Tone Of The Poem The Fish

991 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Elizabeth bishop poetry essay

Over the course of Elizabeth Bishop's life, Bishop was known to have a rough start due to her earlier childhood experiences. At a young age, Bishop lost her father and her mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital due to her mental illness. Many of Bishop's crafts reflect her keen eye and attention to detail, as well as the events in her life that have helped shape her writing. In Elizabeth Bishop’s most notable poem "The Fish", there are many strategies readers can note about her work.One can gather that there exists a deeper more intuitive element to the poem than what is provided for readers to gather from the outside. When reading and observing the poem, "The Fish", Bishop provides her audience with selected types of tones and moods …show more content…

The speaker says proudly, "I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat "(Bishop, Elizabeth. "The Fish."). We can hear the boast in her voice as if she had just achieved a mission she had longed to reach. The speaker observes her catch with great detail as if to study and absorb every detail of the fish's appearance including its flaws. She begins to grow an attachment and a connection with the fish as she is holding it up, almost like a holding a trophy. She writes, "He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down" (Bishop, Elizabeth. "The Fish."). As she begins to describe the fish in more detail, we hear a more judgmental tone. We almost begin to wonder if perhaps, Bishop's keen eye is only watchful of what is on the outside of the fish, not of the things such as how the fish evolved to be this tremendous fish she describes. She later demonstrates a deeper understanding of the fish this towards the end when says, "I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw" (Bishop, Elizabeth. "The Fish."). This line is evident of the growing respect and curiosity the narrator develops for the fish, leading up to the end where she finally decides to liberate the fish. The speaker is slowly and surely over the course of this poem, considering how tough this fish must be and how much he has had to

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Suffering Mirrored By Nikky Finny

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    In fact, the fish story has become a metaphor reflecting the technique used by Finney for expressing the difficult thing beautifully, to compress a poem choosing what should be kept in a poem and what should be thrown away (Finney, “Interview with: Nikky Finney”), to express whatever difficult feelings she has without much noise or rage. Finney sees activism as a basic part of her work.

    Read More

  • Mark Doty's A Display Of Mackerel

    216 Words  | 1 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Four Fish Summary

    505 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Elizabeth Bishop's "the Fish" and "One Art"

    446 Words  | 1 Pages

    "The Fish" is filled with poetic images all for the reason of making a powerful point,

    Read More

  • Examples Of Indirect Characterization: The Cat In The Hat

    1200 Words  | 3 Pages

    Effect on others: Throughout the first three quarters of the story, three different illustrations portray the fish scowling at the cat (11, 25, and 37) immediately after each of the cat’s activities. When the cat returns to clean up his mess at the end of the story the fish is shown with a smile on his face (57). Explaining the scowls on the fish’s face support the argument that the cat’s behavior at the beginning of the story is not acceptable to the fish. The fish’s smile at the end of the story reveals that the cat is engaging in behavior that is now acceptance to the

    Read More

  • Imagery and Diction in The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    The title of the poem itself dictates the simplicity Bishop wishes to convey regarding the narrator's view of his catch. A fish is a creature that has preceded the creation of man on this planet. Therefore, Bishop supplies the reader with a subject that is essentially constant and eternal, like life itself. In further examination of this idea the narrator is, in relation to the fish, very young, which helps introduce the theme of deceptive appearances in conjunction with age by building off the notion that youth is ignorant and quick to judge.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Jose Torres 'Essay' A View From The Bridge

    1028 Words  | 3 Pages

    He teaches the kid what to do in order to successfully reel in a large, beautiful fish. Ironically, the narrator is the one who learns from the kid in the end. At the beginning of the story, everything is described negatively, from the description of the kid as a “lumpy little guy with baggy shorts” to his “stupid-looking ’50s-style wrap-around sunglasses” and “beat-up rod”(152). Through his encounter with the boy, the narrator is able to see life in a different way, most notable from how he describes the caught tarpon as heavy, silvery white, and how it also has beautiful red fins (154). Through the course of the story, the narrator’s pessimistic attitude changes to an optimistic one, and this change reveals how inspiring this exchange between two strangers is. This story as a whole reveals that learning also revolves around interactions between other people, not only between people and their natural surroundings and

    Read More

  • Sharks Do Not Deserve Their Reputation

    553 Words  | 2 Pages

    A fisherman sits in his boat on the open sea, alone save for the fish below the water’s surface. The calmness of the ocean is disrupted by something underneath, something big. Fear seeps through the fisherman’s heart as he sees the shiny gray dorsal fin pierce the sun-glinted surface of the ocean. The creature stops its ritual and pulls its head out of the water, revealing the face of a great white: scars from countless battles in the ocean’s depths, a mouth full of lethal daggers, and dark, savage eyes.

    Read More

  • Billy Collins

    1505 Words  | 4 Pages

    Just as the surroundings would seem different through color slides, he asks the readers to see the world from diverse viewpoints while reading and writing poems. Moreover, by listening to the poem’s hive, dropping a mouse, and walking inside its room, Collins encourages readers to discover the concealed depth of poetry. He comments that the readers should enjoy the poem in a way they would like to water ski.... ... middle of paper ... ...

    Read More

  • Sorrow Of Sorrow

    996 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Essay 1

    1806 Words  | 4 Pages

    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 ...

    Read More

  • Nature in the Poems: The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop and The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke

    518 Words  | 2 Pages

    Two poems, “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop and “The Meadow Mouse” by Theodore Roethke, include characters who experience, learn, and emote with nature. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” a fisherman catches a fish, likely with the intention to kill it, but frees it when he sees the world through the eyes of the fish. In Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Meadow Mouse,” a man finds a meadow mouse with the intention of keeping it and shielding it from nature, but it escapes into the wild. These poems, set in different scenarios, highlight two scenarios where men and women interact with nature and experience it in their own ways.

    Read More

  • Analysis of The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

    976 Words  | 2 Pages

    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:

    Read More

  • The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

    885 Words  | 2 Pages

    With fewer than fifty published poems Elizabeth Bishop is not one of the most prominent poets of our time. She is however well known for her use of imagery and her ability to convey the narrator?s emotions to the reader. In her vividly visual poem 'The Fish', the reader is exposed to a story wherein the use of language not only draws the reader into the story but causes the images to transcend the written work. In the poem, Bishop makes use of numerous literary devices such as similes, adjectives, and descriptive language. All of these devices culminate in the reader experiencing a precise and detailed mental image of the poem's setting and happenings.

    Read More

  • Nature and Humanity, a Comparison of Poems

    1540 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...nizes the fish because, just like the fish, people fight daily battles to survive in life. This humanization of the fish enables the speaker to relate and respect him, and therefore, ultimately leads to his release.

    Read More

More about Tone Of The Poem The Fish

Open Document