When Father Bobs For Eels

I’ve seen men fishing down in Maine,

     On lakes of great renown

With tackle fit to grace a hand

     From Isaac Walton’s down.

They’d fine canoes or power boats,

     And all that one could wish,

Including all the fancy “baits”,

     With which to lure the fish.

Now father he is different,

     No fancy fisher, he;

When he rigs up for catching fish

     He’s plain as he can be.

He has no rods or power boats

     No flies or rods or creels;

He just goes out upon the “Crick”

     And simply bobs for eels.

He has a bunch of angle worms

     All tangled up with thread;

A pail. old coat and rubber boots,

     An old hat on his head.

He shoves off to the channel bank,

     When darkness o’er us steals,

And drops his bob’ down o’er the side

     Where run the hungry eels.

Pa waits till one grabs on his bob,

     Then slyly pulls his line,

And flops a big one in the boat,

     Well, easy one pound nine.

Pa doesn’t smile or say a word,

     But I know how he feels;

He always has a cheery look

     Whene’er he bobs for eels.

I like to see him sitting there

     In just the same old boat;

The same old hat upon his head

     The same old boots and coat.

For me he makes a picture fair

     That beats all reels and creels;

And father always fills his pail

     Whene’er he bobs for eels.

June 3, 1908

   Izaak Walton (c. 1594 – 15 December 1683) was an English writer. Best known as the author of ‘The Compleat Angler’, he also wrote a number of short biographies that have been collected under the title of Walton's Lives.

   The Compleat Angler was first published in 1653, but Walton continued to add to it for a quarter of a century. It is a celebration of the art and spirit of fishing in prose and verse; 6 verses were quoted from John Dennys's 1613 work The Secrets of Angling. It was dedicated to John Offley, his most honored friend. There was a second edition in 1655, a third in 1661 (identical with that of 1664), a fourth in 1668 and a fifth in 1676. In this last edition the thirteen chapters of the original had grown to twenty-one, and a second part was added by his friend and brother angler Charles Cotton, who took up Venator where Walton had left him and completed his instruction in fly fishing and the making of flies.

   Walton did not profess to be an expert with a fishing fly; the fly fishing in his first edition was contributed by Thomas Barker, a retired cook and humorist, who produced a treatise of his own in 1659; but in the use of the live worm, the grasshopper and the frog "Piscator" himself could speak as a master. The famous passage about the frog, often misquoted as being about the worm—"use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer"—appears in the original edition. The additions made as the work grew did not affect the technical part alone; quotations, new turns of phrase, songs, poems and anecdotes were introduced as if the author, who wrote it as a recreation, had kept it constantly in his mind and talked it over point by point with his many friends. There were originally only two interlocutors in the opening scene, "Piscator" and "Viator"; but in the second edition, as if in answer to an objection that "Piscator" had it too much in his own way in praise of angling, he introduced the falconer, "Auceps," changed "Viator" into "Venator" and made the new companions each dilate on the joys of his favorite sport.

   The best-known old edition of the Angler is J. Major's (2nd ed., 1824). The book was edited by Andrew Lang in 1896, followed by many other editions.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izaak_Walton