Anyone who has ever sat on a riverbank knows that fishing is rarely about fish. John B. Colwell's "I Went to Fish" takes this open secret and turns it into a small, cheerful lesson in attention. A man heads to a favorite spot to catch his dinner, forgets his errand, and comes home with something he values more. The poem's central idea is announced in its capitalized words: the PAST slips away and the NOW takes over. Present-moment awareness, the poem argues, is a gift that is always on offer and costs nothing.
The opening stanza sets the scene with unhurried confidence. "A place I know" suggests a habit, a spot returned to again and again, and the stream that "winds languidly to and fro" does what the line itself does, drifting along on its long, loose rhythm. The images are specific and painterly: a red-bud "adorned in pink" and willows "fringing the brink." The word "adorned" dresses the tree like a guest at a party, while "fringed" makes the willows a kind of decorative border, as though the stream were a framed picture. Nature is presented as a place that has been prepared for the visitor.
Sound takes over in the second stanza, and here Colwell is at his most playful. The mourning dove's "plaint" blends with the "jubilant notes" of a thrasher, and the verb "coalesced" is a surprisingly scientific, even chemical, choice for birdsong; it suggests two very different moods fusing into one. Then comes the parenthetical aside, "(Such a ribald air has the thrasher's note!)", which breaks the calm like a grin. The brackets make it feel like the speaker muttering to himself, and "ribald" gives the bird a cheeky, almost bawdy personality. It is a good reminder that the poem's peace is not solemn. It is warm and a little funny.
Formally, the poem is built from rhyming couplets (brink/pink, above/dove, lure/pure), which gives it a steady, singsong ease. The lines are loosely anapestic, with extra unstressed syllables that bounce the reader along, and some of them run long, so the meter never feels rigid. Light verse of this kind is easy to dismiss, but the looseness suits the subject. A tightly clipped, anxious meter would fight the poem's message about letting go.
The third stanza is the turning point. The air "softly fanned my careworn brow" is the only moment where we glimpse the speaker's burdens, and the word "careworn" is enough to hint at a life of worry without explaining it. Then the capital letters arrive: "The PAST slipped by and I lived in the NOW." Typographically, this is the loudest line in the poem, and it is the thesis. The shouting capitals are a little ironic, since the message is about quiet, but they mark the moment of transformation clearly.
The fourth stanza steps back from the scene and speaks to the reader directly. The first-person "I" becomes "we," and the experience becomes a general principle. Daily life is "hum-drum," and the NOW is "spice" for it, a homely kitchen metaphor that keeps the moral from sounding grand. Cares "dissolve and are set adrift," like a boat cast loose onto the same lazy stream. The conditional, "if we but heed the proffered gift," places the responsibility on us: the gift is there, but we have to notice it.
The final stanza delivers the joke and the revelation together. The question "Did I catch the fish I went to get?" is answered with comic bluntness: "Not a one did I snare. All are swimming yet." The fish keep their freedom, and the fisherman seems content with that. Then the tone shifts. "The Unknown spoke His soothing words / To my open heart, through the mouths of birds." The capitalized "Unknown" and "His" give the experience a spiritual dimension, and the image of birds as mouths for a divine voice neatly connects back to the songs of the second stanza. The poem judges the outing a success by a different measure entirely. The speaker went out wanting to catch something and instead was caught by something, by a moment of attention he did not plan.
That reversal is what makes the poem worth reading. It is modest and unpretentious, but it makes a surprisingly durable point: the things we chase are often not the things that feed us.