“The Fish” Poem by Elizabeth Bishop

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Works Cited

Introduction

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” is a narrative poem, told in the first person revealing the thoughts and feelings that course through the poet’s mind on catching a fish, staring into its eyes and reflecting. The event encapsulated by the narrative is a very simple one that is clear in the first and last lines of the poem “I caught a tremendous fish” (1) and “I let it go” (76). Between these two lines, the poet’s experience is one that is transformative in nature so much so the poet finally releases the fish back into the water. The speaker, out in a battle-worn, rented boat, catches the old fish and after examining the fish closely and sympathetically, in a spontaneous moment of recognition tosses the fish back into the water. “The aesthetic nature of this experience, by which the fish is literally seen and metaphorically tamed, is the final cause of the speaker’s release of him” ( Schwartz and Esters, p. 170). The poem is rich in literary elements such as imagery, simile and sound devices.

Main body

The poem has many descriptive phrases and similes right from the beginning till the end. The poem first shows deflation – the tremendous fish that is caught shows no struggle and hangs timidly – “He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable/ and homely”. The description of the fish forms the major part of the poem – his skin is like wallpaper; there are rosettes of lime and rags of seaweed on him; the swim-bladder is like a peony. The poet also talks about the dangers he poses – “the frightening gills,,, that cut so badly” “his sullen face,/the mechanism of his jaw”. Based on the fish’s commonality and its alien features, the speaker compares the fish to a veteran fighter, who has seen many struggles and who wears the remnants of old fish-lines in his lower lip like battle scars or “medals with their ribbons/frayed and wavering,/a five-haired beard of wisdom/trailing from an aching jaw”. The descriptive language used in the poem serves two purposes – to bring to the mind the exact picture of the fish as the poet sees it and to show how this image impacts the poet altering her environment. The crucial move of the poem happens when the poet looks into the fish’s eye expecting, by nature of plot, a sort of bonding. But she finds eyes “far larger than mind/ but shallower, and yellowed/ the irises backed and packed/ with tarnished tinfoil”. The fish shatters her expectations and its opaque eyes respond only “like the tipping of an object toward the light”. She now begins to see how from its lip “A green line, frayed at the end/ “, She notices him further deeply and sees in him the scars of past struggles.

The fish is rendered as both ugly and beautiful by anchoring the images to very fish-like elements such as isinglass, barnacles, weed, lice, scales, bones, eye, bladder, entrails, etc and things that are commonly associated with home and beauty such as wallpaper, roses, beards etc. Senses of sound and smell and touch are added through words such as grunting, blood, sharp, etc. The fish, with his hook-filled mouth, and scarred lower lip emerges as a symbol of pain and catching him offers the poet an occasion to confront the repressed feelings within. This is evident in the lines where the fish is described as a relic, a living diary upon which layers of meaning are physically inscribed. Sympathy for the fish is evoked by creating a persona for the fish. The fish is a “he”, has “an aching jaw” and “a sullen face”. It is a “venerable” fish with a beard of wisdom and ribbon of medals. The fishing lines become a beard of wisdom and a ribbon of medals.

Bishop deftly shifts the narrator’s tone from detachment to observation to admiration to enrapture, as the poem progresses. Initially the narrator is detached and is very objective in describing the fish using short sentences. However as the poem progresses, the narrator is absorbed into the beauty of the fish and describes it in greater detail, using longer sentences. Moreover, the narrator becomes less and less detached as she develops emotional responses to the fish, indicated by words such as frightening” and “terrible”. Finally, at the end, the poet is in a creative colorful mood as she is able to see rainbows in the oil spills and with an expansive heart, she decides to let the fish go. The use of the first person helps the reader to identify with the poet as she undergoes transformation in her thoughts and feelings. It also provides a meditative voice to the poem where the poet “attempts to comprehend a natural object as fully as possible before letting it go” (Travisano175-76).

Bishop employs sonics to make her pictures more vivid. Several of the lines employ assonance, for example the double assonance of the “awe” sound and the “un” sound in: “He hadn’t fought at all./ He hung a grunting weight”. The use of assonance gives beauty to the poem enabling the reader to find beauty in the subject of the poem as well: “shapes like full-blown roses/ stained and lost through age”.

The last line is ironical. When the poet has taken the trouble to catch the fish, the act of letting it go seems meaningless unless seen in the context of the feelings of the poet. The poem succeeds in conveying a moment of transformation during which the poet experiences a certain beauty in the whole world. As the narrator drops the fish back into the water that contains oil spillage, the image seems to suggest that the world is both dangerous and beautiful like the ocean with oil spills, and here the fish becomes a symbol of survival in a dangerous world.

Works Cited

Schwartz, Lloyd and Estess, P. Sybil (1983). Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. University of Michigan Press, 1983
Travisano, Thomas (1988). Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1988.

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“The Fish” Poem by Elizabeth Bishop

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