E.J. Pratt: The Shark

He seemed to know the harbour,

So leisurely he swam;

His fin,

Like a piece of sheet-iron,

Three-cornered,

And with knife edge,

Stirred not a bubble

As it moved

With its base-line on the water.

His body was tubular

And tapered

And smoke-blue,

And as he passed the wharf

He turned,

And snapped at a flat-fish

That was dead and floating.

And I saw the flash of a white throat,

And a double row of white teeth,

And eyes of metallic grey,

Hard and narrow and slit.

Then out of the harbour,

With that three-cornered fin

Shearing without a bubble the water

Lithely,

Leisurely

He swam –

That strange fish,

Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue,

Part vulture, part wolf,

Part neither – for his blood was cold.

Dated January 1923. Pratt’s best-known animal poem is “Sea-Gulls”; it’s perhaps understandable that a shark poem wouldn’t circulate as widely. Here the technical assurance in the depiction of the animal and its movement is complete: the poet is in perfect control, at least until the slightly too pat final line. While modernists were having parties and breakdowns in London and New York, up in Canada an ex-Methodist minister from Newfoundland was producing poetry as good as theirs.