LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Student Student Poetry Presentation, summer 2002

poetry: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish,” N 2612
poetry reader: Natasha Bondar
recorder: Lynda Williams
Tuesday, 25 June  

            Having begun the poetry presentation by reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” I continued by proposing that the poem revealed an interplay of both realistic and romantic elements. In the recounting of his/her experience, the poem’s speaker continually imposes a romantic interpretation on the realistic details of the fishing expedition. For instance, the stark realism of “[h]e hung a grunting weight” transitions into poetic “battered and venerable / and homely”; and the straight forward “the pink swim-bladder” is followed by a poetic twist of “like a big peony.”  And the plain recounting of “ I looked into his eyes / . . . They shifted a little, but not / to return my stare” transforms into a delicate “[i]t was more like tipping an object toward the light,” a gossamer-like simile. I describe the speaker’s interpretation as romantic because it bears a mark of an individual’s perception, imposing meaning onto the natural world.

Correspondence is another major romantic element present in the poem. Here the speaker’s enlightenment transfigures all that surrounds him/her. The above-mentioned realistic-romantic interchange develops into an explicit expression of correspondence in the following lines: “I stared and stared / and victory filled up / the little rented boat / . . . – until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”  Curiously, Bishop’s depiction of the speaker’s enlightenment is unspecified; it is empty, like Whitman’s in “Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry,” in that she does not say what it is that the speaker realizes (although this realization is implied).  This emptiness allows the reader to project herself into the void, thus identifying more firmly with the experience of the fisherman.

After the discussion of the romantic and realistic features of the poem, I posed the following question to the class: (1) did my classmates agreed with the assertion that the poem had both realistic and romantic elements and (2) what effect did the interplay of realism and romanticism have in the poem?  All assented that the poem had both realistic and romantic characteristics.  Jennifer explained that she perceived the poem as primarily realistic, although she agreed that the poem had a romantic element as well. In response to the second half of the question, Kelly proposed that the interplay of realism and romanticism supported the idea of transcendence. The poet’s use of realism/romanticism interchange aids her building of the notion of transcending the mundane to move to a more elevated position; the poem’s ending presents a culmination of this process.

Having heard Kelly’s argument, I resolved my questioning of whether realistic or romantic element was more prominent in the poem, deciding that the poem was leaning toward romanticism more heavily because the realistic element was there primarily to be transcended. As we continued to deliberate on whether the poem was more romantic or realistic, Crisann proposed to examine the characters of the poem (whereas we have been discussing its language primarily until then), suggesting that the fisherman was a realistic figure while the fish romantic.

At the end of the discussion Dr. White pointed out that the poem’s lines describing the inner structure of the fish (“I thought of the course white flesh / packed in like feathers, / the big bones and the little bones, / the dramatic reds and blacks / of his shiny entrails”) reminded him of a gothic temple, with its red, white, and black tones. I wrapped up the presentation by commenting that the attractiveness of Bishop’s poem lies in its fusion of two literary traditions.  This marriage of realism and romanticism is particularly appealing because it corresponds to human nature, which is both reasonable and passionate.