Poem Analysis - "The Shark", Edwin John Pratt

“The Shark”, Edwin John Pratt

“He seemed to know the harbour,
So leisurely he swam;
His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge,
Stirred not a bubble
As it moved
With its base-line on the water.

His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue,
And as he passed the wharf
He turned,
And snapped at a flat-fish
That was dead and floating.
And I saw the flash of a white throat,
And a double row of white teeth,
And eyes of metallic grey,
Hard and narrow and slit.

Then out of the harbour,
With that three-cornered fin
Shearing without a bubble the water
Lithely,
Leisurely,
He swam—
That strange fish,
Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue,
Part vulture, part wolf,
Part neither—for his blood was cold.”

           “The Shark”, by Edwin John Pratt, initially interested me from its strange, straightforward title. The poem, however, is simply about a shark circling a harbor, but the poet uses many poetic devices to paint the picture of the shark in the reader’s head.

    Imagery is used frequently to help portray the lethal elegance of a shark, and other poetic devices such as similes and metaphors are used as well to compare the colours and destructiveness of the shark to weapons and other items.

    His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge,
Stirred not a bubble
As it moved

Alliteration is also used commonly in the poem as well to draw attention to the description of the sharks’ movements and the way the shark’s body is shaped.

   The way that the shark is described in the poem almost portrays the shark as a deadly killing machine from the vocabulary chosen in the poem. The meaning of the poem is simply to show the violence and deadliness of the shark being illustrated within the poem as it circles the harbor described in the poem.

   The Poem “The Shark” was found from the “Theme and Image” list.