The Full Text of “Fisherman's Song”
The Full Text of “Fisherman's Song”
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“Fisherman's Song” Introduction
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"Fisherman's Song" is Kayo Chingonyi's nightmarish meditation on human suffering—and, more particularly, the suffering and death occasioned by the 21st-century migrant crisis. The poem follows a fisherman who hauls up what at first seem to be "strange, underwater blooms" in his nets. Those eerie flowers at last reveal themselves to be "clumps of matted human hair" floating loose from drowned bodies. (This scene is all too real. Thousands of migrants have attempted to reach Europe and the UK from Africa and the Middle East, traveling in small, overcrowded, unsafe boats. And thousands have drowned and been discovered in just this way.) Traumatized by what he's seen, the fisherman no longer feels able to comfort his children through their nightmares: the world, the poem suggests, is just as scary as the children think it is, and there's no guarantee of safety for anyone. Chingonyi first published this poem in his 2017 collection Kumukanda.
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“Fisherman's Song” Summary
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How sad it is for a fisherman to go out to sea and discover (among his nets that sink down deep into the water) a mass of mysterious underwater flowers—things that at first seem to be seaweed. But when he looks at them up close, he discovers that they're really clots of human hair floating above a stinking soup.
And what song can this fisherman (who loves cheerful tunes) sing to soothe his kids when, in the darkness of their room, they feel as if the night has become a monster that only their father's voice can calm? And who can help to calm the fisherman who goes out to sea?
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“Fisherman's Song” Themes
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The Terror and Inescapability of Human Suffering
In "Fisherman's Song," Kayo Chingonyi tells the disturbing tale of a fisherman who goes out to sea and pulls up drowned and rotten human bodies in his nets. Traumatized by what he's seen, he finds that he can no longer sing a "jaunty tune" to "lullaby his children" through their nightmares. He knows, now, that nightmares are all too real. The poem's picture of a father's confrontation with violent death suggests that security is always an illusion: there's no way to ensure the safety of oneself or one's children in a dangerous and uncertain world.
Horror dawns on the fisherman slowly when he hauls in his nets and sees something unusual tangled in them. At first, he imagines that he's just seeing "strange, underwater blooms," seaweed maybe. Then he realizes that he has in fact dredged up "clumps of matted human hair / atop an acrid soup" of rotting flesh. The visceral awfulness of this image makes it clear that the people he has found died in a terrible and accidental way. Nobody would want this kind of death.
When the fisherman's children later want him to sing them a lullaby to distract them from "dark shapes in their room" at night, then, he finds himself in a painful predicament, unable to distract himself from the "dark shapes" he saw in the water earlier that day. Confronting death in one of its worst and darkest guises makes him all too aware that there's no guaranteed security in the world, whether for himself or for his children. Far from being able to "soothe" his children, he finds himself longing for someone to soothe his own fears. But ultimately, no such solace can be found.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-16
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The Horrors of the 21st-Century Migrant Crisis
"Fisherman's Song" can be read as a reflection on a contemporary crisis: the deaths of thousands of migrants from Africa and the Middle East during their attempts to come to Europe in small, unsafe boats. The story of a fisherman pulling up drowned bodies in his nets could, sadly, be pulled straight from the headlines. Though Chingonyi never explicitly describes the drowned bodies as those of migrants, he doesn't need to: the stories of these desperate people's deaths are both notorious and horribly common. By drawing a parallel between the fisherman and the drowned migrants, the poem suggests that a world that's cruel and unjust to some is cruel and unjust to all. The fisherman sees himself and his children reflected in the murky waters in which the bodies float.
Chingonyi presents the drowned bodies the fisherman discovers in a grim, visceral, and unsentimental way. Rotting in the water, they have become nothing more than "clumps of matted human hair / atop an acrid soup": a nightmarish mess made from what was once human. This sight naturally leaves the fisherman deeply disturbed—not just because of this vision of horror and suffering, but because he can see himself in the remains. He goes out to "navigate the blue" in his boat just as these drowned people went out in a little boat to navigate their way to a better life. And he wants to "soothe" and protect his children, just as these people might have wanted to soothe and protect theirs.
The poem thus invites readers to stand alongside the fisherman, empathizing with him as he empathizes with the dead. A world that drives migrants to these desperate, dangerous voyages is a world that breeds nightmares.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-16
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Fisherman's Song”
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Lines 1-5
What sadness ...
... first, like bladderwrackThe first words of "Fisherman's Song" are spoken in the sympathetic voice of a narrator, who describes the fisherman of the title:
What sadness for a fisherman
to navigate the blueThese words might invite readers to settle in for something like a folk song or a fairy tale. The main character here is presented simply as "a fisherman," an archetypal, everyman sort of person. And when he goes fishing, he "navigate[s] the blue," in a moment of vivid metonymy that makes his sailing feel timeless and placeless. This isn't the Mediterranean or the Atlantic: it's just the "blue."
The poem's shape helps to create a fairy-tale feeling, too. These lines use a traditional folksong shape: common meter (also known as ballad meter). That means that the poem alternates between:
- lines of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "and find | a mong | rece- | ding nets")
- and lines of iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs, as in "to nav- | igate | the blue")
Everything here seems like it's part of a dreamy old song, then—maybe the kind of song a fisherman might sing.
And at first, the sources of the fisherman's mysterious "sadness" feel dreamlike, too. His sorrow arises when he looks down into his "receding nets" (imagery that evokes the way objects seem to fade away as they descend into deep water) and sees something mysterious. Floating amidst his nets, he finds what appear to be "strange, underwater blooms"—flowers he at first believes might be "bladderwrack," a kind of seaweed. The horrible reality, alas, will be quite different.
Even before he reveals the identity of those "underwater blooms," Kayo Chingonyi suggests that something is wrong through his understatedly ominous language. Readers know from the start that what the fisherman finds in his nets will bring him "sadness." And they know from the word "strange" that there's something not quite normal, not quite right about those "underwater blooms." The metaphor of these objects as "blooms," blossoms, makes this situation feel even creepier: this is a word typically associated with pleasant scents, springtime, liveliness. These associations are about to become horribly ironic.
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Lines 6-8
but from a ...
... an acrid soup. -
Lines 9-14
...
... voice can soothe -
Lines 15-16
...
... navigates the blue?
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“Fisherman's Song” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
"Fisherman's Song" uses a simple poetic form that suggests a folk song, a ballad, or a lullaby. Against the backdrop of that earthy shape, the poem's precise, careful imagery stands out sharply—and horrifically.
The first image the poem gives readers is of a fisherman looking down into the "blue" (a metonym for the sea) into his "receding nets." This image gracefully evokes the depth of the ocean and the scale of the nets: they appear to recede (or fade away) as they sink deeper and deeper into the water.
Among these nets, the speaker says, the fisherman notices what he at first imagines is just "bladderwrack" (a type of seaweed). But taking a "closer view," he makes a terrible discovery. What seemed to be "strange, underwater blooms" are in fact "clumps of matted human hair." The imagery here is horrifically precise. The hair isn't loose and floating; it's clotted together, "matted," made into awful wet lumps. It has also clearly come loose from the heads upon which it grew, suggesting that the people it belonged to have been dead and rotting in the sea for some while.
Intensifying that idea is the image of the "acrid soup" these clumps of hair are floating over. This foul-smelling stew is the discharge of the rotting human bodies that the hair came from. But, like a good horror director, the poem's speaker doesn't directly reveal these bodies. The awful "acrid soup" instead compels readers to guess at what the fisherman might see (and smell), forcing them to step (unwillingly) into his shoes.
There's a similar terrible and suggestive vagueness in the imagery of the second stanza, where the speaker describes the fisherman's children getting scared of "dark shapes in their room," which make the night seem to transform into a "snarling monster." The mysterious "dark shapes" here suggest the way that ordinary chairs and curtains look to a scared child in the night. But they also hint horribly at the "dark shapes" the fisherman might have seen down in the water, drawing a parallel between what the kids can only imagine and what the fisherman has seen with his own eyes.
Where imagery appears in the poem:- Line 3: “receding nets”
- Lines 7-8: “clumps of matted human hair / atop an acrid soup.”
- Lines 12-13: “when dark shapes in their room / make the night a snarling monster”
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Metaphor
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Rhetorical Question
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Repetition
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"Fisherman's Song" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Receding
- Bladderwrack
- Matted
- Acrid
- Jaunty
- Soothe
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(Location in poem: Line 3: “find among receding nets”)
Pulling away, diminishing, fading. (The image here is of fishing nets fading away as they descend deeper into the water.)
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Fisherman's Song”
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Form
"Fisherman's Song" uses a short, straightforward form. It's built from two eight-line stanzas written (mostly) in common meter—the traditional rhythm of ballads and hymns. (More on that in the Meter section of this guide.)
The poem's brevity and simplicity allow the central disturbing image—a fisherman pulling up pieces of drowned and rotting bodies in his nets—almost to tiptoe into the reader's imagination. Juxtaposed with a gentle singsong form, the poem's imagery feels even more shocking and horrific.
The simple shape Chingonyi chooses here might even suggest the kind of "jaunty tune" the poem's fisherman usually likes to sing to his children. With its swaying, lulling rhythm, the poem could almost be a "lullaby" itself, if one weren't listening too closely.
In giving his poem this shape, Chingonyi is tapping into the tradition of poets like Emily Dickinson and William Blake: writers who use an unassuming form to explore complex, mysterious, and sometimes terrifying ideas.
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Meter
"Fisherman's Song" is written, for the most part, in common meter (also known as ballad meter). That means that its lines alternate between:
- iambic tetrameter—lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "and find | among | rece- | ding nets"
- and iambic trimeter—lines of three iambs, as in "atop | an ac- | rid soup."
This is the earthy, simple rhythm of many folk songs and hymns (and of poems influenced by these traditional forms, like the works of Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth). It might even help this poem to sound like the kind of "lullaby" the fisherman likes to sing to his kids—if one weren't listening too closely to the horrifying words.
In the second stanza, however, the poem's meter changes and intensifies. Listen to what happens in lines 13-14:
make the | night a | snarling | monster
only | father’s | voice can | sootheThese lines are written in trochaic tetrameter: that is, they use four trochees in a row, the opposite foot to iambs, with a DUM-da rhythm. That stress-first pattern makes these lines feel tenser and fiercer, reflecting the children's fear (and the fisherman's).
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Rhyme Scheme
"Fisherman's Song" uses this deceptively simple rhyme scheme:
ABCBDBEB
But there's a complication here: all the rhymes are slant. In other words, the rhyme words aren't perfect matches (like, say, pains / drains). Instead, they're assonant, linked only by a shared /oo/ vowel sound: blue / blooms / view / soup in the first stanza, tune / room / soothe / blue in the second.
This pattern of rhymes feels just a bit uneasy: the sounds are never quite as readers might expect them to be. The rhyme scheme thus matches up with the fisherman's experience as he makes the horrific discovery that what he believes are "underwater blooms" are really "clumps of matted human hair."
It's also notable that the uniting sound here is a long /oo/—a sound that might equally suggest a moan of terror and a crooned lullaby.
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“Fisherman's Song” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a narrator who stands a little bit apart from the poem's action, describing an anonymous "fisherman" and the horrific discovery he makes when he pulls up his nets. The speaker seems to feel deep sympathy for this fisherman: reflecting on how he feels, they cry, "what sadness for a fisherman." Sometimes, they even look through his eyes. They know, for example, that the fisherman at first thinks that the "clumps of matted human hair" he finds in his nets are "bladderwrack" (a kind of seaweed). And they know that he's traumatized by his discovery, left in desperate need of someone to "soothe" his fears (and finding that nobody is there to offer that comfort).
Though the narrator is close to the fisherman and sympathizes with him, the little gap between them helps to give this poem its eerie tone. The speaker is, in a sense, as helpless as the fisherman is. The fisherman can only observe the aftermath of a terrible tragedy at sea; the speaker can only observe as the fisherman confronts this tragedy. In the face of some horrors, the poem's voice suggests, it's hard not to feel helpless and alone.
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“Fisherman's Song” Setting
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"Fisherman's Song" has two settings, both of them vague and dreamy:
- First, there's "the blue"—a vivid metonym for the sea. This is the fisherman's world, the landscape he "navigate[s]" every day. But readers don't learn which sea this is, or when the poem's events take place.
- Then, there's the fisherman's home, and more specifically the "room" his children share. Again, readers don't get any details about where the fisherman's home is or what the children's room is like.
Because the speaker doesn't give too many precise details, the poem's setting feels big and archetypal. The events, feelings, and fears this poem describes could take place in any fisherman's home and upon any sea.
However, the image of a fisherman pulling up dead bodies in his nets can't help but summon up current events in the UK (where Chingonyi lives) and in Europe. In recent years, migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Africa and the Middle East have increasingly made desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean Sea or the English Channel in small, unsafe boats. Many have drowned.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Fisherman's Song”
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Literary Context
Kayo Chingonyi (1987-present) is a Zambian-British poet. He came to the UK with his family as a small child and has since lived in London, Sheffield, and Durham. “Fisherman's Song” appeared in his first collection, Kumukanda (2017), which was awarded a Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, among other honors. The title poem of that collection explores a speaker’s feelings about a traditional Zambian coming-of-age ritual that he never experienced, and it serves as a good example of Chingonyi’s work: he often writes reflective (and sometimes semi-autobiographical) verse about identity, memory, and the power and meaning of art.
“Music is the first art form that moved me as a small child,” Chingonyi explains. Popular music, especially the elaborate rhymes and rhythms of rap, are a huge force in his poetic style as well as his themes. Of his influences, Chingonyi has said:
My work is always trying to achieve a balance between the written and oral traditions of literature, and so it makes sense to bring together traditional canonical poetic forms with forms which are a part of their own canon, to create a canon of my own.
"Fisherman's Song" reflects Chingonyi's interest in playing with the written poetic tradition. In its combination of a simple form, harrowing subject matter, and a watchful, removed narrative voice, the poem follows in the tradition of writers like Emily Dickinson and William Blake. Its reflections on the struggles and sufferings of immigrants might also put it in dialogue with poems like Dalit Nagra's "Look We Have Coming to Dover!"
Chingonyi, whose family emigrated to the UK from Zambia when he was a child, has a first-hand perspective on what it means to come to a new country (and how his own experience has affected his creative process). In an interview, he said:
It means that some of the experiences outside the mainstream can be written. There is a refreshing take or perspective on the world, as a result of the process of going to a new place and remaking a life there.
Chingonyi became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University.
Historical Context
This poem's vision of drowned bodies caught up in a fisherman's net is all too real and all too contemporary. Though Chingonyi never explicitly says so in this poem, the image evokes the kinds of headlines that have appeared across Europe for more than a decade: the stories of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Africa and the Middle East, only to drown attempting to cross the seas to Europe. Thousands of people have attempted this terrible journey, crowding into small, unsafe boats managed by unscrupulous smugglers. And according to a recent UN report, thousands have died on the way. Many of the dead are children.
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More “Fisherman's Song” Resources
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External Resources
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Chingonyi's Website — Visit Chingonyi's website to learn more about his work.
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An Interview with Chingonyi — Listen to an interview in which Chingonyi discusses his work.
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The Reality Behind the Poem — Read an article discussing the all-too-real stories that inform this poem: the drowning deaths of migrants from Africa and the Middle East attempting to reach Europe.
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Chingonyi's Influences — Read an article in which Chingonyi discusses some of his creative influences and his ideas about poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Kayo Chingonyi
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