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I
caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my
hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing
in
the terrible oxygen
— the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little
bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than
mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but
not
to return my stare.
— It was more like the
tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
— if you could call it
a lip —
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the
end
where he broke it, two heavier
lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain
and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
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about the poet
Elizabeth Bishop
(1911-1979) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her
father died before she was a year old; four years later,
when her mother suffered a mental breakdown, Bishop was
taken...(more)
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Understanding a poem's cultural
context can often help our understanding of some aspect
of the work itself. The social, political, and economic
currents surrounding a writer can, and usually do, affect
the writer's literary creation. Sometimes this influence
is direct, as evidenced in the title of John Milton's
sonnet "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont."
Sometimes it is more allegorical, as is the case for
"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.
Sometimes it seems so slight that the cultural context
of a work may be important only because it seems reasonable
to assume that all writers are to some degree products
of their time.
We have collected the following
documents to help you to broaden and deepen your understanding
of this poem. There are interactive questions at the
end of each piece -- some of these refer to previous documents
in the collection, so we recommend that you look through
them in order.
>Document
Collection: Elizabeth Bishop as Painter
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"The Fish" from THE COMPLETE POEMS, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. |
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