The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

First published: 1946 in North and South

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” is a highly compact meditative lyric of seventy-six free verse lines, relaying a first person narrator’s experience of catching a “tremendous” fish, coming to an empathetic understanding and appreciation of it, and subsequently letting it go. The narrator’s unspoken and self-transforming reaction to this fish, conveyed largely through imagery, contains the poem’s theme and underlies the narrator’s external actions. The poem begins significantly with the fish already caught and the speaker’s awareness that the fish had really not fought her. She holds the fish “half out of water” so that he exists briefly in a liminal area half in and half out of his natural environment. In this place the narrator can examine him closely. Her initial observations are scrupulously objective. Any thoughts that the speaker may have are carefully masked by descriptive imagery which largely targets negative aspects. The fish which is “battered and venerable/ and homely” is also “infested/ with tiny white sea-lice.”

While the verb “I caught” precedes this objective description of the fish, the narrator uses the verb “I thought of” to depart from objective appraisal in favor of interpolating aspects of the fish which she cannot see but which she knows must be present. Here she envisions the flesh that must lie beneath the fish’s skin as well as its bones, entrails, and swim bladder. Her evaluation is not yet complete even after this thorough examination, for she then looks closely into his eyes, contrasting them minutely with her own. Though the speaker has been trying to comprehend the fish, it refuses to return her stare, remaining completely indifferent to her.

At this point the speaker utters for the first time an emotion brought about by her encounter with the fish: admiration for “his sullen face.” It is with this expression of admiration that the narrator is enabled to notice details that her previous painstaking examination failed to uncover, details that will increase her admiration and intensify her experience. Embedded in the fish’s mouth are five additional hooks, trailing broken fishing lines of various weights. After realizing the fish’s earlier successful battles, she “stared and stared.” Her thought process remains unrevealed, but in it there occurs a moment of epiphany, realization, comprehension. It is for the narrator a moment of breakthrough, of seeing something clearly and holistically that was previously unapprehended and which will slip away as the moment fades. For that moment, however, “victory filled up/ the little rented boat.” Even nature cooperates with the inner dynamic of the speaker as oil and bilge water within the boat combine with sunlight “until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” It is at this point that she, almost automatically, without the need for thought, releases the fish.

Forms and Devices

The narrator’s empathy with the fish arises from her concentrated examination of him. Bishop conveys this empathy to the reader through dense and exacting descriptive phrases replete with similes and metaphors. Every single word serves to convey what the fish is like and indirectly communicates the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. In her initial examination, the speaker compares his skin to strips of “ancient wall-paper,” a homely image that belies her apparent objectivity by depicting the fish in terms of something familiar. As she extends her wallpaper imagery, she stresses the age of the fish, for, appearing on the wallpaper/fish are “shapes like full-blown roses/ stained and lost through age.” While the fish has not fought her, he has not given up for his gills continued to struggle to strain the “terrible oxygen” of the air. The narrator refers to them as “frightening gills” and hints at past experiences in which she discovered that gills “can cut so badly.” The description of the fish is exhaustively thorough; nothing is neglected, not the banal, the possibly disgusting, or the frightening. Though objective, the description alludes to thoughts and feelings and prepares the reader for the narrator’s response.

As the narrator relates those parts of the fish that she cannot see, her desire to do so and her choice of imagery again reveals her growing empathy. She envisions “white flesh/ packed in like feathers,” “the dramatic reds and blacks/ of his shiny entrails,” and even his swim bladder which she compares to a “big peony.” Nothing about the fish disgusts her as she concentrates on what is before her. The narrator devotes more imagery to the eyes than to any other part of the fish. Traditionally it is the eye that conveys much about person or creature. Here too, for the first time, the comparison is not with an outside object, but initially, at least, with her own eyes. Noting that the fish’s eyes are “larger than mine/ but shallower, and yellowed,” she strains for an exact representation, describing the irises as “backed and packed/ with tarnished tinfoil/ seen through the lenses/ of old scratched isinglass.

When the narrator notices the hooks, she notes that they are hanging from a lip that is “grim, wet, and weapon-like.” She describes the hooks and trailing lines as “medals with their ribbons” and a “five-haired beard of wisdom.” Obviously the fish has become a kind of symbol for the human qualities the narrator and Bishop admire: courage, strength, perseverance, shrewdness. Yet it never becomes abstract for these very qualities are inherent in the actual, living fish. Neither is the personification of victory an abstraction as it fills the boat, but it is the very real result of the narrator’s concentration on the unique individuality of the fish. The rainbow at the end of the poem literally takes over everything, making all the faulty and ordinary artifacts of the boat, the “rusted engine,” the “bailer rusted orange,” the “sun-cracked thwarts,” into itself “until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” This final image speaks of the transformation taking place within the narrator through an encounter with what appears ordinary to the outward eye. Yet the rainbow, too, preserves its own reality as oil in bilge water. The ordinary reveals the uncommon when penetrated by perceptual imagination.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.

Boland, Eavan. “An Unromantic American.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14 (Summer, 1988): 73-92.

Fountain, Gary. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

MacMahon, Candace, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927-1979. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980.

Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Motion, Andrew. Elizabeth Bishop. Wolfeboro, N.H.: Longwood, 1986.

Parker, Robert Dale. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Schwartz, Lloyd. That Sense of Constant Readjustment: Elizabeth Bishop “North & South.” New York: Garland, 1987.

Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.

Wylie, Diana E. Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Nemerov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.