Most of us have stood at a window and wanted what was behind it. John B. Colwell's "Transmigration" begins that way, with a man pausing before a shop of fishing tackle, but it quickly turns the familiar moment inside out. He starts by looking at the glass and ends by looking through it, into a place that is not in the shop at all. The poem is about the way a longing, or a happy memory, can overwrite the present so completely that the cold street simply drops away.
The title is the key to the whole thing. "Transmigration" usually describes a soul passing from one body into another, and Colwell borrows that grand word for something small and affectionate: a fisherman's mind slipping out of a winter street and into a summer boat. Nothing in the poem tells us the speaker is a philosopher. The word is gently comic, a little too big for the occasion, and that mismatch is part of the charm. It also makes a quiet claim, that imagination can carry a person somewhere just as truly as travel can.
The structure follows the journey exactly. Each of the three stanzas is a stage. In the first, the speaker is firmly in the shop window, and the language is a catalogue: "rods, hooks, lines and reels; / The painted lures; the canvas creels." The list is pleasingly concrete, all hard nouns and bright surfaces, and even the "landing net / As yet unwet" hints at what the objects are really for. That unused net is the first crack in the glass, a small reminder that tackle only means something once it meets water.
The second stanza makes the break. "But, as I gaze, these disappear" is the hinge of the poem, and what replaces the display is specific and tender: "some pines — a rocky shore — / A little baylet I adore." The dashes feel like the mind catching sight of things one at a time. "Baylet" is a delightful word, a diminutive that sounds half invented, and it tells us how the speaker feels about the place, as something small enough to hold fondly. The boat is "E'en now afloat," and the phrase carries the poem's trick in miniature: "E'en now" insists the scene is happening in the present, even though it can only be a memory.
The final stanza completes the exchange of seasons. The speaker admits "wind be chill" and mentions "slush and snow," but dismisses them with a shrug: "Why should I care?" His heart is "warm with thrill," and it is "mem'ry's glow" that does the work. Notice how temperature carries the emotion here. Cold belongs to the real street, warmth to the remembered lake, and the speaker chooses warmth. The closing phrase, "where big ones grow," is wonderfully human. After all the lovely pines and rocking wavelets, the real prize is the fisherman's hope of a large catch, and the poem is honest enough, and funny enough, to say so.
The sound of the poem supports its slightly playful mood. The rhymes are tidy and audible, and the poem keeps repeating the sounds of its ending lines (shop/stop, shore/adore, glow/grow), giving it the easy bounce of a song. The line lengths vary, with short, indented lines such as "A fishing boat" and "With me away" set against longer ones, so that the stanzas seem to rock slightly, much like the boat they describe. The poet also uses small contractions like "E'en" and "mem'ry," in the old-fashioned manner of poets keeping a line to its beat, which gives the verse a gentle, slightly dated courtesy.
What makes the poem worth reading is its modesty and its accuracy. It does not pretend that daydreaming solves anything; the speaker is still standing in the snow at the end. But it captures, in a few light stanzas, something true about how memory works: that a single object can open an entire summer, and that the happiest places are sometimes the ones we visit while standing perfectly still.