THE FISH

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 , 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

At the beginning of the poem , the speaker , solitary and introspective observes with cool detachment her fish beside the boat /half out of the 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 grunting weight ' the fish remains passive ad resigned unresponsive to her gaze , the fish becomes a spectacle that she may probe and interrogate . She describes each crevice of his body providing a detailed inventory of each physical attribute

It is her vivid imagination that allows her to confront the fish 's grizzly visage , punctured with five hooks and sundry broken fish-lines Each thread of line suggests also the narrative threads ' of the past each one another story of anguish . The speaker casts the grim mementos 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

Reference

Bishop , Elizabeth (1984 . The Complete Poems , 1927-1979 . Farrar , Starus and Giroux...