The Fish

The use of figurative language to create striking images and set a mood is an important poetic device, and Bishop employs it widely in “The Fish.” Imagery includes not only the pictures and visuals that a poet creates with words, but any description which carries sensory weight and appeals not only to sight but to smell, touch, sound, and taste. This is one of Bishop’s hallmarks, and in “The Fish,” images are precise, employing multiple senses. For example, the details of the fish’s body, from the rough barnacles blossoming on it and the shiny entrails, to its coarse and feathery flesh use visual and tactile descriptors to bring the fish to life for the reader.

These details are evocative not only because they appeal to the senses, but because they often seek to find correspondences in two very different things. It is surprising to hear a fish’s flesh described as “packed in like feathers” (Line 28) because one typically associates feathers with birds which, as creatures of the sky, are seen in opposition to fish. It is this freshness, this new way of seeing common things that makes the image effective.

These images are very often created using the figurative devices of simile and metaphor, which are another defining feature of the poetic use of language. Both simile and metaphor transfer the qualities of one thing to another, so the poet can better communicate to the reader what something feels or seems like. In “The Fish,” Bishop builds layer after layer of simile and metaphor in her attempt to communicate  the properties of the fish, by saying what it is like. Aside from some of the examples given above, others are: likening the fish to an old warrior, the hanging seaweed to rags, and the frayed lines in the fish’s mouth to a “beard of wisdom” (Line 63).

“The Fish” shares features in common with the litany, an old literary device which relies on the power of naming a long series of things or creating a long list or catalog. Originally used in religious texts, it can often have a chant-like feel. The effectiveness of a litany can be in the sheer weight of things piled up one upon the other, whether they be names, adjectives, objects, or images. The fact that “The Fish” is one long stanza without visual breaks adds to the feel of a litany, as her speaker methodically describes the outside, the inside, and the history of the fish for the reader. Bishop’s poem is so weighted with images and objects following one right after the other that by the end, the speaker has reached an almost trance-like state that is overwhelmed by the totality of the fish, as represented through spectrum of color in a rainbow.