Winter has arrived, and a fisherman has nothing to do but remember. That is the quiet drama of "Fishin' Days Are Gone." John B. Colwell builds a short, three-stanza poem around a simple turn: the speaker looks at a bare November landscape, drifts into a memory of a good catch, then snaps back to the cold and begs for spring. Nothing dramatic happens. And yet the poem holds a whole mood, the restlessness of someone whose favorite pastime has been shut down by the calendar.
The first stanza is an inventory of absence. The leaves have fallen, the limbs are bare, the cricket's chirp "is stilled along the shore." Colwell is careful with sound here. A summer shoreline would have been noisy with insects, and the poem registers the season mostly through what can no longer be heard. The two remaining animals are busy in their own ways: a crow "sails in the chilly air" and a squirrel "hunts his winter store." Notice the pairing of "Above" and "Below," a tidy structural gesture that places the speaker between them, earthbound and empty-handed while even the squirrel gets on with the work of the season. The crow is called "lustrous," a small touch of glossy black against a gray sky, and the squirrel is "frisky," a word that feels almost mocking next to the speaker's idleness.
The second stanza is where the poem comes alive. "Before me lies the creek I know so well," the speaker says, and the dash that follows opens a litany of intimate detail: "Each hole, its every pile of drift, its snags." This is how a fisherman really knows water, not as scenery but as a map of hiding places. Then comes the poem's liveliest moment: "Just here I caught that two pound 'cat'!" The quotation marks around "cat" (presumably a catfish, judging by the context) and the exclamation point make the speaker sound like he is telling the story aloud, finger pointing at the exact spot. The parenthetical that follows is even more revealing. The line is deliberately stretched out, and the speaker admits, "I love to dwell / Upon the mem'ries of the days I made GOOD bags." The capitalized "GOOD" is pure boast, a little burst of pride the speaker cannot resist. It is a sympathetic, human detail: the cold season has turned him into someone who relives his triumphs because he cannot repeat them.
Formally, the poem is looser than it first appears. The rhyme scheme is ABAB in each stanza ("bare / shore / air / store"; "well / snags / dwell / bags"; "bare / edge / rare / hedge"), a plain alternating pattern that suits the plain-spoken subject. The lines run long, closer to a loose iambic hexameter than to a tight pentameter, and the pacing wobbles on purpose in places. The second stanza's third line sprawls and has to spill into an indented continuation, as though the speaker's excitement is too big for the line. The slightly folksy touches, such as "Fishin'" in the title and the elided "mem'ries," reinforce a voice that is conversational rather than literary.
The final stanza returns to the opening image, "the leaves are gone and limbs are bare," but now with the word "But" and a new detail: "icy needles skirt the water's edge." The ice forming along the bank is more than scenery; it is the physical barrier that ends the fishing season, creeping in on the very creek the speaker loves. The poem then pivots into pleading: "Oh, speed the time of dogwood bloom, of odors rare, / When green comes once again to osage hedge!" The imagery shifts from sight and sound to scent and color, and the speaker's longing becomes almost sensory. The specific plants, dogwood and osage hedge, ground the wish in a particular landscape rather than a generic "spring."
What makes the poem worth reading is exactly this modesty. It does not claim that nature teaches a grand lesson. It captures something many people recognize: the ache of a favorite activity put on hold, and the way memory fills the gap. The title announces a loss, but the poem's real subject is hope, because every detail of the remembered creek is also a promise that the fishing, like the green hedge, will return.