Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish"
* The fish is a Soldier, even though he hadnt put up a fight at the beginning, just seeing the thread and previous hooks still attached to his "lips" shows that he survived numerous battles befor the one he was in now, perhaps he was too tired to fight his last battle.
* As he hung like ancient wallpaper, we can tell that the fish is an old one, he was shaped like "Full- Blown roses" I would interpret that to mean that his time is almost near.
* Im curious to know if by her letting the fish go back into the water, would it survive? the features and condition of the fish seems as though it was ready to give up, her catching him on the hook without a fight may have been his easy way out, rather than dying in the water. She said he had "sea-lice" and "Rags of green weed" hung down, Could it be he was already on his death bed IN the water?
* Elizabeth put human characteristics into the fish, "I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip" as she stood there with the fish she began to feel some of its "pain" she looked into its eyes with out getting a stare in return.
* She let it go.... To her it may be a good deed, but to the fish it can be the rebirth to the beginning of death... again.
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I agree with Nkgraham that Elizabeth Bishop used language that is characteristically human. I hadn't thought of the fish being an old soldier: the image of the fish's scales could be viewed as armor or a helmet; the wire that sill hung from his mouth and the bleeding scales could be signs of the wounds of a soldier.
ReplyDeleteMy opinion,however, is that "the shapes like full-blown roses" (14) are meant to be descriptive of the design 'on' the wallpaper not the shapes of the wallpaper that's hanging. My reasoning is that the author uses a colon after the word wallpaper (13) which is used to pause a thought and indicate that a complete sentence relating to the previous thought follows.
You're right about her attributing human characteristics, or more exactly, value, to the fish, though other imnages in the poem show that more clearly; the image you point to here I would suggest is at attempt to not do that, but to understand the fish in its "fishness." One of the centeral conflicts of the poem can be deduced from the way its imagery both demonstrates our appropriation of the non-human other for our purposes, and also questions that act of appropriation (imagery of the gills, the image you note above, the description of what its eye do and don't do, etc.).
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