ELIZABETH BISHOP
THE FISH
TABLE 2, LINES 09 – 21
First of all, the title plays a vital role as to uncovering the true meaning and significant of the poem entitled “THE FISH” by Elizabeth Bishop. What we get from the title is that it has some what to do with a fishing experience of some sort. While furthering examining the poem it details with this woman who decided to go on a fishing expedition and caught this huge fish in her little rented boat she observed it for a while, and final let it go. “Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper” She compares its brown skin to ancient wallpaper. Ancient wallpaper itself has a weird crisp feel to it, by using this comparison she lets us know how old the fish is and possibly how sick or battered its skin is. “Shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age.” This sentence further elaborates on the pattern of the scales enhanced on the species. Helping you better understand why the author is so repulsed by this fish because a stain symbolizes age but in the meanwhile it also incorporates the delicacy, and beauty of a rose. As the roses get older and close to death their color changes to a dark brown, resembling a burnt pattern. “He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime”. Further goes on to detail on the texture of this fish. Barnacles are filter-feeding crustaceans that live attached to hard surfaces in this case on a Goliath Grouper. This process happens mainly to primeval aquatic species. Sea –lice is also found and described, these external parasites feed on the epidermal tissue of marine fish and are mostly found in their skin, and as it was mention in the description they have a tiny white aspect. By being infested with sea lice goes back to its negative characteristics inflected on this creature making it once again unappealing to the naked eye. At the end she says “and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down” This last statement informs you of the environmental habitat this creature occupies. Normally found in shallow tropical water among coral reefs. In which causes substances attach to its lower body while it travels through the bottom of the sea. The speaker has portrayed mixed characterizations and feelings about the fish: on one hand he is tremendous and respected, but on the other he is somewhat of dead weight and ugly.