An Analysis Of The Fish By Elizabeth Bishop

The life of Elizabeth Bishop commences and ends with sorrow, heartbreak, and tragedy. Promptly after she was ripped away from her mentally unstable mother, Bishop was silently stamped as an outsider set to wander a path of outcasts until her dying days. Thus she interlaced her life themes of grief, the struggle to belong, and trauma into her poems through imagery and by doing so, audiences and fanatics of Bishop are still enchanted with her works today. Momentous feelings such as anxiety, identity crisis, empathy, courage, and sacrifice are of the inner self-psyche and cause immense or overwhelming feelings of pride or sorrow. Bishop plays with these feelings in her poem “The Fish” through the use of repetition and of imagery throughout the poem. Due to Bishops hardships throughout the entirety of her life, it is exceptional how she implements the momentous feeling of empathy within her poem “The Fish”. The poem itself centres around the speaker—whom is presumably Bishop herself— catches a “tremendous fish” (1) which awestruck her in the most peculiar of ways; these include how she views the fish itself as another “element”, and the

Bishop dictates that: “and underneath two or three / rags of weed hung down./While his gills were breathing in/the terrible oxygen.”(20-23) once again using the tactical imagery around the word “hung” she also refers to the fish breathing in “terrible oxygen”. This then sets the fisher up for an epiphany about the elements that both the fish and fisher thrive in. Bishop creates this sense of dichotomy between the two species, as the encounter between the ‘Human’ and the ‘Other’ simply by using imagery to depict the poison of the oxygen, thus creating the barrier. By doing so, Bishop provides the reader with a feeling of an identity crisis and that the reader grasps the concept of man versus beast in everyday life, not simply in just heroic