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.
And the victory that fills up the little rented
boat? To whom does it belong? It is a question by
no means simple. It belongs in part, of course, to
the fish who in the end manages to escape ‘‘the
terrible oxygen’’ and to return to his watery home.
But the greater victory surely belongs to the poet
herself who, despite her first satisfaction in win-
ning her prey, yet succeeds in quelling the sports-
woman’s aggressiveness to the point of being able
to respond to that in this creature which asks to be
saluted and admired. And thus, the fish being
allowed (in Coleridge’s phrase) ‘‘its moment of
self-exposition,’’ everything becomes ‘‘rainbow,
rainbow, rainbow!’’
Source:Nathan A. Scott, Jr., ‘‘Elizabeth Bishop: Poet with-
out Myth,’’ inVirginia Quarterly Review,Vol.60,No.2,
Spring 1984, pp. 255–75.
Sources
Bishop, Elizabeth, ‘‘The Fish,’’ inThe Complete Poems
1927–1979, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Cone, Temple, ‘‘Bishop, Elizabeth,’’The Scribner Encyclo-
pedia of American Lives Thematic Series: The 1960s, edited
by William L. O’Neill and Kenneth T. Jackson, 2 vols.,
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003.
Costello, Bonnie, ‘‘Attractive Mortality,’’ inModern Amer-
ican Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/
bishop/fish.htm (accessed January 7, 2009); originally pub-
lished inElizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery,Harvard
University Press, 1991, pp. 63–64.
———, ‘‘Narrative Secrets, Lyric Openings: Stevens and
Bishop,’’ inModern American Poetry, http://www.english
.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/fish.htm (accessed Jan-
uary 7, 2009); originally published in theWallace Stevens
Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall 1995, pp. 184–85.
Doreski, C. K., Review of ‘‘The Fish,’’ by Elizabeth Bishop,
inModern American Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/
maps/poets/a_f/bishop/fish.htm (accessed January 7, 2009);
originally published inElizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of
Language, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Ferry, Anne, ‘‘The Anthologizing of Elizabeth Bishop,’’
inRaritan, Vol. 19, No. 3, Winter 2000, p. 37ff.
Lerner, Laurence, ‘‘What Is Confessional Poetry?’’ in
Critical Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, June 1987, pp. 46–66.
McCorkle, James, Review of ‘‘The Fish,’’ inModern Amer-
ican Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/
bishop/fish.htm (accessed January 7, 2009); originally pub-
lished inThe Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Intercon-
nection in Five Postmodern American Poets,University
Press of Virginia, 1989.
Miller, Brett C.,Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of
It, University of California Press, 1995.
‘‘Modernism and Experimentation: 1914–1945,’’ inOutline
of American Literature,rev.ed.,December2006,http://
usa.usembassy.de/etexts/oal/lit6.htm (accessed January 7,
2009).
Moore, Marianne, ‘‘A Modest Expert,’’ in theNation,
Vol. 163, No. 13, September 28, 1946, p. 354.
Ramais, Thierry, Review of ‘‘The Fish,’’ by Elizabeth Bishop,
inModern American Poetry, 2004, http://www.english uiuc
.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/fish.htm (accessed January 7,
2009); originally published inArizona Quarterly,Vol.38.
No. 4, Winter 1982.
Scott, Nathan A., Jr., ‘‘Elizabeth Bishop: Poet without
Myth,’’ in theVirginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 60, No. 2,
Spring 1984, pp. 255–75.
Wood, Michael, ‘‘RSVP,’’ in theNew York Review of
Books, Vol. 24, No. 10, June 9, 1977, pp. 29–30.Further Reading
Bishop, Elizabeth,The Collected Prose, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1984.
This definitive volume presents a look at Bish-
op’s nonpoetic works. The volume contains
both short stories and nonfiction essays.
Goldstein, Lorrie,Elizabeth Bishop: A Biography of a
Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1993.
This literary biography closely examines Bish-
op’s work in light of her life. The volume is
essential reading for any student interested in
Bishop’s oeuvre.
Lowell, Robert, and Elizabeth Bishop,Words in Air: The
Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and
Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia
Hamilton, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
A collection of thirty years’ worth of corre-
spondence between two major American poets,
this book is essential to any study of Bishop and
her work. Notably, both Lowell and Bishop
struggled with depression and alcoholism.
Underwood, Lamar, ed.,The Greatest Fishing Stories Ever
Told: Twenty-Eight Unforgettable Fishing Tales,Lyons
Press, 2004.
This collection of fishing tales provides an inter-
esting complement to Bishop’s poem. The volume
includes stories by Ellington White, Odell She-
pard, and A. J. McLane, among several others.The Fish