The Goose Fish (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Howard Nemerov
- First Published: 1955
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Death or dying, Life and death, Beaches or seashores, Moon or moons, Fishes, Comedians
The Poem
“The Goose Fish” is a study in irony, and the irony begins with the title. On one level, the title is straightforward and appropriate, because the goose fish occupies center stage in the poem’s “story”: It is assigned many roles, including onlooker, comedian, optimist, emblem, and patriarch. The irony is that the fish is dead, so one might well wonder how significant any of those roles might be. The poem is in iambic tetrameter and trimeter, in five stanzas of nine lines each (eight lines of tetrameter and the last of trimeter).
The first stanza sets...
[The entire page is 1542 words long]
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