Time not only causes an individual to age but it also takes away their strength to fight. Old age takes away people’s strength both physically and mentally. As people get older they have difficult time remember important events in their lives and they bones become fragile and weak. In the poem “ The Fish” Bishop writes “ I caught a tremendous fish … He didn’t fight” (Bishop). The speaker describes a scene where he caught a huge fish while fishing and noticed that the fish did not resist him being pulled in out of the water. The poem continues by stating “He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered … his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper” (Bishop). He describes the fish as being injured and unattractive overall. …show more content…
In the next stanza the author writes “While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen … I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed … scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare” (Bishop). In this stanza the author uses more descriptive details to appeal to the five senses of the reader by describing how vulnerable the fish actually is, reminding the readers that the fish is at the mercy of the speake. Furthermore, the author uses simile to compare the fish’s skin to a feather ( I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers (Bishop)). The author keeps on correlating the the fish’s unattractive appearance to decorative objects such as a rose and a feather, giving the readers a (somewhat) paradox, the ugly beauty. In the fifth stanza the author writes “ It was more like the tipping ... that from his lower lip … hung five old pieces of fish-line, … with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth” (Bishop). In this stanza the author describes the that fish already had five fishing hooks attached to its mouth. He suggest that the fish was able to fight of death five time in the past and starts to admire the fish for its strength. The author again uses more descriptive detail as noted
In Mark Doty’s “A Display of Mackerel”, Doty depicts a glorious group of mackerel perfectly united to suggest that humans should learn from them and act as a group to reach the same level of perfection. He describes simple mackerel on sale, but with the stunning image he portrays, they seem as valuable as gems: “Iridescent, watery/prismatics: think abalone,/the wildly rainbowed/mirror of a soapbubble sphere,/think sun on gasoline.” (9-13 Doty). The fish are remarkable in themselves, but their beauty supports the point of this poem, which is that there is “nothing about them/of individuality. Instead/they’re all exact expressions/of the one soul,/each a perfect fulfilment/of heaven’s template” (17-22 Doty). The earlier imagery creates a feeling
The book has vivid imagery making the reader imaging as if her or she was their right beside him in his whole investigation. Such as “In the winter of 1978, through, a fierce blizzard hit southern Connecticut. Temperatures were often below zero and at one point it snowed for thirty-three hours straight. Perhaps it was the cold that killed the fish, or the copper sulfate I helped the caretaker drag through the pond the previous summer to manage the algal blooms, or maybe even the fishermen id noticed trespassing on the estate one day, scoping out my grounds. But whatever caused it, after that never again did I spot a living fish in that pond again.”(Greenberg 12-13). This quote shows how good his imagery, tone, and diction is, when I read it all I could think of is that storm and the pond. The author has an excellent writing style and keeps the reader wanting more. Even though the book has a lot of good things for it the only thing I would tell the author would to give more connections of him to the story. It says “The transformation of salmon and sea bass from kingly and holiday wild fish into everyday farmed variants is a trend that continues with different animals around the globe.”(Greenberg 195). In every chapter about each of the fish it gives some connections to him but it would make it even
Kim Addonizio’s “First Poem for You” portrays a speaker who contemplates the state of their romantic relationship though reflections of their partner’s tattoos. Addressing their partner, the speaker ambivalence towards the merits of the relationship, the speaker unhappily remains with their partner. Through the usage of contrasting visual and kinesthetic imagery, the speaker revels the reasons of their inability to embrace the relationship and showcases the extent of their paralysis. Exploring this theme, the poem discusses how inner conflicts can be powerful paralyzers.
In Drea Knufken’s essay entitled “Help, We’re Drowning!: Please Pay Attention to Our Disaster,” the horrific Colorado flood is experienced and the reactions of worldly citizens are examined (510-512). The author’s tone for this formal essay seems to be quite reflective, shifting to a tone of frustration and even disappointment. Knufken has a reflective tone especially during the first few paragraphs of the essay. According to Drea Knufken, a freelance writer, ghostwriter and editor, “when many of my out-of-town friends, family and colleagues reacted to the flood with a torrent of indifference, I realized something. As a society, we’ve acquired an immunity to crisis. We scan through headlines without understanding how stories impact people,
Firstly, the poisonous fish is a symbol of the mysterious swift but sudden death that his mother suffered from trying to cook for a woman whom they give no further details other than her name. The fact that the process of cleaning the fish is so dangerous and the people continue to eat it makes the reader wonder why they are willing to take the risk of death. The fish is mysterious because one wrong move on the
The poems “Sea Rose” by H.D and “Vague Poem” by Elizabeth Bishop were both written by two women who took over the Victorian era. H.D’s works of writing were best known as experimental reflecting the themes of feminism and modernism from 1911-1961. While Bishop’s works possessed themes of longing to belong and grief. Both poems use imagery, which helps to make the poem more concrete for the reader. Using imagery helps to paint a picture with specific images, so we can understand it better and analyze it more. The poems “Sea Rose” and “Vague Poem” both use the metaphor of a rose to represent something that can harm you, even though it has beauty.
The poet seems to share the same pain with the fish, observing the scene and enjoying the detail just like enjoying an artwork. The poet lets the fish go because she is totally touched by the process between life and death; she loves life but, meanwhile, is deeply hurt by the life. In the poem, the fish has no fear towards her; the desire to live is in the moving and tragic details when she faces the death.
In the second section, lines fourteen to twenty-four, the speaker seems to reach her destination and with the use of metaphors describes what she sees. The speaker describes the pond as ?black and empty?, all that can be seen is a bundle of reeds. But to the speakers surprise, this pond was not as empty and lifeless as she had thought, the reeds were actually a small group of egrets, three to be exact.
Throughout the first half of the poem, Bishop describes the fish as an inanimate object, as reflected in her comparisons, which uses objects to describe the fish as shown when she says, “Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper…”. (9-11) She chooses a wallpaper to describe the skin of the fish in order to accurately portray its battered and worn state; her decision to compare the fish to an inorganic ...
The first element to analyze when looking at “The Fish” is figurative language. The reader is drawn to this element because of its heavy emphasis throughout the poem. Elizabeth Bishop profusely uses similes with the intention of heightening the sensation of fishing. She writes:
The speaker describes the fish, and then the relationship they create with the fish. It appears that there is only one overall theme which means that the entire poem supports a common moral. The speaker immediately identifies their role as first person, although without a gender. The rhetoric is pretty straightforward and when the speaker talks about the relationship they create with the fish we know it's strictly about the relationship. It could be slightly persuasive at the beginning when the speaker begins to pity the fish because that might would imply that the speaker is an empathetic human. The positive connotation used all throughout the poem suggest that the speaker respects this fish. This poem doesn’t contain subtle hints to lead the reader to believe that there are any deeper themes. The syntax used in this poem is not convoluted, but it is skillfully created because it is full of imagery. Being as the poem was written in 2011, the modern language correlates with the syntax. The sentences are mostly compound because they are full of descriptive words that are either describing the fish or the way the speaker felt towards the fish. The word choice used in this poem indicates that our speaker was an average educated person. Since this is considered a free verse poem, there aren't many visual patterns in this poem besides the fact that there is only one stanza. The only thing that might catch the reader's eye is that the breaks in the lines could pass as the speaker's thought process. For example in lines 42 through 44, the speaker says “to return my start. - It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light” (42-4). The way the breaks and dashes are positioned some may seem like they are interrupting a thought and then coming back to it. There is not an official rhyme scheme and most of the sentences follow a normal subject verb agreement. Overall this poem combines a skillfully crafted diction, syntax
I’ve explained that Fish used humor, but he did so through exaggeration and irony. In the first stanza, the speaker uses a hyperbole that the weatherman burst into flame because it was so hot. Later, s/he rants “[third-graders] are out there having full on sex!” (16). Are eight-year-olds actually having sex? Probably not. In the next line, s/he juxtaposes “innocent” and “blowjob” (17), as if blowjobs are in any way innocent. Each of these instances makes the reader pause and think, “Yeah right,” along with a head shake or a laugh. “Cotton- / candy pink panties” (18-19) and “corn on the cob” (27) are examples of alliteration which help the flow of the poem, especially when read aloud. The speaker also ends with a simile and a metaphor suggesting “you’ll feel like you’re / swimming in who you were, and you’ll cautiously dive into who you’re / becoming
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.
The fish withholds a great part in this book. The Old Man and the Sea is a book that’s about a small town where the residents revolve their lives around fishing. The fish is a symbol of beauty and it is a greatly admired creature to these people. An example from the book is on page 49. Santiago has been fishing for 84 days and decides not to return home without a fish on the 85th day. On the 85th day, alone in the boat, he manages to hook an enormous marlin, the biggest fish he's ever seen in all his life. The fish is larger and stronger than Santiago. Santiago's experienced fishing skills and his will to catch and survive push him to pursue the fish for many days and many miles out to sea.
'He was very fond of flying fish as they were his principal friends in the ocean'; (29.) It was that the ocean was just like him, lonely and isolated. It was a comforting thought that these animals were always there with him, as if they were guiding him throughout his quest. These fish were companions to Santiago, they made him feel as if there was always someone there, always watching. He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and the ineffectual movements of the bird. 'That school has gotten away from me, he thought. They are moving too fast and too far. But perhaps I will pick up a stray and perhaps my big fish is around them. My big fish must be somewhere'; (34-5). Santiago related to the fish as family, like brothers and a hope to gain respect by the constant battles he has with them. ' No flying fish broke the surface and there was no scattering of bait fish. But as the old man watched, a small tuna rose in the air, turned and dropped head first into the water. The tuna shone silver in the sun and after he had dropped back into the water another and another rose and they were jumping in all directions, churning the water and leaping in long jumps after the bait. They were circling it and driving it'; (38) Not only were the fish family, it was also a long, drawn out food for Santiago.