Renée Vivien: Fishhooks

Renée Vivien

(1877-1909)

Fishhooks

A Scotsman, a friend from my childhood, showed me, one day, his collection of fishhooks.

“Look”, he said to me, “this is a veritable museum. They are objets d’art, these fishhooks that you see. To entice the salmon which feed on flies in their iridescent flight, we invent light fishhooks, of gold, green, blue, and violet. Some of these are fashioned with pheasant feathers: and you know that the pheasant has all the magnificence of the peacock, augmented by the inexpressible grace of being wild. These fishhooks require patient workmanship and skillful ingenuity.”

I regarded these strange jewels of torture and death. They were very beautiful in effect, brilliant like glory, glittering like love.

“And”, continued my interlocutor, “the salmon who believe themselves to be seizing the rainbow and opal wings of wandering flies, feel their throat lacerated implacably by the steel hook. It is beautiful in its struggles, it is prey to the Enemy.”

As I leaned over the jewels of torture and death:

“What do you think of my collection?”, my friend the Scotsman asked me.

“- I think”, I said to him, “that the Bible (which I have heard you squander in such copious quotations) has not lied, and that truly God has created man in his own image.”

Renée Vivien prose poem

kempis.nl poetry magazine

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