Deep Sea Fishing
Sometimes I cast my longing like a line,
Watch it sink deep and deeper in the blue
Immoderate waters that are dreams of you,
Flooding the parched land that is sleep of mine.
Impassively I float the pale hours through,
With quiet eyes upon the quivering twine,
Aware of lurking shapes that give no sign
Of rising, though they move as fishes do.
Your hands, your hands, a thousand multiplied,
Cool, slim, and wary, darting to and fro,
For every touch of yours I knew, a hand!
Then breaks the line along the failing tide,
I lean—to drown among them as they go—
Knowing I may not drown on waking sand!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 18, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
Leonora Speyer’s “Deep Sea Fishing” was collected in her Pulitzer Prize–winning book Fiddler’s Farewell. In an unattributed review, likely written by an editor, that appeared in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, Vol. LXXXI (July–December 1926), Speyer’s work is described as follows: “There are many poems which distinguish Leonora Speyer’s Fiddler’s Farewell. She is seldom perfervid, almost never sentimental; she neither coquettes with her reader nor indulges in clever obscurities. On the contrary, in such poems as ‘Deep Sea Fishing,’ she speaks out simply. Which is to say that much of her work is admirable.”
Leonora Speyer
Leonora Speyer was born in Washington, D.C., in 1872. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for her poetry collection Fiddler’s Farewell (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926)