Intro to Literature
In poetry images and language is very important. It allows the
reader to interpret and author to tell a story with few words.
Some things have several meanings and it is up to the reader to
draw their own conclusions as to the authors meaning.
In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Fish, we see a lot of imagery
that could and probably has been interpreted many different
ways.
The first line of the poem “I caught a tremendous fish” is
saying that the fisherman/woman has been victorious over nature.
Catching a fish of great bounty.
Then “and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my
hook fast in a corner of his mouth. ” The imagery is showing
both fisherman/woman and the fish are out of their element/
natural environment. Despite this it would seem that the
fisherman/woman holds power over the fish. “He didn’t fight. He
hadn’t fought at all.”
The fish should be a formidable opponent. It’s very large and
probably powerful but instead of fighting it is limp.
The fisherman/woman’s first observation of the fish upon closer
inspection “He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable and homely. ” Here the author has endowed
the fish with human qualities.
Then the author switches again giving the fish qualities of
inanimate objects. “Here and there his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper.
“Shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He
was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested with tiny white sea-lice and underneath two or
