Mary F. C. Pratt's "Whale" begins with three technical terms: "Logging, spy-hopping, bubble-netting." They are names for what a whale does. Logging is resting at the surface, spy-hopping is lifting the head straight up out of the water to look around, and bubble-netting is trapping fish in a spiral of bubbles. Starting with the jargon of whale-watchers gives the poem an observer's authority. By the end, though, it has moved from watching a living animal to picking over a dead one, and that shift carries its central idea. A whale's life is largely hidden and unknowable to us, and only in death does it become something we can touch, handle and describe.
The first half insists on that mystery. The speaker can see the "breath clouds" and the "humpy back," but the whale "sound[s]," dives out of sight, and its "mysterious love affairs" and "great hungers" are named without being explained. The phrase "You sing where we cannot go" draws the line plainly. The word "sound" may be doing double work here. As a verb it means to dive, and a few lines later the whale is singing. That is a reading rather than a certainty, but it fits a poem so interested in what happens beyond our sight and hearing.
Small, strange details keep the whale from being a postcard. The compound "flipper-legs" fuses two body plans, as if the creature were caught halfway between land and sea. The "tiny hipbones hidden" suggest a leftover from land-dwelling ancestors, and the raised flukes look "like splaying feet." The poem keeps pointing at the whale's resemblance to us, in its legs, hips and feet, while holding it at a distance. "Humpy" is an affectionate, almost childish word set against the huge animal, and it makes the speaker sound fond rather than awed from afar.
The poem is built from free verse with no rhyme. Its lines are short, usually two or three stresses, so they surface and sink like the whale itself. Sound does the binding that rhyme might have done: the soft b's in "breath clouds / blow in the bay" give the line a puffed, exhaled feel. The third stanza drops verbs altogether. "Your lunging, / great hungers, / mysterious love affairs" is a run of fragments, each one a glimpse, and then the stanza ends on a full sentence, "You sing where we cannot go." The whale is addressed as "you" throughout, which makes the speaker sound intimate, even though the content keeps admitting how little is known.
Then comes the poem's turning point, a stanza of one line: "You must be awake to breathe." It is bare and factual. Whales breathe by choice rather than by reflex, so they can never switch off completely, and the line also stands alone on the page. It works almost like a motto for living, with constant effort and no lapse, and it makes the stanza that follows hit harder, because a creature that had to stay awake to stay alive is now lying still.
That final stanza has no true verb: "Your carcass once / on a stony beach." The sentence trails off, and what remains is a list. The whale becomes "Baleen fabric, skull bone cave, / the long purple leather of your skin." These metaphors turn the body into cloth, architecture and clothing, the things humans make. The "skull bone cave" is especially sharp. Earlier we "cannot go" where the whale sings, but now we can walk inside its head. Access has come only after the life has gone. The colour "purple" adds a note of beauty, so the poem does not turn the carcass into something merely grim.
What makes "Whale" worth reading is how much it holds in so few lines. It never lectures about conservation or loss, though a reader may feel both. It lets precise vocabulary, a single stark sentence and a sudden change of tense do the arguing. The poem is dated August 2004, but its concerns are lasting ones: how we look at wild creatures, what we cannot know about them, and how quickly mystery becomes material once it is dead.