
Hemingway's end story fromIn Our Time
PART I
The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.
Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.
Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning forward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and he turned off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into the country. He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.
From the time he had gotten down off the train and the baggage man had thrown his pack out of the open car door things had been different. Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed, but it did not matter. It could not all be burned. He hiked along the road, sweating in the sun, climbing to cross the range of hills that separated the railway from the pine plains.
The road ran on, dipping occasionally, but always climbing. He went on up. Finally after going parallel to the burnt hill, he reached the top. Nick leaned back against a stump and slipped out of the pack harness. Ahead of him, as far as he could see, was the pine plain. The burned country stopped off at the left of a range of hills. All ahead islands of dark pine trees rose out of the plain. Far off to the left was the line of the river. Nick followed it with his eye and caught glints of the water in the sun.
There was nothing but the pine plain ahead of him, until the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land. He could hardly see them faint and far away in the heat-light over the plain. If he looked too steadily they were gone. But if he only half-looked they were there, the far-off hills of the height of land.
Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.
As he smoked his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started grasshoppers from with dust. They were all black. They were not the big grasshoppers with yellow and black or red and black wings whirring out from their black wing sheathing as they fly up. These were just ordinary hoppers, but all a sooty black in color. Nick had wondered about them as he walked without really thinking about them. Now, as he watched the black hopper that was nibbling at the wool of his sock with its fourway lip he realized that they had all turned black from living in the burned-over land. He realized that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now. He wondered how long they would stay that way.
Carefully he reached his hand down and took hold of the hopper by the wings. He turned him up, all his legs walking in the air, and looked at his jointed belly. Yes, it was black too, iridescent where the back and head were dusty.
"Go on, hopper," Nick said, speaking out loud for the first time. "Fly away somewhere."
He tossed the grasshopper up into the air and watched him sail away to a charcoal stump across the road.
Nick stood up. He leaned his back against the weight of his pack where it rested upright on the stump and got his arms through the shoulder straps. He stood with the pack on his back on the brow of the hill looking out across the country, toward the distant river and then struck down the hillside away from the road. Underfoot the ground was good walking. Two hundred yards down the fire line stopped. Then it was sweet fern, growing ankle high, walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again.
Nick kept his direction by the sun. He knew where he wanted to strike the river and he kept on through the pine plain, mounting small rises to see other rises ahead of him and sometimes from the top of a rise a great solid island of pines off to his right or his left. He broke off some sprigs of the leathery sweet fern, and put them under his pack straps. The chafing crushed it and he smelled it as he walked.
He was tired and very hot, walking across the uneven, shadeless pine pram. At any time he knew he could strike the river by turning off to his left. It could not be more than a mile away. But he kept on toward the north to hit the river as far upstream as he could go in one day's walking. For some time as he walked Nick had been in sight of one of the big islands of pine standing out above the rolling high ground he was crossing. He dipped down and then as he came slowly up to the crest of the bridge he turned and made toward the pine trees. There was no underbrush in the island of pine trees. The trunks of the trees went straight up or slanted toward each other. The trunks were straight and brown without branches. The branches were high above. Some interlocked to make a solid shadow on the brown forest floor. Around the grove of trees was a bare space. It was brown and soft underfoot as Nick walked on it. This was the over-lapping of the pine needle floor, extending out beyond the width of the high branches. The treeshad grown tall and the branches moved high, leaving in the sun this barespace they had once covered with shadow. Sharp at the edge of this extension of the forest floor commenced the sweet fern.
Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade. He lay on his back and looked up into the pine trees. His neck and back and the small of his back rested as he stretched. The earth felt good against his back. He looked up at the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyesagain and went to sleep.
Nick woke stiff and cramped. The sun was nearly down. His pack was heavy and the straps painful as he lifted it on. He leaned over with the pack on andpicked up the leather rod-case and started out from the pine trees across the sweet fern swale, toward the river. He knew it could not be more than a mile.
He came down a hillside covered with stumps into a meadow. At the edge of the meadow flowed the river. Nick was glad to get to the river. He walked upstream through the meadow. His trousers were soaked with the dew as he walked. After the hot day, the dew halt come quickly and heavily. The river made no sound. It was too fast and smooth. At the edge of the meadow, before he mounted to a piece of high ground to make camp, Nick looked down the river at the trout rising. They were rising to insects come from the swamp on the other side of the stream when the sun went down. The trout jumped out of water to take them. While Nick walked through the littlestretch of meadow alongside the stream, trout had jumped high out of water. Now as he looked down the river, the insects must be settling on the surface, for the trout were feeding steadily all down the stream. As far down the long stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain.
The ground rose, wooded and sandy, to overlook the meadow, the stretch of river and the swamp. Nick dropped his pack and rod case and looked for a level piece of ground. He was very hungry and he wanted to make his camp before he cooked. Between two jack pines, the ground was quite level. He took the ax out of the pack and chopped out two projecting roots. That leveled a piece of ground large enough to sleep on. He smoothed out the sandy soil with his hand and pulled all the sweet fern bushes by their roots. His hands smelled good from the sweet fern. He smoothed the uprooted earth. He did not want anything making lumps under the blankets. When he had the ground smooth, he spread his blankets. One he folded double, next to the ground. The other two he spread on top.
With the ax he slit off a bright slab of pine from one of the stumps and split it into pegs for the tent. He wanted them long and solid to hold in the ground. With the tent unpacked and spread on the ground, the pack, leaning against a jack pine, looked much smaller. Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ridgepole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off theground with the other end of the rope and tied it to the other pine. The tent hung on the rope like a canvas blanket on a clothesline. Nick poked a pole he had cut up under the back peak of the canvas and then made it a tent by pegging out the sides. He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep, hitting them down into the ground with the flat of the ax until the rope loops were buried and the canvas was drum tight.
Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out mosquitoes. He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas. Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a goodplace to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.
He came out, crawling under the cheesecloth. It was quite dark outside. It was lighter in the tent.
Nick went over to the pack and found, with his fingers, a long nail in a paper sack of nails, in the bottom of the pack. He drove it into the pine tree, holding it close and hitting it gently with the flat of the ax. He hung the pack up on the nail. All his supplies were in the pack. They were off the ground and sheltered now.
Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied a can at pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.
"I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'm willing to carry it," Nick said.
His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.
He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump.Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the tour legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan and a can of spaghetti on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubblesthat rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato ketchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomatoketchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent; he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate."Chrise," Nick said, "Geezus Chrise," he said happily.
He ate the whole plateful before he remembered the bread. Nick finished the second plateful with the bread, mopping the plate shiny. He had not eatensince a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich in the station restaurant at St. Ignace. It had been a very fine experience. He had been that hungry before, but had not been able to stand it. He could have made camp hours before if he had wanted to. There were plenty of good places to camp on the river. But this was good.
Nick tucked two big chips of pine under the grill. The fire flared up. He had forgotten to get water for the coffee. Out of the pack he got a folding canvas bucket and walked down the hill, across the edge of the meadow, to the stream. The other bank was in the white mist. The grass was wet and cold as he knelt on the bank and dipped the canvas bucket into the stream. It bellied and pulled held in the current. The water was ice cold. Nick rinsed the bucket and carried it full up to the camp. Up away from the stream it was not so cold.
Nick drove another big nail and hung up the bucket full of water. He dipped the coffee pot half full, put some more chips under the grill onto the fire and put the pot oil. He could not remember which way he made coffee. He could remember an argument about it with Hopkins, but not which side he hadtaken. He decided to bring it to a boil. He remembered now that wasHopkins's way. He had once argued about everything with Hopkins. While he waited for the coffee to boil, he opened a small can of apricots. He liked to open cans. He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup. While he watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the juice syrup of the apricots, carefully at first to keep from spilling, then meditatively, sucking the apricots down. They were better than fresh apricots.
The coffee boiled as he watched. The lid came up and coffee and grounds ran down the side of the pot. Nick took it off the grill. It was a triumph for Hopkins. He put sugar in the empty apricot cup and poured some of the coffee out to cool. It was too hot to pour and he used his hat to hold the handle of the coffee pot. He would not let it steep in the pot at all. Not the first cup. It should be straight. Hopkins deserved that. Hop was a very serious coffee drinker. He was the most serious man Nick had ever known. Not heavy, serious. That was a long time ago Hopkins spoke without moving his lips. He had played polo. He made millions of dollars in Texas. He hadborrowed carfare to go to Chicago when the wire came that his first big well had come in. He could have wired for money. That would have been too slow. They called Hop's girl the Blonde Venus. Hop did not mind because she was not his real girl. Hopkins said very confidently that none of them would make fun of his real girl. He was right. Hopkins went away when the telegram came. That was on the Black River. It took eight days for the telegram to reach him. Hopkins gave away his 22-caliber Colt automatic pistol to Nick. He gave his camera to Bill, It was to remember him always by. They were all going fishing again next summer. The Hop Head was rich. He would get ayacht and they would all cruise along the north shore of Lake Superior. Hewas excited but serious. They said good-bye and all felt bad. It broke up the trip. They never saw Hopkins again. That was a long time ago on the Black River.
Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sittingon the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.
Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blanket. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.
PART II
In the morning the sun was up and the tent was starting to get hot. Nick crawled out under the mosquito netting stretched across the mouth of the tent, to look at the morning. The grass was wet on his hands as he came out. The sun was just up over the hill. There was the meadow, the river and the swamp. There were birch trees in the green of the swamp on the other side of the river.
The river was clear and smoothly fast in the early morning. Down about two hundred yards were three logs all the way across the stream. They made the water smooth and deep above them. As Nick watched, a mink crossed the river on the logs and went into the swamp. Nick was excited. He was excited by the early morning and the river. He was really too hurried to eat breakfast, but he knew he must. He built a little fire and put on the coffee pot.
While the water was heating in the pot he took an empty bottle and went down over the edge of the high ground to the meadow. The meadow was wet with dew and Nick wanted to catch grasshoppers for bait before the sun dried the grass. He found plenty of good grasshoppers. They were at the base of the grass stems.Sometimes they clung to a grass stem. They were cold and wet with the dew, and could not jump until the sun warmed them. Nick picked them up, taking only the medium-sized brown ones, and put them into the bottle. He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were several hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house. Nick put about fifty of the medium browns into the bottle. While he was picking up the hoppers the others warmed in the sun and commenced to hop away. They flew when they hopped. At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when they landed, as though they were dead.
Nick knew that by the time he was through with breakfast they would be as lively as ever. Without dew in the grass it would take him all day to catch a bottle full of good grasshoppers and he would have to crush many of them, slamming at them with his hat. He washed his hands at the stream. He was excited to be near it. Then he walked up to the tent. The hoppers were already jumping stiffly in the grass. In the bottle, warmed by the sun, they were jumping in a mass. Nick put in a pine stick as a cork. It plugged the mouth of the bottle enough, so the hoppers could not get out and left plenty of air passage.
He had rolled the log back and knew he could get grasshoppers there every morning.
Nick laid the bottle full of jumping grasshoppers against a pine trunk. Rapidly he mixed some buckwheat flour with water and stirred it smooth, one cup of flour, one cup of water. He put a handful of coffee in the pot and dipped a lump of grease out of a can and slid it sputtering across the hot skillet. In the smoking skillet he poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. It spread like lava, the grease spitting sharply. Around the edges the buckwheat cake began to firm, then brown, then crisp. The surface was bubbling slowly to porousness. Nick pushed under the browned under surface with a fresh pine chip. He shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose on the surface. I won't try and flop it, he thought. He slid the chip of clean wood all the way under thecake, and flopped it over onto its face. It sputtered in the pan.
When it was cooked Nick regreased the skillet. He used all the batter. It made another big flapjack and one smaller one.
Nick ate a big flapjack and a smaller one, covered with apple butter. He put apple butter on the third cake, folded it over twice, wrapped it in oiled paper and put it in his shirt pocket. He put the apple butter jar back in the pack and cut bread for two sandwiches.
In the pack he found a big onion. He sliced it in two and peeled the silky outer skin. Then he cut one half into slices and made onion sandwiches. He wrapped them in oiled paper and buttoned them in the other pocket of his khaki shirt. He turned the skillet upside down on the grill, drank the coffee, sweetened and yellow brown with the condensed milk in it, and tidied up the camp. It was a good camp.
Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod-case, jointed it, and shoved the rod-case back into the tent. He put on the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He had to hold it from hand to hand, as he threaded it, or it would slip back through its own weight. It was a heavy, double tapered fly line. Nick had paid eight dollars for it a long time ago. It was made heavy to lift back in the air and come forward flat and heavy and straight to make it possible to cast a fly which has no weight. Nick opened the aluminum leader box. The leaders were coiled between the damp flannel pads. Nick had wet the pads at the water cooler on the train up to St. Ignace. In the damp pads the gut leaders had softened and Nick unrolled one and tied it by a loop at the end to the heavy fly line. He fastened a hook on the end of the leader. It was a small hook, very thin and springy.
Nick took it from his hook book, sitting with the rod across his lap. He tested the knot and the spring of the rod by pulling the line taut. It was a good feeling. He was careful not to let the hook bite into his finger.
He started down to the stream, holding his rod, the bottle of grasshoppers hung from his neck by a thong tied in half hitches around the neck of the bottle. His landing net hung by a hook from his belt. Over his shoulder was a long flour sack tied at each corner into an ear. The cord went over his shoulder. The sack slapped against his legs.
Nick felt awkward and professionally happy with all his equipment hanging from him. The grasshopper bottle swung against his chest. In his shirt the breast pockets bulged against him with the lunch and the fly book.
He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to his legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold shock.
Rushing, the current sucked against his legs. Where he stepped in, the water was over his knees. He waded with the current. The gravel slipped under his shoes. He looked down at the swirl of water below each leg and tipped up the bottle to get a grasshopper. The first grasshopper gave a jump in the neck of the bottle and went out into the water. He was sucked under in the whirl by Nick's right leg and came to the surface a little way down stream. He floated rapidly, kicking. In a quick circle, breaking the smooth surface of the water, he disappeared. A trout had taken him.
Another hopper poked his face out of the bottle. His antennas wavered.He was getting his front legs out of the bottle to jump. Nick took him by the head and held him while he threaded the slim hook under his chin, down through his thorax and into the last segments of his abdomen. Thegrasshopper took hold of the hook with his front feet, spitting tobacco juice on it. Nick dropped him into the water.
Holding the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull of the grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel with his left hand and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the little waves of the current. It went out of sight.
There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was his first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he hauled in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pulling against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. He lifted the rod straight up in the air. It bowed with the pull.
He saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body against the shifting tangent of the line in the stream.
Nick took the line in his left hand and pulled the trout, thumping tiredly against the current, to the surface. His back was mottled the clear, water-over-gravel color, his side flashing in the sun. The rod under his right arm, Nick stooped, dipping his right hand into the current. He held the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the barb from his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream.
He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a stone.Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under water. The trout was steady in the moving stream resting on the gravel, beside a stone. As Nick's fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling, he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream.
He's all right, Nick thought. He was only tired.
He had wet his hand before he touched the trout, so he would not disturb the delicate mucus that covered him.If a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot. Years before when he had fished crowded streams, with fly fishermen ahead of him and behind him, Nick had again and again come on dead trout furry with white fungus, drilled against a rock, or floating belly up in some pool. Nick did not like to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were of your party, they spoiled it.
He wallowed down the steam, above his knees in the current, through the fifty yards of shallow water above the pile of logs that crossed the stream. He did not rebait his hook and held it in his hand as he waded. He was certain he could catch small trout in the shallows, but he did not want them. There would be no big trout in the shallows this time of day.
Now the water deepened up his thighs sharply and coldly. Ahead was the smooth dammed-back flood of water above the logs. The water was smooth and dark; on the left, the lower edge of the meadow; on the right the swamp. Nick leaned back against the current and took a hopper from the bottle. He threaded the hopper on the hook and spat on him for good luck. Then he pulled several yards of line from the reel and tossed the hopper out ahead onto the fast, dark water. It floated down towards the logs, then the weight of the line pulled the bait under the surface. Nick held the rod in his right hand, letting the line run out through his fingers.
There was a long tug. Nick struck and the rod came alive and dangerous, bent double, the line tightening, coming out of water, tightening, all in a heavy, dangerous, steady pull. Nick felt the moment when the leader would break if the strain increased and let the line go.
The reel ratcheted into a mechanical shriek as the line went out in a rush. Too fast. Nick could not check it, the line rushing out, the reel note rising as the line ran out. With the core of the reel showing, his heart feeling stopped with the excitement, leaning back against the current that mounted icily his thighs, Nick thumbed the reel hard with his left hand. It was awkward getting his thumb inside the fly reel frame.
As he put on pressure the line tightened into sudden hardness and beyond the logs a huge trout went high out of water. As he jumped, Nick lowered the tip of the rod. But he felt, as he dropped the tip to ease the strain, the moment when the strain was too great, the hardness too tight. Of course, the leader had broken. There was no mistaking the feeling when all spring left the line and it became dry and hard. Then it went slack.
His mouth dry, his heart down, Nick reeled in. He had never seen so big a trout.There was a heaviness, a power not to be held, and then the bulk of him, as he jumped. He looked as broad as a salmon.
Nick's hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.
The leader had broken where the hook was tied to it. Nick took it in his hand. He thought of the trout somewhere on the bottom, holding himself steady over the gravel, far down below the light, under the logs, with the hook in his jaw. Nick knew the trout's teeth would cut through the snell of the hook. The hook would imbed itself in his jaw. He'd bet the trout was angry. Anything that size would be angry. That was a trout. He had been solidly hooked. Solid as a rock. He felt like a rock, too, before he started off. By God, he was a big one. By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of.
Nick climbed out onto the meadow and stood, water running down his trousers and out of his shoes, his shoes squlchy. He went over and sat on the logs. He did not want to rush his sensations any.
He wriggled his toes in the water, in his shoes, and got out a cigarette from his breast pocket. He lit it and tossed the match into the fast water below the logs. A tiny trout rose at the match, as it swung around in the fast current. Nick laughed. He would finish the cigarette.
He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his back, the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods, shallows, light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank and white birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark, gray to the touch; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him. It went away slowly, the feeling of disappointment that came sharply after the thrill that made his shoulders itch. It was all right now. His rod lying out on the logs, Nick tied a new hook on the leader, pulling the gut tight until it crimped into itself in a hard knot.
He baited up, then picked up the rod and walked to the far end of the logs to get into the water, where it was not too deep. Under and beyond the logs was a deep pool. Nick walked around the shallow shelf near the swamp shore until he came out on the shallow bed of the stream.
On the left, where the meadow ended and the woods began, a great elm tree was uprooted. Gone over in a storm, it lay back into the woods, its roots clotted with dirt, grass growing in them, raising a solid bank beside the stream. The river cut to the edge of the uprooted tree. From where Nick stood he could see deep channels like ruts, cut in the shallow bed of the stream by the flow of the current. Pebbly where he stood and pebbly and full of boulders beyond; where it curved near the tree roots, the bed of the stream was marry and between the ruts of deep water green weed fronds swung in the current.
Nick swung the rod back over his shoulder and forward, and the line, curving forward, laid the grasshopper down on one of the deep channels in the weeds.A trout struck and Nick hooked him.
Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the current, Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the danger of the weeds into the open river. Holding the rod, pumping alive against the current, Nick brought the trout in. He rushed, but always came, the spring of the rod yielding to the rushes, sometimes jerking under water, but always bringing him in. Nick eased downstream with the rushes. The rod above his head he led the trout over the net, then lifted.
The trout hung heavy in the net, mottled trout back and silver sides in the meshes. Nick unhooked him; heavy sides, good to hold, big undershot jaw and slipped him, heaving and big sliding, into the long sack that hung from his shoulders in the water.
Nick spread the mouth of the sack against the current and it filled, heavy with water. He held it up, the bottom in the stream, and the water poured out through the sides. Inside at the bottom was the big trout, alive in the water.
Nick moved downstream. The sack out ahead of him sunk heavy in the water, pulling from his shoulders.
It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck.
Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout. Now the stream was shallow and wide. There were trees along both banks. The trees of the left bank made short shadows on the current in the forenoon sun. Nick knew there were trout in each shadow. In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills the trout would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream.
The very biggest ones would lie up close to the bank. You could always pick them up there on the Black. When the sun was down they all moved out into the current. Just when the sun made the water blinding in the glare before it went down, you were liable to strike a big trout anywhere in the current. It was almost impossible to fish then, the surface of the water was blinding as amirror in the sun. Of course, you could fish upstream, but in a stream like the Black, or this, you had to wallow against the current and in a deep place, the water piled up on you. It was no fun to fish upstream in this much current.
Nick moved along through the shallow stretch watching the balks for deep holes. A beech tree grew close beside the river, so that the branches hung down into the water. The stream went back in under the leaves. There were always trout in a place like that.
Nick did not care about fishing that hole. He was sure he would get hooked in the branches.
It looked deep though. He dropped the grasshopper so the current took it under water, back in under the overhanging branch. The line pulled hard and Nick struck. The trout threshed heavily, half out of water in the leaves and branches. The line was caught. Nick pulled hard and the trout was off. He reeled in and holding the hook in his hand walked down the stream.
Ahead, close to the left bank, was a big log. Nick saw it was hollow, pointing up river the current entered it smoothly, only a little ripple spread each side of the log. The water was deepening. The top of the hollow log was gray and dry. It was partly in the shadow.
Nick took the cork out of the grasshopper bottle and a hopper clung to it. He picked him off, hooked him and tossed him out. He held the rod far out so that the hopper on the water moved into the current flowing into the hollow log. Nick lowered the rod and the hopper floated in. There was a heavy strike. Nick swung the rod against the pull. It felt as though he were hookedinto the log itself, except for the live feeling.He tried to force the fish out into the current. It came, heavily.
The line went slack and Nick thought the trout was gone. Then he saw him, very near, in the current, shaking his head, trying to get the hook out. His mouth was clamped shut. He was fighting the hook in the clear flowing current.Looping in the line with his left hand, Nick swung the rod to make the line taut and tried to lead the trout toward the net, but he was gone, out of sight, the line pumping. Nick fought him against the current, letting him thump in the water against the spring of the rod. He shifted the rod to his left hand, worked the trout upstream, holding his weight, fighting on the rod, and then let him down into the net. He lifted him clear of the water, a heavy half circle in the net, the net dripping, unhooked him and slid him into the sack.
He spread the mouth of the sack and looked down in at the two big trout alive in the water.
Through the deepening water, Nick waded over to the hollow log. He took the sack off, over his head, the trout flopping as it came out of water, and hung it so the trout were deep in the water. Then he pulled himself up on the log and sat, the water from his trouser and boots running down into the stream. He laid his rod down moved along to the shady end of the log and took the sandwiches out of his pocket. He dipped the sandwiches in the cold water. The current carried away the crumbs. He ate the sandwiches and dipped his hat full of water to drink, the water running out through his hat just ahead of his drinking.
It was cool in the shade, sitting on the log. He took a cigarette out and struck a match to light it. The match sunk into the gray wood, making a tiny furrow.Nick leaned over the side of the log, found a hard place and lit the match. He sat smoking and watching the river.
Ahead the river narrowed and went into a swamp. The river became smooth and deep and the swamp looked solid with cedar trees, their trunks close together, their branches solid.It would not be possible to walk through a swamp like that.The branches grew so low. You would have to keep almost level with the ground to move at all. You could not crash through the branches. That must be why the animals that lived in swamps were built the way they were, Nick thought.
He wished he had brought something to read. He felt like reading. He did not feel like going on into the swamp. He looked down the river. A big cedar slanted all the way across the stream. Beyond that the river went into the swamp.
Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half-light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He didn't want to go up the stream any further today.
He took out his knife, opened it and stuck it in the log. Then he pulled up the sack, reached into it and brought out one of the trout. Holding him near the tail, hard to hold, alive, in his hand, he whacked him against the log. The trout quivered, rigid. Nick laid him on the log in the shade and broke the neck of the other fish the same way. He laid them side-by-side on the log. They werefine trout.
Nick cleaned them, slitting them from the vent to the tip of the jaw. All theinsides and the gills and tongue came out in one piece. They were both males; long gray-white strips of milt, smooth and clean. All the insides clean and compact, coming out all together. Nick took the offal ashore for the minks to find.
He washed the trout in the stream. When he held them back up in the water, they looked like live fish.Their color was not gone yet.He washed his hands and dried them on the log.Then he laid the trout on the sack spread out on the log, rolled them up in it, tied the bundle and put it in the landing net.His knife was still standing, blade stuck in the log.He cleaned it on the wood and put it in his pocket.
Nick stood up on the log, holding his rod, the landing net hanging heavy, then stepped into the water and splashed ashore.He climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, toward the high ground.He was going back to camp.He looked back.The river just showed through the trees. There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.
Nick's return home is infused with the issues faced by a man coming back from war. Everything at home is burnt out and abandoned. This state of Nick's homeland represents the feeling of many veterans returning home. Whether or not their homes are actually demolished, they are symbolically demolished. After seeing war, home can never seem as innocent and carefree. Further, no one else can understand what a soldier has gone through, so he might as well be alone. Finally, a burnt-out town looks similar to one that has been bombed out or blown apart. Therefore, it is as if Nick's home has also been destroyed by the war. Nick also confronts the new freedom of a man returning from the army. Now, he can choose whether or not to carry heavy food: He has that freedom. Further, he can make his own bed that no one can disturb. Even during his long day of hiking, he feels happy because he can decide for himself where to go and how fast.
Nick's return home is also full of experiences that he had along his developmental journey. He learned from Bugs how to cook in a pan with bread to sop up the left-over sauce. As he sits against the tree with his legs sprawled out, the reader is reminded of his being shot and propped up against a church. Nick remembers an argument with Hopkins, presumably just one of the friends he has lost.
The grasshoppers are an important symbol. They have become black to adapt to their new, blackened surroundings. Nick wonders how long they will stay like that. These grasshoppers represent Nick and other soldiers who become hardened by the war experience because they are in a tough environment. No one knows how long they will remain hardened either.
The second half of "Big Two-Hearted River" shows Nick trying to enjoy himself and savor every feeling, being simply happy to be alive. It also finishes the themes of combat and masculinity. Nick fights these fish, but the battles are not nasty. They are mellower than the rest of the battles in the book. The entire battle is like the moment when Vallalta and the bull became one. The trout and Nick perform an almost ritual dance with each other. They are the two hearts of one river, and their battle becomes a moment of unity rather than separation. One reason that this battle can be so fraternal is that the fish are also male. From the other stories, it seems that the harmony would have been shattered if females were involved.
Emotionally wounded and disillusioned by World War I, Nick Adams returns to his home and leaves for the north Michigan woods on a camping trip. He leaves by himself, hoping that the routine of selecting a good place to camp, setting up a tent, fixing meals, and preparing for fishing will restore peace and a sense of balance to his traumatized soul.
On the way to the woods, Nick passes the ruined, gutted, burned-to-the-ground town of Seney. The first half of this solitary sojourn focuses on passing through Seney and setting up camp, which comprises Part I.
Analysis
According to Hemingway biographer James R. Mellon, Hemingway regarded "Big Two-Hearted River" as the "climactic story in [his short story collection] In Our Time and the culminating episode in the Nick Adams adventures that he included in the book."
That comment ought to spark the curiosity of readers of this story, for, on the surface, very little happens in the story. Seemingly, it goes nowhere. If, however, one has read Thoreau's Walden, it is relatively easy to see that Hemingway is portraying Nick Adams' attempt to achieve a bonding with nature that Thoreau, in 1845, was seeking when he decided to live a simple, semi-solitary life at Walden Pond. In Walden, Thoreau says: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . . and see if I could learn what it had to teach. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."
This "living deliberately" is the key to what Nick is seeking through the restorative and recuperative powers of nature. He has seen first-hand the horrors of war (World War I), was seriously injured himself and suffered a mental breakdown. He is searching for some way to put the horrors of these experiences behind him and restore himself to a healthy emotional life. To do so, he feels that he must isolate himself from the rest of humanity until he regains his own sense of sanity and humanity.
Interestingly, trout fishing plays an important role for many of Hemingway's male characters. For example, in The Sun Also Rises, the main character, Jake Barnes, who, like Nick, was seriously wounded in the war, goes with his best friend to the Spanish Mountains for some trout fishing, especially when he is about to lose control of his life. Ultimately, the traditional Christian symbols of fishing and water become symbolic of Nick's being rebaptized into life. However, even though two prominent Western world symbols have been mentioned thus far, this is not a story whose meaning relies on symbols. Instead, it is a realistic account of a fishing trip during which Nick regains control of his life.
Two major, over-arching themes can be seen in each part: recovery in Part I and recollection in Part II.
Nick's recovery begins here as Nick goes alone to a deserted area along the fictional Two-Hearted River (Michigan's Fox River) in the upper peninsula of northern Michigan, where he can see Lake Superior from a hilltop, where "there was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. . . . It was all that was left of the town of Seney." The symbolism here is fairly obvious: Nick is leaving the burned, destroyed portions of his life behind, hoping and searching for renewal on the rich, green, and fertile river bank of the big Two-Hearted River. Nick, however, does not go immediately to the river; instead, he gets off the train and pauses on a bridge, watching trout that are far below him in the stream. It is important to note here that Nick is looking down onto the river and the trout, which will both be living, breathing symbols that are essential to Nick's healing later. The trout are all steadily floating in deep, fast-moving water. Hemingway uses another important symbol here: the kingfisher, a brightly-colored bird that dives just under the water's surface for fish. This is most definitely a metaphor for the facile, healthy spiritual state that Nick is seeking on this solitary camping trip. The bird's ability to fly is a traditional symbol for spiritual ascension and the ability to transgress beyond worldly cares, and the bird's ability to go underneath the surface and pluck things out of the river and digest them is a metaphor for what Nick needs to do to transmutate his unpleasant memories. He follows the river from a distance, for some time, delaying gratification before deciding on a place for his camp. He wants to begin his healing in the woods deliberately and with discipline. Throughout the story, he will be isolated from other people. He will not see or communicate with anyone.
When he sees the trout moving about in the pools of the river, he feels an elation that he has not felt for a long time. Nick saw trout in the stream below the bridge; his "heart tightened as the trout moved." Then, leaving the burned town behind him, Nick "felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him." These key ideas, then, are the essence of this story: Nick has escaped into his own world where the mere sight of trout influences his responses. He is at one with this world: "He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river."
As Nick walks through Seney, he notices that even the surface of the ground has been burned. The black, sooty ruin of Seney represents the atrocities of war and its devastating effect on Nick's psycho-emotional well being. Here, he walks through it and notices that even the grasshoppers are covered with soot, much the same way that Nick himself is still covered with "soot" from the war.
However, note that Nick does not go to the river immediately. He wants to get as far upstream as he can in one day's walking. Even though he stops and instinctively knows that the river cannot be more than a mile north of where he is, being tired, he takes off his backpack and sleeps on the ground until the sun is almost down.
The description of Nick's putting up the tent, smoothing the ground, chopping stakes, pulling the tent taut, hanging cheesecloth over the front — all of these components coalesce and make Nick feel happy: "He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp."
Hemingway is famous for avoiding three-syllable, high-flown adjectives; instead, he uses simple adjectives such as "good." Here, this was a "good place" to camp.
Afterward, Nick makes his supper — a can of pork and beans mixed with a can of spaghetti. As the two ingredients cook together, Nick inhales a "good" smell — not a "superb aroma" — just simply a "good" smell.
Nick is trying to return to basics, to regain a sense of the simplicity of life; thus Hemingway presents his camping trip in its simplest terms. Even though Nick eats plain, canned food, he describes it lovingly: " . . . he had been that hungry before, but had not been able to satisfy it." His hunger is satisfied both literally and metaphorically. And again, he pronounces his camp "good." Later, Nick again asserts that there "were plenty of good places to camp on the river. But this was good."
Hemingway presents a moving picture of Nick making camp with meticulous, detailed descriptions that add a methodical, ritualized dimension. It is this solitary, repetitive, methodical action of making camp that frees Nick's mind from stress, bad memories, and the cares of the world. It is a moving meditation unto itself, providing Nick with a mind-numbing and pain-relieving sense of calm and relaxation. Nick's own moving meditation here in the woods is no different from the traditional Eastern image of the spiritual seeker who sits on a mountaintop, chanting "om" and other mantras while in deep meditation.
Thought and grief are inexorably linked in Nick's mind now, and this moving meditation heals him.
Nick then turns his focus on making camp coffee; he remembers a guy named Hopkins, who considered himself an expert on making camp coffee. We know no more about this person than is presented in this single paragraph, but the mood of the paragraph invokes a sense of "long ago," in stark contrast to the very vivid "now" that Nick is creating for himself. Then, long ago, Nick and Bill and Hopkins were young and joyous, carefree, and dreamily optimistic. Their youthful days of irresponsibility were broken, however, when Hopkins received a telegram informing him that he was suddenly very rich; back in Texas, his first big oil well had hit pay dirt. Hopkins immediately promised his two buddies that he'd take them sailing on the yacht that he was going to buy. Nick never heard from Hopkins again.
The implication is that Hopkins was swallowed by the world of money and materialism and forgot about such basic values as friendship. Similarly, Nick once believed in the glory of war and was almost killed by the machines of war, yet he survived and has come "home" to nature to restore his physical and mental health.
The dinner and the ritualistic way Nick drinks his coffee in the "Hopkins" manner put Nick back in touch with past friends and associations that bring back some good memories.
The last two paragraphs of Part I conclude with Nick's preparation for sleep, as he crawls into his tent and feels sleep coming. This concludes the first of two major, over-arching themes in the story: the period of recollection for Nick, as it encompasses the war, good memories prior to the war, and connects Nick to Nature itself. Nature is a living, breathing, presence that Nick merges with to move beyond stress and ill health back to good health and creativity. It is a quiet and peaceful break that firmly cements the first theme before Nick enters into the world of the river and fishing in Part II.
Glossary
burnt timber The reference is to the forest fire that destroyed vast acres of woodland, as well as the town of Seney, Michigan.
convex having a surface that bulges outward.
cinders burned remains.
jack pines North American evergreens with soft wood and short, twisted needles.
swale a slightly lower tract of land either created or caused by running water.
cheesecloth coarsely, loosely woven gauze.
Map
The northern peninsula of Michigan is the setting for many of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories: "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The End of Something," "The Three-Day Blow," and Parts I and II of "Big Two-Hearted River." This country was intensely familiar to Hemingway; he grew up fishing, hunting, hiking, and camping along the rivers and in the woods and hills of this region.
Horton Bay, in "The End of Something," is referred to as Hortons Bay; today, the once-burned-out town of Seney has been rebuilt. In "The Three-Day Blow," Bill tells Nick Adams that had Nick continued dating Marjorie, he would not be drinking scotch with Bill in the cabin; he'd be living a boring, middle-class life with Marjorie in Charlevoix; Nick reluctantly agrees.
After Nick is wounded, physically and psychologically, during his stint as a soldier in Italy during World War I, he returns to the woods of northern Michigan and camps along the Two-Hearted River, fishing for trout and slowly restoring serenity and peace to his broken mind and emotions.
Hemingway's father had a summer cabin, Windemere, here in the northern peninsula; it was along the streams and rivers, where they fished and camped, that Dr. Hemingway taught his son the skills and codes of life — especially living outdoors, independently, on one's own.
Hemingway recounts in precise detail Nick's rituals of preparation for fishing before he wades into the river. He successfully catches two trout and begins to gather sufficient courage so that in the days ahead, he can easily fish across the river, in the dark swamp, a symbol of Nick's fears and uncertainties. Clearly, Nick's recovery from the trauma of war has already begun, and readers finish this story with a sense of hope.
Analysis
This section presents Nick's preparations for fishing and his actual wading into the river to fish for trout and examines his accompanying emotions and reactions. Every detail, every action, is understated. Hemingway describes no grandiose epiphanies. The river is the central element in this section, as Nick is constantly in the river, following the river, and looking to the swamp at the end of the river. The river is a consistent thread here that parallels Nick's subconscious and the memories contained therein.
First, Nick must have some bait. He is surrounded by grasshoppers, and luckily, they are sluggish this early in the morning because of the heavy dew. Nick gets an empty bottle and collects enough bait for the entire day; he knows that he can get all the "hoppers" he needs each morning of each day for the rest of his stay in the woods. It is important here to note the contrast between the grasshoppers in Part I, which were black and covered with soot, and these grasshoppers, which are nestled in the grass amongst the drops of dew, waiting for the sun. If the river is Nick's subconscious, then the grasshoppers represent the mundane, methodical camping tasks that are calming to Nick and enable him to dip into his subconscious without fear, much like the kingfisher in Part I.
Nick retrieves his fishing rod from the leather rod case and prepares the leader line, the gut line, and the hook, and tests them: "It was a good feeling."
All preparations completed, Nick is ready to enter the water. As he leaves camp, he feels "awkward" but "professionally happy" with all of his paraphernalia hanging from him: His sandwiches are in his two front pockets; his bottle of grasshoppers is hanging around his neck; his landing net is hanging from a hook in his belt; a long flour sack is tied round his shoulder (this will hold the trout that he catches); his "fly book" is in one of his pockets; and he is carrying his fly rod.
Nick's first catch is too small, so he removes the hook and throws it back. Note that before he touches the trout, he wets his hand because he knows that "if a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot." This kind of knowledge emphasizes again that Nick is an expert in this type of fishing; readers respect him. However, it also indicates something deeper: Nick has a specific code of fishing that separates him from other fishermen. It places Nick into a select, morally "higher" group that respects the fish and Nature. This totally integrates Nick with the fish and Nature itself.
Nick then rebaits his hook and, this time, spits on it for good luck, a typical thing for an experienced fisherman to do. This time, and it does not take long, he hooks an enormous trout: When it leaps high out of the water, Nick is overcome because he has never seen such a large trout, but then "tragedy" strikes: The leader line breaks, and the trout escapes.
Nick's hand is shaking. He slowly reels in his empty hook. He vaguely feels a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.
These details illustrate Hemingway's belief that if people — men, in particular — give in to their emotions, they are in danger of losing everything. For Nick, the thrill of hooking this large trout is overwhelming. Some may also surmise that the trout represent happy memories, and that this big trophy trout that gets away is a symbol for a memory that made Nick very happy but didn't come to fruition for whatever reason. The emotional investment in something that makes him happy that he ultimately can't connect with again at this point in his recovery is a sickening disappointment to him, especially because it's his fault. However, after the jarring experience of war, Nick must expect to "lose a few" at first during his journey into his own river of recovery.
After he rests and smokes, Nick rebaits, and this time, upon reentering the river, he works his rod carefully. He catches a good-sized trout, and note that he says that it was "good" to hold — he had "one good trout." Nick catches another, but for the second time, the trout gets away, although this time, it isn't Nick's fault. The fish dives into heavy underbrush.
Almost immediately, Nick has another strike, and after some struggling, he brings this trout into his net. Nick then spreads the "mouth of the sack and [looks] down at the two big trout alive in the water." He concludes that they are good trout.
After Nick eats his sandwiches, he sits and watches the river; then he kills and dresses the two trout. Both are males because each is exuding "milt," a substance found only in male fish. Nick returns to camp completely satisfied and looks forward to the days to come when he will fish the swampy areas, as he steadily moved downstream into deeper water today.
Nick's steady progress downstream into deeper water leads him to reach a point in the river that intersects the present moment: His wish for something to read. This return to thinking and cerebral pursuits indicates a mental rejuvenation. It isn't a total rejuvenation, because Nick has yet to fish in the swamp, but it is a rejuvenation that indicates to the reader that Nick's recovery is well underway.
Another signpost of Nick's progress in recovery is his emotional reaction to swamp fishing. The swamp is a deep, dark place at the end of the river covered by cedar branches. It is a dangerous place to fish because of the muck on the bottom and the fast, deep water that sometimes has whirlpools that take anything in the water down with it. It is here that the really big trout seek the shade and cool water, and it is here that Nick reacts to it: first, by concluding that he won't do it just yet, and second, that it is "tragic," which is an emotionally charged description. The swamp can be seen as the dark, sooty place in Nick's subconscious where the war and all of the bad memories from it reside. For Nick, this swamp (and swamp fishing) is the final frontier of healing and transmutating the war experience. It is no surprise that he concludes that he will try it another time, without any reference to a timetable or a goal for doing it. He is satisfied with his present progress, and he'll simply do it when it occurs to him that he is ready.
After having followed Nick through his two days in the woods by the river, readers are filled with confidence that Nick is a survivor and that he will be able to put all of the horrors of the war behind and find a suitable niche in life.
Glossary
condensed milk canned milk.
a fly an artificial fishing lure, often resembling an insect.
leaders lengths of wire or gut or nylon connecting hooks to fishing lines.
milt fish sperm, along with seminal fluid.
offal intestines or waste parts of butchered fish.
