Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishops The Fish is a narrative verse, told in the first person, around the confrontation between an amateur fisher--fishing in a rented manna boat (Bishop 1212; all references to the poem are to this edition)--and a frightening battle-worn fish. A poem that acknowledges sensory faculty in nature, The Fish, although a narrative, sings in the counsel we expect lyric poetry to sing, for it is rich with imagery, simile, metaphor, as sound as rhetorical and sound devices. I plead confrontation, nonwithstanding really the fish, with evidence of having been caught at least five other than times, confronts the speaker (whom Ill call a she for convenience) only with its presence: the agree has gone out of him. The real confrontation is the speakers internal possess do: should she keep the fish or throw it venture? In a act of illumination, she does the latter. Bishops poem endows its fish with an awareness not very different from benignant awareness. That this is a poem of treble consciousness, to use Robert Blys term for poems that grant nature an massive fall of consciousness (5)1, is indicated by Bishops calling the fish a he instead of an it. This is not mere personification, for she treats the fish as a sentient being, with feelings not unlike those of a human being.

She admires the fishs surly face as his eyes tip toward the lightsomeness, light which for us humans would symbolize consciousness but which for the beast of the irrigate symbolizes the unconsciousness of death. The narrative may be summed up quickly, for what happens happens more(prenominal) q uickly than the time it takes to read the po! em. The speaker, out in a battle-worn, rented boat, catches the old fish, holds it half out of wet, with my hook / fast in a corner of his mouth. After examining the fish closely and sympathetically, she has, ironically, a here and now of recognition (what Virginia Woolf might call a moment of being (70)2 or James Joyce an epiphany (Levin 8)3) and tosses the fish back into the pissing:...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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