Elizabeth Bishop "The Fish"
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting eight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in stripes
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
strained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
-the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly-
I 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
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
-It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
-if you could call it a lip-
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels-until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
In “The Fish” there is an individual fishing, and happens to catch a large fish. This poem is not about how great of a catch this was for the fisherman, but rather examining the fish. The fish had “brown skin [that] hung in stripes/like ancient wallpaper” which gives an image of how aged the fish had become. Looking along the body of the fish, the fisherman reveals that there are pieces of fishing line and hooks hanging from this ancient fish. He has been caught previously, but by the looks of the line the fish was fighting last time. Seeing the wisdom and years aged in the fish, the fisherman decided to let the fish go. This poem was chosen because I enjoy the idea of the fisherman looking deeper into the fish, and not seeing it only for what it is. There is time and wisdom that the fish possessed, and the fisherman realized this. “The Fish” gave me a sense of peace, and it shows, in more of a human aspect, the respect that elders should receive.