LITR 5535: American
Romanticism
Student Poetry Presentation 2006
Monday 13 November:
poetry: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish,” N 2650
poetry reader / discussion leader: Ashley Huff
Elizabeth Bishop
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911
Father died when she was 8 months old
Mother had many breakdowns and was institutionalized when she was 5
Lived with her maternal grandparents until she was “kidnapped” by her paternal grandparents
Often very sick with a variety of illnesses throughout her childhood
Graduated from Vassar College in 1934
Marianne Moore had a great impact on her future and led her to see the life as a poet as more appealing than her plans to attend medical school
Marianne Moore also helped her edit and gave commentary on “The Fish”
The Fish was one of her most popular poems, written in 1946, and one that she often submitted for contributions to Poetry books and anthologies
Received a Pulitzer Prize for her work for her combined volume of North and South and A Cold Spring in 1955.
She was the first woman and first American to receive the Books Abroad Neustadt International Prize for Literature
She was friends with many famous influential people including Robert Lowell, and she had friends in beneficial places that got her work out and helped her to create a name early in her career; such as friends in Review magazines Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, and Lloyd Frankenberg
She died in 1979
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
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.
1946
Correspondence on "The Fish" by Lynn Keller
Elizabeth Bishop to Marianne Moore: January 14, 1939
The other day I caught a parrot fish, almost by accident. They are ravishing fish – all iridescent, with a silver edge to each scale, and a real bill-like mouth just like turquoise; the eye is very big and wild, and the eyeball is turquoise too – they are very humorous-looking fish. A man on the dock immediately scraped off three scales, then threw him back; he was sure it wouldn’t hurt him. I’m enclosing one [scale], if I can find it. …
From One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop, Ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 79.
Elizabeth Bishop to Marianne Moore: February 5, 1940
I have one Key West story that I must tell you. It is more like the place than anything I can think of. The other day I went to the china closet to get a little white bowl to put some flowers in and when I was rinsing it I noticed some little black specks. I said to Mrs. Almyda, "I think we must have mice" – but she took the bowl over to the light and studied it and after a while she said, "No, them’s lizard." …
I am so much longing to see some of your new poems. I am sending you a real "trifle" ["the Fish"]. I’m afraid it is very bad and, if not like Robert Frost, perhaps like Ernest Hemingway! I left the last line on so it wouldn’t be, but I don’t know …
From One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop, Ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 87.
Questions to reflect on…
Bishop was someone who went through several bad things in her lifetime, most notably her family situation in her early childhood. It has been said that her poetry represents a sense of great loss.
1) What aspects of loss, suffering, pain are seen in her poem “The Fish” and what other Romantic elements are present?
2) In what ways is this poem NOT romantic, as she falls into the post-romantic time frame?
3) What do you think of her use of color descriptions?
4) Is there a connection between her and any other author we have read thus far in the class?
My notes:
1) Aspects of loss, suffering, pain: “hook fast in a corner of his mouth.”
“lost through the age”
“infested with tiny white sea lice”
“cut so badly”
“their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth”
Other elements: Sublime
“shapes like full blown roses…speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime…underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down”
“terrible oxygen”
“frightening gills”
“where oil had spread a rainbow”
2) How NOT romantic?
Perhaps based on a real situation that took place, as the commentary shows a more realist view than romantic
Shows how man affects nature in a negative way, almost as if nature is corrupt; like the toxins in the water that make the rainbow and the hooks in the mouth of the fish that plague him
Also presumes the fish is a HE and thus making this a more masculine view of nature instead of the feminine “mother nature” we generally associate with things in nature
She’s observing something and giving a report of what she sees and observes about this fish, an investigation into his past perhaps and setting him free from his bonds. Similar to her in that she had to overcome a lot of things in her past to be able to create a life for herself. One commentary suggested that it ends on a triumphant note with the suggestion that creativity is produced through destruction so suffering she concludes in the beginning of imagination.
3) Her use of color descriptions very vivid and perhaps are just used as a mechanism to make the reader feel as if they are seeing this fish the way she is seeing it at that moment
“brown skin”
“rosettes of lime”
“white sea lice”
“green weed”
“white flesh”
“dramatic reds and blacks”
“pink swim-bladder”
“his eyes...shallower and yellowed”
“green line”
“fine black thread”
4) Connection between her and other writers?
Perhaps Faulkner in that she lists things chronologically as she is observing them also the emphasis on loss that is in their writings. Also one commentator compared his “The Bear” from Go Down Moses with Bishop’s “The Fish” because they both view nature in masculine terms as he calls the buck “grandfather” and she refers to the fish as “He”
Also James’s work in viewing people as passive, things just seem to happen to them, such as Isabel in Portrait of a Lady and in “The Fish” there is no resistance or fighting back, the fish is very passive to the things going on and in way tries to alter or change the things happening to them
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