The first line in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘‘The Fish’’
begins as a standard fisherman’s tale, as in, ‘‘I
hooked a fish and it was this big.... ’’ Though this
format exists largely in oral traditions, the fisher-
man’s tale also appears throughout American liter-
ature. One notable example is Ernest Hemingway’s
1952 novella,TheOldManandtheSea. Bonnie
Costello, writing in theWallace Stevens Journal,
also comments that Bishop ‘‘invokes folk narrative’’
in ‘‘The Fish.’’ She finds that this is particularly true
of ‘‘the great American ‘fish tale’ sublimely paro-
died’’ in Herman Melville’s classic 1851 novel,
Moby-Dick. Costello states that ‘‘Bishop’s anec-
dote, like Melville’s tale, challenges the official
narrative drawn from the Bible: that man will
have dominion over the fish of the sea.’’ Yet, the
fish story tradition stretches beyond biblical times,
including myths and folk tales across several
cultures. Certainly, folk tales and myths about fish-
ermen and their mystical catches are relatively com-
mon. One biblical story that turns the fisherman’s
tale on its head is that of Jonah and the whale. In
that story, Jonah is swallowed by the whale and
carried to a far off island. Thus, the fisherman
becomes the fish, the hunter becomes prey, and
vice versa. A not dissimilar transformation takes
place in ‘‘The Fish.’’ ‘‘Bishop’s most frequently
anthologized poem... relies upon a... spiritual
exercise to justify a rowboat transformation from
plunderer to benefactor,’’ notes C. K. Doreski in
Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language.
Certainly, by the fifth line of Bishop’s poem,
the fisherman’s tale is transformed into a nontradi-
tional format; the poem is no longer the expected
story of the glorious hunt, of nature vanquished
and subdued. This is indicated by both the fifth
and sixth lines, in which the speaker remarks upon
the fish’s uncanny placidity. That the fish does not
struggle is an immediate sign that this is no stand-
ard hunter’s tale. Indeed, the fish’s unusual lack of
virility, its near refusal to fight for its life, is so
uncanny that the speaker finds it to be a fact that
bears repeating. Notably, it is in the fifth line that
the speaker begins to refer to the fish as a male,
assigning it a gender instead of referring to the fish
as an ‘‘it.’’ Thus, there are actually two indicators
that the poem is veering away from the fisherman’s
tale. The first is the fish’s calm acceptance of its
fate; the second is the personality granted to the
fish by the speaker’s assignation of a gender.
From there, the speaker launches into a
lengthy and detailed observation of the fish,
filled with descriptive language and simile. The
fish, in no uncertain terms, is ugly. It is covered
with mites and other refuse from the sea. It is
made to seem old and worn with age, infested so
much by the sea that it is almost as if it becomes
the sea personified. Yet, even as the speaker is
barely able to contain her disgust at the fish’s
shredded skin, she finds beauty. The fish exudes
age and decay, but the speaker compares his skin
to rose-patterned wallpaper (albeit stained). She
finds the fish’s gills terrifying, and yet she never-
theless likens his internal organs to flowers and
imagines his insides in vivid colors. Notably,
although the speaker describes the fish as a
male, she gives it some feminine attributes, as
when she compares the fish’s bladder to a flower,
or perhaps later on when she discusses his large
eyes. Certainly, the poem’s themes pertain not
only to the power of observation but also to the
power of finding beauty in the ugly through that
very observation. As Thierry Ramais points out
inModern American Poetry, ‘‘There is a strong
sense that repulsion, combined with fear...ofWHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? The Old Man and the Sea(1952) by Ernest
Hemingway is also a fisherman’s tale. The
novella similarly espouses respect and awe
for nature through the visceral experience of it.
Also considered a great American modernist
poet, Marianne Moore exercised a great deal of
artistic influence on Bishop and her work. Her
Complete Poems(1994) provides a comprehen-
sive overview of thismajor poet’s oeuvre.
Prominent confessional poet Robert Lowell
was second only to Moore in his influence on
Bishop. HisCollected Poems(2007) presents a
definitive example of confessional poetry.
Peter Gay’sModernism: The Lure of Heresy
(2007) is a nonfiction overview of the mod-
ernist movement. The volume includes dis-
cussion of both the visual arts and literature,
as well as profiles of the artists who founded
the movement.The Fish