Poetry has multiple meanings and they are usually not obvious. Elizabeth Bishop, the author of “The Fish,” hides a variety of poetic meanings in her poem. “The Fish” seems to be a simple poem about a speaker who catches a fish, ridicules it, and lets it go. This poem includes numerous amounts of symbolism, denotation, assonance, diction, irony, and similes. Bishop tells the classic fishing story with a slight twist. The poem is an interaction with nature which reveals the power and beauty of the outdoors.
The one type of poetic tool used is assonance. The first example is “He hadn’t fought at all” and “He hung grunting weight” (6-7). Bishop uses this as an odd language to describe a normal experience. “His brown skin hung in strips” (10) is also the same as the previous two lines using odd language to describe a seemingly experience. She also echoes the word hung in lines seven and ten to enhance the effect of assonance in these lines. One other form occurs in line fourteen when the author tells of the shapes of full-blown roses. The speaker’s previous description has made the fish sound almost ugly, but the thought of roses gives it a type of beauty. “R
Symbolism is a rarely used tool in this poem, but its meaning is very important to the outcome of the poem. In lines five and six the speaker tells that the fish didn’t fight and hadn’t fought at all. This is quite odd of an animal that has been taken out of its natural habitat. Most of the time the animal will fight until it is completely tired and cannot fight any longer. This might symbolize the age of the fish and the numerous attempts fishermen have tried to capture it. It might be just giving up to this particular fisherman. In lines 45-48 Bishop talks of the fish as if it was a male in gender. The speaker also talks of “his sullen face” (45) as if he had some control over his facial expression. A final tool used in this poem is tone. Bishop begins with a dull tone. The speaker caught a big fish in a normal way with a normal hook. Later Bishop changes the tone to be more descriptive, and she also uses larger more specific words. One obvious shift in tone occurs when the speaker looks into the fish’s eyes and sees the hooks in its mouth. The repetition of the word rainbow in line seventy-five shows the speakers exhilaration to catching such a marvel. It has obviously eluded at least
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