The Fish (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Elizabeth Bishop
- First Published: 1946
- Type of Work: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
The Poem
Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” is a highly compact meditative lyric of seventy-six free verse lines, relaying a first person narrator’s experience of catching a “tremendous” fish, coming to an empathetic understanding and appreciation of it, and subsequently letting it go. The narrator’s unspoken and self-transforming reaction to this fish, conveyed largely through imagery, contains the poem’s theme and underlies the narrator’s external actions. The poem begins significantly with the fish already caught and the speaker’s awareness that the fish had...
[The entire page is 1532 words long]
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