Notes
1. What little has been written pushes credulity or couches the argument in bizarre language: “At-one-ment with God's crucified body (Christ's symbol was the fish) is the sacred analogue that Heaney repeats in the common experience of fishing” (Hart, 45); “The angler poet here searches for hidden enlightenment not with spade or divining rod, but rather with rod and line” [This generative sentence generates no explanation] (Stallworthy, 177); “the ambiguity of the closing lines problematises [sic] the analogy between speaker and salmon” (Williams).
2. In his brief reference to the poem, Burris, rather, sees the fisherman as being “unavoidably stained” by his encounter with the salmon (22).
3. The first stanza is technically an exception, for there are only three feet in its last line, even though the line has the same number of syllables as the first line (an anapest and a dactyl account for this).