In my shady past I was famously branded

As an unfeeling and violent hooligan who

Once provided himself with a huge angle,

A powerful black line and a whole bunch

Of fifty fetid pipsqueaks to be used as bait.

And threw the line into the Sea of Darkness.

Morning after morning I angled thus and,

Not a single goby or a damned minnow.

At the end of that time, a monster-fish

Swallowed the bait and dived down,

Dragging the huge size hook with it.

Then it rose to the surface in a flurry

And mightily flapped with its fins,

Till the bloody waves rose like hills,

And the waters were lashed into fury. . .

The noise was like that of devils and imps,

And spread horror for a thousand miles around.

Having got such a monster-fish, I chopped it

In a myriad slices and dried them with blood

Under the blazing sky. Honest to Underworld,

But from the Sea of Darkness to the far east,

And from the Frozen Peak to the polar north,

There was not one who did not eat one's full

From that monster-fish on the eve of Samhain.