Question

What is a suggestions for a thesis for "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop?I am writing a essay on this poem but need 3 points for a thesis. I was trying to compare how the fish is a symbol of nature and it struggles because of mankind but do not know what to write.

Accepted Answer

If you want to argue that the fish is a symbol of nature, you need to think about the way in which the speaker's attitude towards the fish changes and how she ends up letting the fish go at the end of the poem when she comes to experience an epiphany about the fish and about nature at large. You might like to consider the following description of the fish:

...and then I sawthat from his lower lip--if you could call it a lipgrim, wet, and weaponlike,hung five old pieces of fish-line,or four and a wire leaderwith the swivel still attached,with all their five big hooksgrown firmly in his mouth.

In a powerful simile, the speaker describes these various proofs of the fish's survival against mankind, saying they are "Like medals with their ribbons." It is this evidence of the way that the fish has struggled against mankind successfully for so long that causes "victory" to fill the "rented boat." It is this epiphany that demonstrates the speaker's awareness of the precarious nature of the human condition. In a sense, the speaker identifies with the fish, which allows her to move beyond the dichotomy of victor and victim and to attain an understanding of the way that the fish has suffered for so long at the hands of man. Using this argument, you can easily argue that the fish becomes a symbol of nature who is under attack because of man, but the speaker moves beyond this confrontation to identify with the fish and to see the similarities in their position.

Answer

I would first establish that the fish is a symbol of nature by quoting the imagery the narrator uses that shows its intimate connection to nature:

He was speckled with barnacles,fine rosettes of lime,and infestedwith tiny white sea-lice,and underneath two or threerags of green weed hung down.

Second, I would show that Bishop introduces a conflict between nature and civilization through also having the narrator use imagery about the fish that associates it with civilization. The narrator struggles between her understanding of the fish as a natural creature and her desire to deny the fish's essential nature as a free creature by domesticating it, making it an artifact of human culture:

his brown skin hung in stripslike ancient wallpaper,and its pattern of darker brownwas like wallpaper:shapes like full-blown roses

Finally, I would note that the narrator's encounter with looking into the eyes of the fish decides her attitude toward the fish. She goes from the triumph of having caught it as another possession she can own to a realization that it is not an object to possess but a creature she must set free.
A thesis might say something like this: "After an encounter with a fish that symbolizes the nature we humans too often harm through trying to possess it, the narrator acknowledges that the fish is a natural creature that deserves its freedom. As a result, she lets it go."

Answer

Elizabeth Bishop is a poet of the ut pictura poesis tradition: Art, like nature speaks.  Her poem, "The Fish" is pictorial in its descriptive imagery of the "tremendous fish" whose skin is likened to antique wallpaper with defining rosettes.  This fish is the natural object that opens the referential world of art: "--until everything/was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!"
Therefore, a thesis for this poem by Bishop can be a statement of how the single fish is, indeed, "tremendous" because it awakens the speaker to the victory of them both as the speaker learns from its death to read the world around her. For, this is the meaning of the lines,

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat

In this poem the speaker looks into the eyes of the fish and, thus, becomes a respecter of life.  With her exclamation of renewal--"rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!" the speaker lets the fish go in an act of cleansing, as well as an act of recognition of the greater world of nature over the human.

The Fish

What is a suggestions for a thesis for "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop? I am writing a essay on this poem but need 3 points for a thesis. I was trying to compare how the fish is a symbol of nature and it struggles because of mankind but do not know what to write.

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