The Full Text of “The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife”
The Full Text of “The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife”
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“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Introduction
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Sri Lankan poet Patrick Fernando's "The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife" is an elegy for a spouse and for a marriage. The speaker of this dramatic monologue is a wife grieving over her fisherman husband. Theirs was not a wild, passionate romance—they had an arranged marriage and were once terribly awkward with each other—but their relationship eventually blossomed into deep love. Now, losing her husband, the speaker feels as shocked and disoriented as if she'd lost her own hand. Profound married love, in this poem, is a force deeper and more serious than mere flighty passion could ever be. Fernando first collected this poem in his 1955 book The Return of Ulysses.
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“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Summary
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The poem's speaker addresses her husband, remembering the days when he wasn't even 30 yet, before he was deeply suntanned and getting grouchy and morbid like the older fishermen around him. Before those days, she remembers, he would hurry home across the ocean, loyal and swift as a seagull, to be with her.
Now that her husband is dead, the speaker goes on, she can tell their whole story without embarrassing anyone. So she admits: she and her husband didn't get married because they loved each other, or even because they were lonely. Rather, the older people of their village arranged their marriage. At first, her husband was impatient and nervous with her. The first time they went to bed together, she kept her eyes open all night, and shook with fear—equally scared that her new husband wouldn't want her and that he would.
For three months after that, she says, storms ravaged the sea, and her husband stayed home. The sky broke open like a shell and rains poured down. By the time the storms stopped, the gulls came back, and new buds opened on the flowering shrub, the speaker was pregnant.
When the speaker told her husband that she was going to have a baby, she went pale, and her voice was quiet. Her husband looked guilty, as if he didn't know whether to feel great or awful about this news; he just nodded at his feet and headed back out in his boat. Soon, though, the speaker meant more to him even than his religion, and certainly more than any other woman—and the speaker felt just the same way about him.
Now, men visit the speaker's house; some of them say that they understand what's happened. The children are all crying, and the littlest one just thinks their dad is sleeping. They're frightened and confused. The speaker tells her dead husband that he had become as much a part of her as her own hand; now, plain old grief isn't enough to soothe a pain that feels like having her arm chopped off.
Outside the house, the speaker notices, the wind is ripping leaves off trees it used to gently stroke, and the flowering shrub is getting ripped apart, and the sky is again breaking like a fragile shell. Someone sensible, the speaker observes, has gone to get the funeral car before the storm begins.
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“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Themes
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Loss and Grief
“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” is a poignant elegy that suggests that losing a loved one can feel like losing a part of oneself. This poem’s speaker is the wife of a fisherman who, as the title suggests, has recently died. Stunned in the immediate aftermath of his death, she looks back on the early days of their life together and reflects on how they became so close that his death strikes her like an injury to her own body.
The speaker and her husband had a long, intimate relationship. While at first they were shy and awkward with each other—they had an arranged marriage at a young age—they soon fell quietly but deeply in love. After a while, the speaker remembers, she knew she meant more to her husband “than God or temptation,” and she felt the same way about him: in other words, they became by far the most important thing in each other’s lives, outpacing not just the "temptation" of other romances but the power of the divine.
Such an intense intimacy makes the husband’s death into a surreal disaster for the speaker. To lose someone so very close to her, she observes, feels like having a limb amputated. In other words, it feels as if her husband had become part of her. And, as she puts it, “I cannot with simple grief / Assuage dismemberment”: mourning alone can’t heal what feels like having part of her body torn away.
If love makes two people one in this poem, then grief rips a single soul into pieces. The speaker’s loss shreds her, dividing her from a man she has come to feel is part of her, body and soul.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-42
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Love, Marriage, and Passion
“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” depicts the love between a happily married couple as deep, quiet, and profound. Love, the speaker’s elegy for her husband suggests, needn’t be grand and passionate to be urgently meaningful.
When the speaker and her husband first got married, she remembers, it had nothing to do with “love nor affection.” Theirs was an arranged marriage, brokered by their village’s “elders.” To the innocent young speaker, marriage was even frightening: she remembers "trembling” on their wedding night, equally scared that her husband would not want to sleep with her and that he would.
Her husband was scared too, in his own way. When she got pregnant, she remembers, he looked guilty, and didn’t seem to know whether to “repent or rejoice” over his impending fatherhood. In other words, this relationship was not the stuff of a rom-com: the couple were fearful and uncertain with each other, perhaps not sure they were really ready to be spouses and parents.
But these awkward beginnings were no predictor of what the couple would come to mean to each other, the speaker insists. “Soon,” she says to the ghost of her lost husband, “I was more to you than God or temptation / And so were you to me.” The two came to trust, love, and rely on each other so deeply that when the husband dies, the speaker feels as if she has lost something as much a “familiar” part of her as her own “hand.”
The profound love between a married couple, this poem suggests, doesn’t have to be flashy or instantaneous to be real, deep, and true. While the speaker’s relationship to her husband starts out on rocky ground, the couple's love becomes the most important thing in their shared life through the power of time, patience, and trust.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-35
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife”
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Lines 1-8
When you were ...
... be with me!“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” is an elegy (a poem of mourning for the dead) that begins like a love poem. The speaker, the “Wife” of the poem’s title, addresses her now-dead husband, remembering the days when he was “not quite thirty,” still very young.
These days were, apparently, quite a while ago: he was “not yet tanned” to a weatherbeaten "old-boat brown," “not yet embittered like the rest” or “obsessed with death.” Such qualities, those “yet”s suggest, are ones the speaker has seen developing in plenty of aging fishermen: their hard lives weather them like their boats and make them cynical and even morbid.
The speaker’s images of these crusty old sailors set the poem’s scene as much as they introduce the speaker and her husband. Clearly, this is a traditional sort of community, a coastal spot where generations of fishermen age in just the same ways.
Back in the day before he became one of those weatherbeaten fishermen, when he was still an optimistic, lively young guy in his late 20s, the speaker’s husband would rush home to her from every fishing trip:
[…] then would you come
Hot with continence upon the sea,
Chaste as a gull flying pointed home,
In haste to be with me!These vivid images capture a passionate—and very, very married—flavor of love. Strikingly, the speaker imagines her husband “hot with continence,” burning with sexual fidelity more than with sexual passion: he wanted only her. Likewise, the simile of him flying home as “chaste as a gull” suggests a love both animal and loyal. It was as if she had become the target of his homing instincts, pulling him back home “in haste” to be near her again.
But as the poem’s title suggests, this fond memory of intense marital love is also a poignant one. Over the course of this poem, the speaker will look back at her time with a husband she has now lost. She’ll also speak directly to him the whole way through, as if he were still sitting right next to her. The habits of a long marriage, this apostrophe suggests, don’t stop just like that when one spouse dies.
The poem is written in free verse, without a regular meter or rhyme scheme. (It’s full of musical rhyme, though, even if that rhyme doesn’t fall into a predictable pattern.) Its six varying stanzas will carry readers from the speaker’s fond memories of the past right up to her painful present day.
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Lines 9-16
Now that, being ...
... for my virginity. -
Lines 17-23
Three months the ...
... was with child. -
Lines 24-29
My face was ...
... you to me. -
Lines 30-35
Men come and ...
... Assuage dismemberment. -
Lines 36-42
Outside the wind ...
... Before the rain.
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“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Symbols
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The Flamboyante
A blooming flamboyante (a kind of flowering tree) symbolizes the state of the speaker's marriage. Looking back, the speaker remembers that when she first got pregnant, "new buds" were growing in the flamboyante, an image in which the natural world mirrors her own fertility: just as those buds open into flowers, her pregnancy will mature into her first child. Now that her husband is dead, however, the same flowering tree is "torn" by stormwinds, an image that suggests the sweet, youthful times of new babies and new hopes are over. The tree's growth and struggles thus reflect the eras of the couple's relationship, from sweet new life to bare-branched sorrow.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 22-23: “When in our wind-torn flamboyante / New buds broke, I was with child.”
- Line 38: “Once more the flamboyante is torn,”
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“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” is framed as an apostrophe from the mourning wife to her recently dead husband. She speaks to him as if he’s still right there in the room with her, but she also takes certain liberties now that he’s gone. As she puts it, “being dead, you are beyond detection”: she can say what she likes now, he’s not there to be embarrassed about it.
But the story she goes on to tell doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would embarrass a guy at all. While there are certainly intimate details of her life with her husband here, they’re loving ones: the speaker remembers how awkward the two of them were at the outset of their arranged marriage, but also how deeply they came to care for each other.
By presenting the story of this marriage in an apostrophe, the speaker makes it clear that she might never lose her connection to her husband, whether he’s alive or dead. The couple’s connection was so deep that the husband’s death feels like a “dismemberment” to the wife, as if she’d had her arm chopped off. But he remains present to her in a real and serious way. His death might mean she takes a few more liberties with the stories she tells, but she’s still telling them to him.
Where apostrophe appears in the poem:- Lines 1-35
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Imagery
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Anaphora
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Simile
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Assonance
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"The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife" 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.
- Embittered
- Continence
- Chaste
- Maid
- Monsoon
- Thrashed
- Flamboyante
- Wan
- Repent
- Assuage
- Dismemberment
- Despoils
- Hearse
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(Location in poem: Lines 3-4: “you were not quite thirty and had not begun / To be embittered like the rest”)
Made cynical and jaded by age and experience.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife”
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Form
"The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife" is an elegy, a poem of mourning. It's also a dramatic monologue, a poem spoken in the voice of a particular character—in this case, the "Wife" of the title. Patrick Fernando here imagines his way into the feelings of a woman whose arranged marriage blossomed into real love and then collapsed into dreadful grief.
The poem spans 42 lines of reflective, meditative verse divided into six stanzas, without a regular meter or stanza form. The stanzas range between six and eight lines long; the speaker's early memories of her marriage use longer, more meditative stanzas, while more emotional memories—her discovery that she was pregnant, her current grief—are compressed into shorter ones. The poem's lines likewise get shorter as the poem rolls along. The speaker's voice thus feels freest when she remembers her far-off past; as she reaches the terrible day of her husband's funeral, readers can hear her choking up.
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Meter
"The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife" doesn't stick to a regular meter. Instead, the lines change length expressively to capture the speaker's emotion. Many of the stanzas begin with longer lines and boil down to a few tender words. For instance, take a look at the way the fourth stanza ends (lines 28-29):
But soon I was to you more than God or temptation,
And so were you to me.The movement from the longer, more dramatic statement of the fisherman's love to the speaker's simple "and so were you to me" gets at the profound, quiet sincerity (and reciprocity) of the pair's feelings for each other.
Readers might especially notice such changes toward the end of the poem. The speaker begins the poem with stanzas of relatively long, even lines. As she begins to grapple with her grief for her lost husband, however, the lines get shorter and shorter, as if clipped by shock and sorrow.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife" uses plenty of rhyme, though the rhyme scheme isn't consistent all the way through. The first stanza's pattern, for instance, runs ABABCDCD:
[...] sun [A]
[...] brown [B]
[...] begun [A]
[...] grown [B]
[...] come [C]
[...] sea [D]
[...] home [C]
[...] me [D]Much of the poem uses alternating rhymes like these, though sometimes the poet throws in a single unrhymed end word (like "flamboyante" in line 22, which pairs with no other word in the stanza) or a rhymed couplet (like "low" and "know" in lines 24-25). These rhymes are musical without being fully predictable; they sound a little cracked, helping to capture the broken voice of a wife in mourning.
Readers might also notice that many of the rhymes here are slant, not perfect—like "brown" and "grown" in lines 2 and 4 or "come" and "home" in lines 5 and 7. Those slant rhymes make the poem's music subtler and gentler.
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“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Speaker
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This dramatic monologue (a poem in the voice of a particular speaker) captures a sensitive, thoughtful, and quietly passionate soul. The poem's speaker is the "Wife" of the title, a woman in shock after her fisherman husband dies unexpectedly. Now that her husband is "beyond detection," she says that can speak openly (she need not be "discreet," given that he is no longer around to be hurt or offended by what she says). She looks back over their years together and remembers that, at the beginning, theirs was no love match; on the contrary, it was an arranged marriage, brokered by persuasive "elders" and a little frightening for both of them. Despite this unromantic start, however, the pair came to love each other deeply. So deeply, in fact, that the fisherman's death now feels like as great an injury to the speaker as a "dismemberment": with her husband gone, it's as if she's lost her own hand. The speaker's immense, crushing grief is a testament to the bond she and her husband shared, and the poem thus illustrates how true, meaningful love doesn't always begin with passion and fireworks.
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“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Setting
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The poem takes place shortly after the speaker's husband has died, though the fact that his death was very recent doesn't become clear until the poem's end. The speaker spends most of the poem reminiscing about her relationship with her husband, reaching all the way back to their first night together and charting the growth of their love. The final two stanzas then wrench the reader into the present and reveal that the husband's funeral or memorial service is taking place: other mourners come to pay their respects as the speaker's "children weep," and "someone practical has gone / To make them bring the hearse / Before the rain." The poem is thus set on a dreary day when the speaker's grief is very fresh. The fact that it is apparently about to rain adds to the sad, mournful tone.
The speaker's dreamy, timeless voice makes it hard to place her story more broadly: all readers can really know is that she lives by the sea in a fairly traditional community, a place where "elders" might arrange one's marriage. Mentions of the "monsoon" (a strong wind that brings storms or droughts to Southeast Asia) and the "flamboyante" (a kind of flowering tree that grows in hot, wet climates) might tempt readers to imagine that the poem takes place in Patrick Fernando's own native Sri Lanka. But in many regards, this story of grief could just as easily take place in a fairy-tale world. The visions of a mournful wife and a lost fisherman here feel atmospherically timeless.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife”
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Literary Context
Patrick Fernando (born Joseph Patrick Fernando, 1931-1983) was a Sri Lankan poet. Like many poets, he had an unromantic day job, working as a tax official. But he also found time to become a noted literary figure, published worldwide.
This poem was first collected in Fernando's 1955 book The Return of Ulysses, a book whose title's allusion to the legendary Greek seafaring hero points to one of Fernando's preoccupations: the ocean. Fernando lived near the sea for most of his life, and much of his poetry has nautical themes and imagery. This poem's fisherman is not the only one to appear in his work.
"The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife" also participates in the long tradition of the elegy, a poetic genre concerned with mourning and remembrance. It takes its place among many poems about lost beloveds, from John Milton's "Lycidas" to Robert Browning's "Confessions." Readers might even catch a whiff of old folk ballads here, many of which mourn husbands lost to seas and wars.
Much Sri Lankan poetry written in English shows the influence of British colonialism in Southeast Asia, which meant that lots of Sri Lankan writers primarily studied English poetry in school. While Fernando's work often deals with the atmosphere and landscape of his native country, it's stylistically shaped more by English writers like William Wordsworth than by a distinctly Sri Lankan literary heritage. (Readers might compare this poem to "Animal Crackers" by Richard de Zoysa, a later Sri Lankan writer whose work likewise shows a marked British influence.) Fernando's writings were also deeply influenced by his religion. Alongside his poetry, he wrote essays on theology for Catholic journals.
Historical Context
Patrick Fernando rarely wrote directly about his native Sri Lanka. This poem hints gently at aspects of traditional Sri Lankan culture (like marriages arranged by "elders" and a fishing economy) without delving into what was happening in the country in Fernando's time. That's in spite of the fact that the book in which this poem first appeared came out in 1955, during a period of major change.
Sri Lanka, like many countries in Southeast Asia, was colonized by the British during the 19th century. After World War II, in the late 1940s, Britain finally (and abruptly) withdrew from Sri Lanka and left it an independent country. Political wrangling and chaos soon followed. Only a year after this poem was published, the country's Sinhalese ethnic majority took control of the government and began persecuting the Tamil minority (a group of people whom the Sinhalese often felt had been unfairly privileged by the British colonizers). Fernando died the very year that these tensions broke out into civil war in 1983.
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More “The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” Resources
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External Resources
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The Elegiac Tradition — Learn more about the elegy genre to which this poem belongs.
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More of Fernando's Poems — Read more of Fernando's work.
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Sri Lankan Poetry — Read an overview of some of the discussions and controversies around the Sri Lankan poetry world, in which Fernando was an important figure.
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