sustains her and in her gratefulness for that epiph-
any, she lets the fish continue on his way.
Source:Leah Tieger, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Fish,’’ inPoetry
for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
William Logan
In the following excerpt, Logan discusses why Bishop
has often been misunderstood by critics and identifies
her ‘‘observing eye’’ as her true gift, as evidenced in
poems like ‘‘The Fish.’’
The beauty of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry lies
in the keenness of its reserve, and the duplicity
such reserve demands from the integral opera-
tions of language. Surely no poet in this century,
other than Auden, has written so many likable
poems or suffered more from the consoling atten-
tions of critics. Her readers cannot be blamed for
having mistaken her: it is the condition of a poet
of limited means to be mistaken, and usually in
her virtues rather than her vices.
Her vices were of course often taken for virtues.
Bishop was once pigeonholed as a poet of visual
scale, of specious ornamentation and frivolous
detail. She was a Florida coastline stocked with
rare birds, tediously pretty,litteredwithbeautiful
shells: ‘‘with these the monotonous, endless, sagging
coast-line / is delicately ornamented.’’ Robert Low-
ell wrote that ‘‘When we read her, we enter the
classical serenity of a new country,’’ and certainly
some poems appear to be merely structures of visual
seduction whose passivity, like landscape, is vio-
lently serene.
Poetry is a system of communication in which
the instinct of communication is often exceeded by
the poetic means. The means at such a moment
bear a burden in excess of their commitment, and
in a poet like Bishop the innocence of those means
may become part of the troubled drama of under-
standing, may agree to be the carrier of less inno-
cent messages. Poetry is not a code, because it is
more ambivalent than code—its most immaculate
expression may not seemgenuine unless betrayed
by the archeology buried beneath it.
‘‘Land lies in water,’’ begins ‘‘The Map,’’ the
first poem in her first book, marking at the outset
this devotion to appearances, even when appear-
ances are deceiving. Every schoolboy knows that
water lies on land (undersea mountains taller thanOil slick with rainbow colors(Image copyright Bryan Busovicki, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
The Fish