Response to The Fish By Elizabeth Bishop

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Response to "The Fish" By Elizabeth Bishop

I chose to respond to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" because the poem seems so simple, yet there is much to gather from reading it. This is a narrative poem told in the first person about a woman who catches a fish on a rented boat and, after staring at him for a while, decides to throw him back. The narrator of this poem goes through a series of stages in which she is at first detached from the fish, then intrigued by him, and then finally sympathetic towards him.

In the very first lines of Bishop's poem, the narrator catches the fish and treats him as such. "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" (Bishop 665). She has just caught a fish and is in the process of bringing him onto the boat. She seems very disconnected from this fish, who is just the target of a sport--fishing. When she gets the chance to take a good look at him, it seems that her view changes from detachment to curiosity and admiration.

She notices that the fish doesn't struggl...

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