Fly Fishing Poetry and Quotes

Here are a few of my favorites....enjoy

The Song Of Wandering Aengus
By William Butler Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass, and pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.


John Gay in Rural Sports

Around the steel no tortur'd worm shall twine, No blood of living insect stain my line; Le me, less cruel, cast feathered hook, With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook, Silent along the mazy margin stray, And with fur-wrought fly delude the pray.


More From WB Yeats

Where the wandering water
gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the worlds more full of
weeping
than you can understand.
excerpt from " The Stolen Child"
W.B. Yeats


Only those become weary of angling
that bring nothing to it but the idea of
catching fish.


Rafael Sabatini


Angling is tightly woven in a fabric of
moral, social, and philosophical threads
which are not easily rent by the violent
climate of our times.
A.J. McClane




Angling is somewhat like Poetry, men are to be born so...
Izaak Walton



The true angler is generally a modest
man.
Thaddeus Norris

If, as I suspect trout fishing is somewhat
of a disease, then it is also somewhat of
a therapy in itself.
Tom Sutcliffe M.D.