Ballad Of The Long Legged Bait - Analysis

A farewell that already feels like a curse

This poem’s central claim is brutal: what looks like a heroic fishing voyage is really a ritual of desire that turns flesh into bait, and then turns the fisherman himself into something emptied out. From the start, the send-off has the thick, superstitious feeling of a community blessing what it can’t control. The coast is Blackened with birds, the town rang its cobbles for luck, and even the sand and quay seem to speak. Yet the repeated Good-bye doesn’t sound like ordinary parting; it sounds like the living trying to separate themselves from what they’re sending away. The boat leaves white as milk into a drinking dark, an image that makes the sea less a landscape than a mouth. The voyage begins as if it’s already being swallowed.

The first turn: the “bait” is a girl

The poem’s hinge arrives with a shock that redefines everything before it: we saw him throw a girl alive with hooks through her lips. Until this moment, the language of fishing is almost mythic pageantry—gold gut singing on the reel, the boat like a bird over the sea. The revelation makes that earlier music complicit. The “long-legged bait” isn’t a clever lure; it’s a human body forced into the role of instrument.

Notice how quickly the violence spreads beyond the girl. All the fishes were rayed in blood, and the ships themselves speak this line, as if the whole seascape has become a witnessing chorus. The tension here is central: the poem keeps offering good luck and good-bye in the same breath, as though blessing and condemnation are inseparable once desire has crossed a certain line.

A sea full of weddings, hymns, and slaughter

After the girl is cast into the water, the poem’s imagination doesn’t narrow into simple horror; it expands into a delirious wedding-song sung by predators. The sea becomes hilly with whales; the bait tussle[s] in a shoal of loves. Love here is not tenderness but a feeding frenzy, a word the poem insists on using anyway. When it says the whales fled their love or the bait nipped and dived in the nick of love, it forces a contradiction: the same language names both appetite and intimacy.

That contradiction is intensified by religious soundings. A storm arrives with ram of ice and Fire on starlight, and the water is called Jesu’s stream. The poem keeps reaching for church-music—cathedral chimes, a bell-spire mast—while describing a world where every turtle crushed and every bone rises and falls in the rushing grave. The sacred vocabulary doesn’t cleanse the scene; it makes the scene feel like a blasphemous liturgy that still somehow “works.”

The chorus of “Always good-bye”: desire draining away

The repeated cry—Always good-bye—starts to sound less like a sailor’s refrain and more like a metaphysical rule. The poem pushes past the immediate event into a wider theatre of temptation: Mast-high moon-white women naked appear like a dream the eye can’t stop making, yet the tempter is dumb and gone. Biblical and mythic figures drift through—Susannah, Sheba, Lucifer, Venus—not as stable references but as names for recurring patterns of lust, shame, and collapse. Even Sin is given a woman’s shape, which echoes the girl-bait: the poem is angry at a world that turns female body into the site where male desire stages its drama.

And yet the fisherman is not painted as a triumphant villain. The poem insists that, after the casting, he winds his reel with no more desire than a ghost. That line matters: it suggests the act has not fulfilled him but evacuated him. The tension sharpens: the voyage is driven by desire, and the result is desire’s extinction.

Hard question inside the poem’s logic

If the fisherman ends up ghostlike, what was the “catch” supposed to be? The poem seems to imply that the real target isn’t fish at all, but the impossible wish to haul the whole world—its women, its past, its gods—up into the grasping hand that holds the rod.

Miracle haul: the sea gives up the dead and the past

The poem’s next major shift is the grotesque “miracle” of retrieval. The language becomes celebratory—Oh miracle of fishes!—but what rises is not simply food. From an urn, from a room, from a house that holds a town, the fisherman hauls up his fathers, dry as echoes and insect-faced. The dead cling to the girl’s hand; the dead hand leads the past. This is one of the poem’s strangest, richest claims: the sacrificed girl becomes a handle by which history can be dragged into the present.

Even Time becomes a creature in this net: Time is bearing another son, and the poem shouts Kill Time! The images that follow—The oak is felled in the acorn, the hawk in the egg—suggest that destruction is not an accident but built into origins. The sea-ritual exposes a violent principle that the poem implies is older than any single fisherman.

From ocean to land: a world dragged home, and the terror of home

As the rod divining land bends, the catch becomes impossibly expansive: a garden rises with birds and animals, then men and women and waterfalls, then whole cities: O Rome and Sodom To-morrow and London. The sea is no longer just water; it’s a storehouse of civilizations and moral histories. The fisherman’s earlier thrashing hair and whale-blue eye now feel like the features of someone who once belonged to the town, but has become a force that can comb streets and pull them up like weeds.

Yet the poem refuses a triumphant homecoming. The “house of love” he returns to is called furious and ox-killing. Home is not safety; it is where the consequences of the voyage become intimate. When the sea finally dwindles to nothing but its sound, and the anchor dives into the floors of a church, the poem suggests that even faith is being dragged under and repurposed by this obsessive hauling.

Final image: the fisherman stranded with his own heart

The ending is starkly quiet compared to the poem’s earlier storms and choral shouting. Good-bye, good luck is struck by the sun and the moon, as if the cosmos itself is tired of repeating the same benediction. The fisherman is no longer at sea; he is lost on the land, standing alone in his doorway, holding his long-legged heart. That last phrase answers the title in a darkly inverted way: the “long-legged bait” was the girl, but the voyage ends with the fisherman as a kind of bait too—exposed, vulnerable, held out. The poem leaves us with a final contradiction that feels like its verdict: the journey meant to master the sea ends by emptying the man, until only a heart remains, severed from the world it tried to possess.