Elizabeth Bishop (1948)

                                                                                                                                                               Brown 1

Nathaniel Brown
Dr. Clifton Snider
English 384/386
8 January 2000

     Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" is a narrative poem, told in the first person, about the confrontation between an amateur fisher--fishing in a "rented boat" (Bishop 1212; all references to the poem are to this edition)--and a "tremendous" battle-worn fish. A poem that acknowledges awareness in nature, "The Fish," although a narrative, sings in the way we expect lyric poetry to sing, for it is rich with imagery, simile, metaphor, as well as rhetorical and sound devices. I say "confrontation," but really the fish, with evidence of having been caught at least five other times, confronts the speaker (whom I'll call a "she" for convenience) only with its presence: the fight has gone out of him. The real confrontation is the speaker's internal struggle: should she keep the fish or throw it back? In a moment of illumination, she does the latter.

    Bishop's poem endows its fish with an awareness not very different from human awareness. That this is a poem of "twofold consciousness," to use Robert Bly's term for poems that "grant nature an enormous amount of consciousness" (5)¹, is indicated by Bishop's calling the fish a "he" instead of an "it." This is not mere personification, for she treats the fish as a sentient being, with feelings not unlike those of a human being. She admires the fish's "sullen face" as his eyes tip "toward the light," light which for us humans would symbolize consciousness but which for the creature of the water symbolizes the unconsciousness of death.

    The narrative may be summed up quickly, for what happens happens more quickly than the time it takes to read the poem. The speaker, out in a battle-worn, rented boat, catches the old fish, holds it "half out of water, with my hook / fast in a corner of his mouth." After examining the fish closely and sympathetically, she has, ironically, a moment of recognition (what Virginia Woolf might call a "moment of being" (70)² or James Joyce an  "epiphany" (Levin 8)³) and tosses the fish back into the water: "I let the fish go."

    Summarized, the poem is ordinary enough. To leave it at that would be to commit what Cleanth Brooks has called the "heresy of paraphrase" (201). What makes the poem extraordinary is the way the experience is related: the structure is shaped by the language of the poem . Bishop's images appeal to all the senses: sound ("He hung a grunting weight . . . his gills were breathing in / the terrible oxygen)"; smell ("shapes like full-blown roses . . . rags of green weed hung down"); touch (she holds the fish); taste ("I thought of the coarse white flesh"); and of course sight (the "green weed," among many other examples).

    Combining simile and metaphor, Bishop creates sympathy for the fish. The "five old pieces of fish-line . . . with all their five big hooks / grown firmly in his mouth" are

        Like medals with their ribbons
        frayed and wavering,
        a five-haired beard of wisdom
        trailing from his aching jaw.

The fish's "brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wall-paper." His "big bones and the little bones, / the dramatic reds and blacks of / his shiny entrails, / and the pink swim-bladder / [are] like a big peony." Here the alliterated "b's" emphasize the images, just as the internal rhyme and the repeated "t's" dramatize the fish's eyes: "the irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil / seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass."  The use of "isinglass" has double significance, standing as it does for both the actual "gelatin obtained from the blatter of certain fish" and for "thin, translucent sheets of mica" (both definitions from The Random House Dictionary). The word both describes and is part of the fish.

    Bishop adroitly uses other poetic devices to enrich the moment she writes about. Add to the imagery, simile, metaphor and other devices characteristic of lyric poetry such rhetorical devices as the parallelism of

        He didn't fight.
        He hadn't fought at all.
        He hung a grunting weight,
        battered and venerable
        and homely

and the repetition of "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!" and you get a real sense of the experience the speaker describes. Neither her battered boat (with its "rusted engine" around which is an oil-created "rainbow") nor the "venerable" old fish is beautiful in conventional terms. Their beauty lies in having survived, and when the speaker realizes this, "victory filled up / the little rented boat" and she understands that "everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!" That is when she lets the fish return to his home in the water. The structure is, to borrow another phrase from Brooks, like a "musical composition" (203); the music comes from the poetic language Bishop employs.

    The poem obviously was not written by a professional fisher nor by a person to whom fishing is a favorite "sport."  If it succeeds, it succeeds because of Elizabeth Bishop's powerful use of language to convey a personal experience showing her special sensibility.

    ²Jeanne Schulkind describes Woolf's idea as a time when the "self is transcended and the individual consciousness becomes an undifferentiated part of a greater whole" (18).

    ³Harry Levin defines Joyce's "'epiphany' . . . as a sudden illumination if not a divine revelation, a slight but definite insight into other lives, a fragmentary clue to the meaning of life as a whole" (8). Here, of course, the other life is that of a fish, but Levin's words describe what the poem describes rather accurately, even though he is not writing about Bishop's poem.

Bishop, Elizabeth. "The Fish." Responding to Literature. Ed. Judith A. Stanford. 3rd. ed. Mountain

    View, CA:  Mayfield, 1999. 1210-1212.

Bly, Robert, ed. News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. San Francisco: Sierra Club

    Books, 1980.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry.   New York: Harcourt,

    1947.

Levin, Harry, ed. The Portable James Joyce. New York: Viking, 1947.

Schulkind, Jeanne, ed. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. By Virginia Woolf.

    New York: Harcourt, 1976.

Woolf, Virginia. "A Sketch of the Past." Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings.

    Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1976. 61-137.