Esox

He on the sandbank lies,
Sunning himself long hours
With stony gorgon eyes:
Westward the hot sun lowers.
—Edmund Blunden

Killers from the egg. —Ted Hughes

Esox is a genus of freshwater fish commonly known as pike or pickerel. It is the type genus of the family Esocidae. The type species of the genus is Esox lucius, the northern pike.

Quotes

• Ye Nymphes of Mulla which with carefull heed,
  The siluer scaly trouts doe tend full well,
  And greedy pikes which use therein to feed,
  (Those trouts and pikes all others doo excell)
  And ye likewise which keepe the rushy lake,
  Where none doo fishes take.
  • Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion (1595)

• Now as an angler melancholy standing
  Upon a green bank yielding room for landing,
  A wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook,
  Now in the midst he throws, then in a nook:
  Here pulls his line, there throws it in again,
  Mendeth his cork and bait, but all in vain,
  He long stands viewing of the curlèd stream;
  At last a hungry pike, or well-grown bream
  Snatch at the worm, and hasting fast away,
  He knowing it a fish of stubborn sway,
  Pulls up his rod, but soft, as having skill,
  Wherewith the hook fast holds the fish’s gill;
  Then all his line he freely yieldeth him,
  Whilst furiously all up and down doth swim
  Th’ ensnarèd fish, here on the top doth scud,
  There underneath the banks, then in the mud,
  And with his frantic fits so scares the shoal,
  That each one takes his hide, or starting hole:
  By this the pike, clean wearied, underneath
  A willow lies.
  • William Browne of Tavistock, "An Angler", Britannia's Pastorals (1613)

• The ruthless pike, intent on war.
  • Tobias Smollett, "Ode to Leven Water", Town and Country Magazine (June 1771)

• Full of scorn was Hiawatha
  When he saw the fish rise upward,
  Saw the pike, the Maskenozha,
  Coming nearer, nearer to him,
  And he shouted through the water,
  “Esa! esa! shame upon you!
  You are but the pike, Kenozha,
  You are not the fish I wanted,
  You are not the King of Fishes!”
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (1855), VIII

• From shadows of rich oaks outpeer
  The moss-green bastions of the weir,
  Where the quick dipper forages
  In elver-peopled crevices,
  And a small runlet trickling down the sluice
  Gossamer music tires not to unloose.
  Else round the broad pool’s hush
  Nothing stirs,
  Unless sometimes a straggling heifer crush
  Through the thronged spinney whence the pheasant whirs;
  Or martins in a flash
  Come with wild mirth to dip their magical wings,
  While in the shallow some doomed bulrush swings
  At whose hid root the diver vole’s teeth gnash.
  And nigh this toppling reed, still as the dead
  The great pike lies, the murderous patriarch
  Watching the waterpit sheer-shelving dark,
  Where through the plash his lithe bright vassals thread.
  The rose-finned roach and bluish bream
  And staring ruffe steal up the stream
  Hard by their glutted tyrant, now
  Still as a sunken bough.
  He on the sandbank lies,
  Sunning himself long hours
  With stony gorgon eyes:
  Westward the hot sun lowers.
  Sudden the gray pike changes, and quivering poises for slaughter;
  Intense terror wakens around him, the shoals scud awry, but there chances
  A club unsuspecting; the prowling fins quicken, in fury he lances;
  And the miller that opens the hatch stands amazed at the whirl in the water.
  • Edmund Blunden, "The Pike", The Waggoner, and Other Poems (1920), p. 19

• Pike, three inches long, perfect
  Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
  Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
  They dance on the surface among the flies.
  • Ted Hughes, "Pike", Collected Poems (Faber, 2003)
  • Cp. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, II, i, 34–6