The word "Resurrection" usually brings to mind something solemn, so it's a surprise to find it sitting over a poem about digging worms. That gap between the grand title and the humble subject is where John B. Colwell's poem gets its charm. Nothing here rises from a tomb except a man's appetite for a day on the water, but the poem treats that revival with real feeling, and a little humor.
The structure is a tidy two-part story told in two eight-line stanzas. The first looks back to "last fall," when the speaker packs away his fishing gear; the second jumps to "today," when the gear speaks up and spring takes over. The poem is basically a before and after, and the shift in tense, from the past of "I just took my fishin' poles" to the present of "I'm digging worms," makes the change feel sudden. Winter happens in the gap between the stanzas, and the poem never describes it. We only see its beginning and its end.
The first stanza is built on waiting. The autumn wind "swirled the dead leaves in the wood" and makes "eerie squeals" in the flue, a small and rather spooky detail that gives the cold season some personality. Yet the speaker isn't gloomy about it. He stows the poles "on the proper nails," a phrase that shows how orderly and affectionate this ritual is; there is a right place for everything. The stanza closes on the hope that spring will "stir our souls / And make us yearn for well loved trails." Notice the "our": this is not only one man's private pastime but something shared, perhaps with family or fishing companions.
The second stanza answers the first almost line for line. In place of dead leaves, we get a flicker (a kind of woodpecker) that "yammers from his tree," and instead of shrieking winds, "a soft breeze keeps the willows swishin'." The sounds are livelier and friendlier, and "yammers" is a funny, chatty verb for a bird, as if the whole landscape were gossiping about the change of season. Most striking is the moment when the fishing poles "spoke to me." The objects hanging on the garage wall come alive and call him, which is the poem's quiet version of the title's miracle. The desire "that had been dead since fall" is what is resurrected, and the vocabulary of death ("dead leaves," "dead since fall") from the first stanza is set against the vocabulary of waking ("awoke," "stir").
The sound of the poem matches its casual voice. The meter is a loose, bouncy line of about four beats, close to ordinary speech, and the rhyme scheme moves in a pattern that is not perfectly regular but always lands comfortably: "woods/good," "nails/trails," "wall/fall." The apostrophes in "fishin'" and "swishin'" mark a relaxed, spoken dialect, and the rhyme of "swishin'" with "fishin'" is a small pleasure, the kind of rhyme that seems to arrive by itself. Even the repeated "me" in "spoke to me" and "awoke in me" ties the two halves of the stanza together, making the awakening feel personal and inward.
The last two lines carry the poem's punchline. "My office would a prison be: / I'm digging worms to go a fishin'!" The office is the opposite of the willows and the breeze, and calling it a prison is both an exaggeration and an honest confession. The exclamation mark seals it: there is no more debate, only action. The speaker's joy is so complete that it spills out as an instant decision, abandoning duty for the riverbank.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it turns a small, ordinary pleasure into something that matters. It doesn't pretend that fishing is profound; it simply trusts that the feeling of longing and release is universal, whatever our own version of "fishin'" might be. The title's big word and the poem's small subject work together, and the result is a gentle reminder that coming back to life can be as simple as the sight of a rod on a garage wall.