Literary Analysis

“An Introduction to Reading and Writing, Upper Saddle River” by Edgar Roberts

This anthology of fiction, poetry, and drama is dedicated to the interlocking processes of reading and writing. In addition to literary selections, each chapter contains information on and sample essays for writing about literature. It focuses a drowning man's thought a perspective which sets of the drowning reflect that the water was too cold The drowned man however has his own perspective. His life violence the drowning man did to himself from the living ones he left behind always waving when he false and in the end and from the truth seems to have been a lifelong life.

“The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop's speaker in “The Fish” describes her catch— “battered and venerable and homely”—with a mixture of sympathy and bravado. This fish, with his hook-filled mouth, emerges as a symbol of pain, an occasion for the speaker to confront that which is normally repressed and unseen. But with her elaborate, lyrical description, the speaker can be read as an artist who is able to translate this anguish into a five haired beard of wisdom. As the she celebrates her mastery over the fish, the poem ends triumphantly with the paradoxical suggestion that creativity is produced through destruction: suffering, Bishop concludes, can be the impetus for the imagination. Bishop's speaker first describes the fish as a relic, a living diary upon which layers of meaning are physically inscribed. Coated with relics of the sea, he is “speckled with barnacles” and “infested with tiny sea lice.” In the fish, the speaker sees not only the vestiges of the sea, but also the traces of a domestic, human scene. She characterizes him in familial terms: his brown skin is like “ancient wallpaper” in “shapes like full-blown roses/stained and lost throughout the ages.” At the beginning of the poem, the speaker, solitary and introspective, observes with cool detachment her fish “beside the boat/half out of water.” While the fish is initially only partly visible, he soon emerges for the full scrutiny of the speaker and her reader. Though “tremendous” and “of a grunting weight,” the fish remains passive and resigned; unresponsive to her gaze, the fish becomes a spectacle that she may probe and interrogate. Bishop evokes the speaker's moment of victory over both the fish and the repressed “threads” he symbolizes—events that are left unexplained in the poem—in the patterns made by the oil in the water, an unlikely image of beauty. Yet it is in this oil that the speaker sees a rainbow, also the subject of her final exaltation at the end of the poem. “The Fish” concludes on a note of bittersweet celebration as the speaker drops the fish back into the water; filled with oil that is both toxic and beautiful, it suggests a world that is dangerous as well as rich in possibility. The fish, like the speaker, survives in such a world of threat. Her concluding cry—“rainbow, rainbow, rainbow is an insistence on the ...