The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

Discussion And Analysis

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 not fought her. She holds the fish “half out of water” so that he exists briefly in a luminal 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. 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 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, which the narrator enabled to notice details that her previous painstaking examination failed to uncover the details that will increase her admiration and intensify. After realizing the fish's earlier famous 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, holistically that was previously un-apprehended, 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 (Fountain, 2003, 67-89).

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 ...