Perch

media type="custom" key="2088233" This seemingly simple poem shows how the perch lives up to its name - keeping its place while the river and everything else moves past or around it. Heaney uses the metaphor of “holding the pass” (like soldiers defending a strongpoint) to show how the perch remain unmoved. They may seem to sleep, as they are “adoze” (=//dozing//; Heaney makes up the word which is like //__a__sleep, __a__live// and //__a__drift// in its form) but they rely on their “muscle” to guzzle the current. We see the fish from the human viewpoint, looking down into the clear river, but also from their own viewpoint - “under the water-roof”. The metaphor here, like a riddle, is of a kind popular in Old English poetry; it is called a //kenning// (Old English examples include “helmet-bearer” for “warrior” and “whale-road” for the sea). Heaney says of this poem:

“...these perch, although they are actually in the river, they are very much in a kind of fifty-five year old memory lake of my own...I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just as an element it is full of life. It is associated with origin, it is bright, it reflects you.” The poem has a simple form - five couplets with half-rhyme (assonance rhyme, which uses a different vowel sound in each rhyme word). The metre is mostly anapaestic, with some iambic feet, especially at the ends of the lines - this works because the stress falls on the last syllable, whether of two or three. The pattern is also varied at the start of some lines, which open with a stressed syllable - “//Perch//”, “//Near//” and “//Guzz//ling”. (In terms of the metre this syllable serves as a poetic foot on its own.) The poem is striking for the number of monosyllabic words the poet uses, and for groups of words with the same vowel: “gr//u//nts...sl//u//bs...r//u//nty”. Heaney also indulges in wordplay - the two senses of “perch” in the first line and the pun on “finland” (not to be confused with the country of “Finland”) which is echoed by “fenland”.


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