A Paumanok Picture
A Paumanok Picture - meaning Summary
A Coastal Fishing Scene
The poem offers a vivid snapshot of a coastal fishing scene. Whitman records fishermen at work in calm, precise detail: two boats, nets, the communal effort of enclosing a school of fish, and the haul laid out on the sand. The focus is on everyday labor and the natural world, rendering a brief, unromanticized portrait of working lives and the rhythms of a shared task at the water’s edge.
Read Complete AnalysesTWO boats with nets lying off the sea-beach, quite still, Ten fishermen waiting—they discover a thick school of mossbonkers—they drop the join’d seine-ends in the water, The boats separate and row off, each on its rounding course to the beach, enclosing the mossbonkers, The net is drawn in by a windlass by those who stop ashore, Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats, others stand ankle-deep in the water, pois’d on strong legs, The boats partly drawn up, the water slapping against them, Strew’d on the sand in heaps and windrows, well out from the water, the green-back’d spotted mossbonkers.
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