The Last Cast: The Angler’s Apology
Just one cast more! how many a year
Beside how many a pool and stream,
Beneath the falling leaves and sere,
I’ve sighed, reeled up, and dreamed my dream!
Dreamed of the sport since April first
Her hands fulfilled of flowers and snow,
Adown the pastoral valleys burst
Where Ettrick and where Teviot flow.
Dreamed of the singing showers that break,
And sting the lochs, or near or far,
And rouse the trout, and stir “the take”
From Urigil to Lochinvar.
Dreamed of the kind propitious sky
O’er Ari Innes brooding grey;
The sea trout, rushing at the fly,
Breaks the black wave with sudden spray!
* * * * *
Brief are man’s days at best; perchance
I waste my own, who have not seen
The castled palaces of France
Shine on the Loire in summer green.
And clear and fleet Eurotas still,
You tell me, laves his reedy shore,
And flows beneath his fabled hill
Where Dian drave the chase of yore.
And “like a horse unbroken” yet
The yellow stream with rush and foam,
’Neath tower, and bridge, and parapet,
Girdles his ancient mistress, Rome!
I may not see them, but I doubt
If seen I’d find them half so fair
As ripples of the rising trout
That feed beneath the elms of Yair.
Nay, Spring I’d meet by Tweed or Ail,
And Summer by Loch Assynt’s deep,
And Autumn in that lonely vale
Where wedded Avons westward sweep,
Or where, amid the empty fields,
Among the bracken of the glen,
Her yellow wreath October yields,
To crown the crystal brows of Ken.
Unseen, Eurotas, southward steal,
Unknown, Alpheus, westward glide,
You never heard the ringing reel,
The music of the water side!
Though Gods have walked your woods among,
Though nymphs have fled your banks along;
You speak not that familiar tongue
Tweed murmurs like my cradle song.
My cradle song,—nor other hymn
I’d choose, nor gentler requiem dear
Than Tweed’s, that through death’s twilight dim,
Mourned in the latest Minstrel’s ear!
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