Imagery

The first impression one gets from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish� is that of a poem about your basic fishing trip. A closer look at the imagery used by Bishop reveals a poem that has a different intended meaning. She has created a poem that enables the reader to feel what the characters go through. The real theme of Bishop’s poem is that of humanitarianism and respect for a fish’s lifelong will to survive. Most people have been fishing before, but never stopped to think how the fishes feel when they are captured. By cautiously and effectively describing the captured fish, the reactions the fish portrays after being caught, and the symbolic marks on the fish’s body of his past struggles from struggles to stay alive, Bishop creates, through her images of elegance, victory, and survival, something more than a simple fishing story. She creates a path for the reader to see and feel the fish’s side of the story.
The first four lines of the poem are for the most part normal and contain just the facts:
fast in a corner of his mouth. (1-4)
Except for tremendous, Bishop’s persona uses no exaggerations unlike most fishing

Grown firmly in his mouth. (50-51, 54-55)

fish’s being speckled with barnacles and spotted with lime. However, the fisher observes these spots and sees them as rosettes—as objects of beauty, not just ugly brown spots. These images contribute to the persona’s recognition of beauty having become faded beauty.

As if fascinated by them, the persona, observing how the lines must have been broken during struggles to escape, sees the hooks as “ medals with their ribbons/ frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom/ trailing from his aching jaw” (61-64), and the fisher becomes enthralled by re-created images of the fish’s fighting desperately for his life on at least five separate occasions—and winning. In its capability not only for mere existence, but also for action, escaping from previous fishermen, the fish shares the same humanity as the fisher, thus revealing the deepening understanding of how he must now act. The persona has all along described the fish not just with detail but also with an imaginative empathy for the creature. In her more-than-objective description, [the fisher] relates what he has seen to be both the pride and poverty of the fish” (715). It is at the point that the narrator of this fishing tale has a moment of clarity. Realizing the fish’s history and the glory the fish has achieved in escaping previous hookings, the speake