Not that it comes up often, but when people ask if I believe in an afterlife, I quote Woody Allen’s Dostoievsky/Tolstoy pastiche Love and Death. “What happens after we die? Is there a hell? Do we live again? All right. Let me ask one key question. Are there girls?”
This morning, however, I woke up to steady rain that hasn’t stopped all night, and a line came to mind from the poet Rupert Brooke, a favourite of my adolescence; his Collected Poems was the first book I remember buying for myself. At twelve, and in a Catholic phrase, his irreverent take on the topic read as blasphemous, but I got over it - and Catholicism - soon after. Needless to say, girls played a part.
Here is the poem, in case you don’t know it. It’s called Heaven.
Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! – Death eddies near –
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! Never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
As a PS, I thought to include an example of it being read, but found only one version that captures anything of the poem’s irony.
As for the rest, the worst by a country mile has to be Anthony Quinn reading…no: more devouring it to a painfully inappropriate musical accompaniment on The Ed Sullivan Show.
What a cheeky and relatable fishy poem.