Jennifer Crumpler Tammy Frailly ENG 233 IN1 22 October 4, 2013 The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop Bishop writes

a poem called The Fish, which describes a fish being caught by a fisherman but the fish is let go at the end because the fisherman feels the fish has suffered enough. Elizabeth did not have any recollections of the death of her father because she was eight months old. But, for the sake of her Fathers death this allowed her Mother to have a series of breakdowns and her Mother was institutionalized when Elizabeth was five years old. This will explain why Elizabeth had the most critical events happen before she was eight years old. Bishops life was a lot like the fish because Bishop still would take the abuse but in the end she was a fighter and she made a very good life for herself. When you are a little child you create things in pictures or drawing to release a painful or hurtful experience. So, Bishop wrote many poems about her own life with the same unflinching gaze she turned on the landscapes that so compelled her (Elizabeth Bishop 1911-1979). The poem The Fish will open up the next level of observations that will set the tone of each stanza through the eyes of a little girl. When reading each line of the poetry you start to feel the release of the painful experience. The fish is caught on the hook with some of his body in the water and some out. Then, the fish did not fight at all. It really set the tone of observation because when you are caught on something you are hooked on whatever and you cannot fight it, so there is no use trying. Imagine your shirt being caught on a nail, you are not getting off the nail until you completely ripe your shirt or someone helps you. The fish is caught and this next quote will give

you a description it becomes a realization, he is not going anywhere. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely (line 7-9). The fish is making a sound like a pig, bruised, and beat-up taken advantage of and nowhere to go. The narrator mentions in line 14, He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime an infected with tiny white-sea lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down.The fish hanging there on a hook with the reel in their hand holding it up in the sky and saying look at the fish, it is gross with the slimy and mossy green weed hanging from its mouth. The fish cannot breathe at this point because it is lifted up out of the water. But, Bishop addresses this in a beautiful line, line 22-33, while his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen-the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly , which give me the vision of the fish heavily breathing our air. The fish is hanging on to the only air he knows, but this could be his last day. So, the fisherman said I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but swallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass (lines 34-40). The fisherman envisioned the fish with a flowering message of old-timer that has been through a lot and is still alive. They could not go through with it, somehow this particular fish has been through enough. Now, it came close to living or dying, what will Bishop and the fish prefer to do? The narrator looks into the wide-eyed fish, yes, the fish is very scared. The narrator admired the angry face, the fisherman saw it, I admired his sullen face the mechanism of his jaw, then I saw (line 46-48). Again, Bishop sets the tone of a lost fish and a little girl. The fish is just an arm length away from winning a great battle with life, so Bishop and the fish come to realize that life is catching things a little at a time and you never forget how you got the scares to prove it. The fish suddenly realizes that two heavy lines have broken but the fish keeps pulling and

stretching, but when he snaps the line and it breaks, he gets away. When all the victory is won suddenly you realize your life is full and you no longer need it, just be released from it. Line 7576 until everything was a rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! At the end of every rainbow is a treasure of living.

Works Cited Bishop, Elizabeth. The Fish. The Norton Anthology of American Literature 8th ed, Vol. E. Ed. Nina Baym, and Robert S. Levine. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2012. 73-74. Print