Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish"

Blog about one poem that you read for today.  Explain its denotative and connotative meaning.  Discuss its use of imagery and/or figures of speech.  Use the checklists to help you think of what to analyze about the poem you selected.  Make sure you include specific quotes form the poem. 

"The Fish", written by Elizabeth Bishop, is about a fisher man who caught a fish.  Just by reading the title, the readers can concluded how the poem is about a fish and how the fish can represent many themes.  With this poem, the fish represented the life. When the fisherman caught the fish, the man so fascinated by the fish of how it appeared and behaved.  As the fish was hanging on the line in the beginning of the poem, the fish "didn't fight./ He hadn't fought at all./  He hung a grunting weight,/ battered and venerable/ and homely" (454).  By this description, this is quite amazing how the fish did not resist to be taken out of its natural environment.  Naturally, fishes will squirm around due to the fact that fish cannot breathe oxygen and will fight in every way to get into the water.  But, this fish was different because this fish already knew that he lost the fight and will shortly die.  This action can represent how the fish knows how there are always going to be a greater force that has the power to change one's course in life.  But, at the end of the poem, the fisher man let the fish go because man was so in the moment of observing the beauty of the fish and could not bear the fact that he could indeed end this beauty. 


Through the poem, Bishop describes the fish in great details from the "brown skin hung in strips/ like ancient wallpaper,/ and its pattern of darker brown/ was like wallpaper" and "the mechanism of his jaw," (455).  Bishop wanted to go in full details about describing this fish because she wanted the readers to have the visual image of how this fish looked like. When I was reading this poem, I felt as if the fish was in front of me. I was drawn into the detail of the fish because I imagined this fish to be a large fish while listening to "his gills were breathing in/ the terrible oxygen/-the frightening gills" (455). With this kind of effect on the readers, I wonder how the man's thought of about the details of the fish. I believe the affect on the man was more intensified because he was holding the fish in front of him, instead of reading the details. That is why he released the fish. 


Even though that the meaning the of the poem is depressing, this theme is balanced out about the value of life through the colors and body movements.  Bishop also went into great details of how the fish anatomy.  The man said how he "thought of the coarse white flesh/ packed in like feathers,/ the big bones and the little bones,/ the dramatic reds and blacks/ of his shiny entrails,/ and the pink swim-bladder" (455).  A part of life includes having a body.  With the fish, the man was fascinated by the fish because of the different anatomy.  The man probably have never seen a fish in this kind of manner or never considered the fact that he was in controlled of a destiny of a living object.  This ties into the colors of the poem.  Color in this poem is important because color help change the mood of the poem.  The mood of the poem is depressing. When Bishop wrote "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow", people automatically think of the typical colors that is found in a rainbow, like red, yellow, and green (456).  These colors are usually associated with good feelings, instead of depressing feelings.  So the readers can finish the poem on a happy note, instead of a sad note.