“That’s exactly how it happened,” Elizabeth Bishop said nearly thirty years after her poem “The Fish” was written. “I did catch it just as the poem says. That was in 1938. Oh, but I did change one thing; the poem says he had five hooks hanging from his mouth, but actually he only had three. I think it improved the poem when I made that change.”
Talk about a fastidious sense of accuracy! But this emphasis on precision is a little misleading; the interviewer transcribed Bishop’s comment with the emphasis on exactly, but her poem is actually more concerned with exactly how it happened. Here’s the poem:
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his 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.
“The Fish” continues a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference the American continent offers, opportunities to be educated. The poem interprets a wordless, creaturely presence—like Whitman’s “noiseless patient spider” or Emily Dickinson’s “narrow fellow in the grass”—and provides, in its way, speech for that which is wordless. “Every object rightly seen,” wrote Emerson, “unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” The poet turns to the natural world, pays close attention, and is rewarded with instruction. The news this particular fish carries is the possibility of endurance; he’s an exemplar of survival—even victory—in the face of struggle. How could such a “battered and venerable” old soldier not serve as a heroic example?
But if this were the poem’s sole intent, it could have been much shorter. Instead of getting to the point, Bishop is concerned with the experience of observing; her aim is to track the pathways of scrutiny. Elsewhere, she praises “baroque sermons (Donne’s, for instance)” that “attempted to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose.” That’s precisely what’s going on in this poem: a carefully rendered model of an engaged mind at work.
First she notes sound and weight, fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase, “a grunting weight.” Peeling scales provoke simile: the fish’s surface is reminiscent of the condition and pattern of ruined wallpaper. There’s pleasure taken in working out this comparison, and these lines signal just how leisurely and careful an examination this will be. The poet seems to proceed from a faith that the refinement of observation is an inherently satisfying activity. To see is joy and scruple, privilege and duty. No wonder she loved Vermeer!
Now the poem’s structural scaffolding is established: a shuttling of attention from outward detail to inward association, mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie. The eye moves restlessly over the surface of the fish, as if seeking what might satisfy it. The “camera” roves, pans, lingers, moves in for an extreme close-up, fixes a moment on the pulsing of the gills:
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.
Within this single sentence Bishop travels from fish body to human body and back to fish flesh again, entering deeply into what is literally the fish’s inner life, the hidden stuff of flesh and bone. It’s a painterly passage, with its arrangement of white flesh, “dramatic” reds and blacks, and the image of that startling flower-pink bladder hurrying us back to land, to some remembered garden, to the shape and sheen of a peony blossom.
The eleven lines that follow—about those haunting, yellowed eyes, with their scratchy shine—are the most extended and intricate of the poem’s descriptive acts so far, as if to focus our sights on the primacy of vision here, dilate our attention, and slow our movement forward. You can’t help but think about the speaker’s eyes, too, and the poet points attention this way carefully: “seen through the lenses,” “to return my stare.” Progress slows even further when the first of Bishop’s characteristic hesitations is introduced:
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
That little pause and gathering of breath—just a dash, followed by the careful qualifying phrase “It was more like”—makes a world of difference. What does it mean, for a poet to stop and consider, to question herself, just as she will again in a few lines at “—if you could call it a lip”?
This hesitation reveals that what’s been stated so far isn’t necessarily authoritative; each descriptive act is one attempt to render the world, subject to revision. Perception is provisional; it gropes, considers, hypothesizes. Saying is now a problematic act, not a given; one might name what one sees this way, but there’s also that one, and that one. And if we’re not certain what we should say, can we be certain what we’ve seen? A degree of self-consciousness, of uncertainty has entered the project of description.
This reflexive awareness enters the poem just at its moment of maximum strangeness, as the speaker tries to look into those shifting eyes that can’t be comfortably anthropomorphized. They don’t “return my stare,” and seem more like objects than like part of a living thing. And though the speaker has tried, as is her wont, to connect them to the familiar through similes, it doesn’t work; you can feel, in that hesitation, and in the close study of this alien gaze, the thrum of anxiety.
No wonder, after such a moment, that the speaker begins to seize on a meaning for what she sees, a means of interpretation. This old soldier’s war wounds (“like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering”) occupy so many lines because it’s here the speaker has seized on a way of “reading” the exemplar of strangeness she holds before her. She begins to claim him as a hero, attaching the poem’s gathered perceptions to a sense of meaning. Though it’s enormously to the poem’s credit that not all of her observations can be marshaled to support this “point.” There’s no necessary relation between “the pink swim-bladder / like a big peony” or those unsettling eyes and the fish’s ability to persist through adversity. A lesser poet might have edited out the material that doesn’t conform to the message. But the wealth of detail keeps the fish from becoming a symbol and allows it to remain creaturely, its inscrutability intact even as the poem offers us an interpretive act.
Every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world. Bishop’s work of seeing offers, ultimately, a precise portrayal of the one who’s doing the looking. Here stands a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility. A poem is a voiceprint; someone in particular speaks, and becomes, in the most accomplished poems, unmistakable.
You don’t need to know a thing about the poet’s life or circumstances. We can only guess why she might be concerned with defeat and victory, or with survival. It isn’t for us to know whatever hooks she herself may bear. Instead, we’re brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of her sensations. Subjectivity is made of such detail, of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us, known through our associations and histories, our scaffoldings of concerns and interests, the tones and shadings of our moods. We’re invited to form a sort of readerly alliance with Bishop’s speaker, brought close to what she’s feeling and seeing at a moment of intense clarity. Poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself.
“How it feels to be oneself” has a great deal to do with the experience of time. It’s oddly difficult to describe what subjective time feels like. The clock on the wall simply ticks, persisting in its steady progression, while those in the body and psyche call for a great variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions. The time of interiority pools, constricts, tumbles, and speeds. We live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory. And memory edits its records of the past like a brilliant auteur—cutting, juxtaposing, creating a pace determined by the direction and emotion of a story. What is memory but a story about how we have lived? In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse it takes dozens of pages to render the inner lives of a group of people sitting around a dinner table during a single meal; later in the book, decades pass in a few pages. This kind of shifting feels accurate because it replicates something of our internal sense of time, where the irrelevant portions blur while significant moments swell.
But there is another sort of temporality, too, which is timelessness. In this lyric time we cease to be aware of forward movement; lyric is concerned neither with the impingement of the past nor with anticipation of events to come. It represents instead a slipping out of story and into something still more fluid, less linear: the interior landscape of reverie. This sense of time originates in childhood, before the conception of causality and the solidifying of our temporal sense into an orderly sort of progression.
Such a state of mind is “lyric” not because it is musical (though the representation of these states of mind usually is) but because we are seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded. The parts of a narrative are contiguous, each connecting to the previous instant and the next, but the lyric moment is isolate. Though it most often seems to begin in concentration, in wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object, such a state leads toward an unpointed awareness, a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action. Bishop herself described this sort of attention in a famous letter to Anne Stevenson: “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”
Self-forgetful concentration is precisely what happens in the artistic process—an absorption in the moment, a pouring of the self into the now. We are, as Dickinson says, “without the date, like Consciousness or Immortality.” That is what artistic work and child’s play have in common; both, at their fullest, are experiences of being lost in the present, entirely occupied.
There are, in essence, only seven lines of narrative in “The Fish.” The first six occur right at the beginning, bringing us into the scene:
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
These lines are extremely plainspoken. The verbs are simple, the last two sentences clipped off with firmly placed, line-ending periods. Of these facts, we might infer, there can be no doubt; they are the “objective” layer of the poem, its outer skin. The stuff of casual narration, their style is answered by the equally blunt final line, “And I let the fish go.”
Everything else in this poem behaves differently. The remaining sixty-nine lines are concerned with the inside of the story, attention freely drifting between fish and an interior territory of association, reflection, imagination, and interpretation. Since the fish is, after all, “tremendous,” the speaker can’t be holding him “half out of water” for very long; this encounter must be a very brief one. But the moment dilates as it is described, creating an alternate sense of duration. It’s like one of those Japanese paper flowers Proust mentions in the Overture to his novel, the kind locked up in a seashell; drop it in water and out blooms something that you’d never think could be contained in something so small. Looking and looking causes time to open; sustained attention allows us to tumble right out of progression.
How long does it take, exactly, to stare into the eyes of a fish? His eyes are
… far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
Here’s a beautiful series of echoes. Sometimes it’s simply the chiming of a repeated vowel (far and larger, scratched and glass); sometimes it’s a more complete rhyme (shallow and yellow, backed and packed). Then there are echoed initial consonants (tarnished and tinfoil), and subtle groups of near-rhymes (seen and lenses and isinglass). Such music-making lends the surface of language the complexity and interest of the surface that’s being observed. The tongue and the muscles of the jaw must work to produce these sounds; even when we’re reading silently there’s a subtle physical participation taking place, an unspoken sounding of the poem’s words. This physicality—heightened by a progression of sounds whose thickness means we have to labor to enunciate them—is a way of mirroring the physicality of the world.
It also, of course, takes time. It’s a slightly longer activity, sounding a line like “the irises backed and packed,” than it is to speak a plainer line like “I looked into his eyes.” On a subtle level, this variation speeds the poem up and slows it down again, allowing our movement through the lines to mimic the character of experienced time.
Bishop slows time further by delivering “The Fish” in short lines, some as brief as two or three words. This makes for lots of interruption of the movement of the sentence. Each of the three longest ones—the gill description, the evocation of the pierced jaw, and the transformation of the boat into a location of prismatic color—takes up eleven lines, and thus each is interrupted ten times by a bit of silence or white space. Momentum is slowed by these constant, carefully placed visual delays. And there’s no rest here between stanzas, simply one long flow of little units of perception; the absence of stanza breaks suggests seamlessness; our attention’s suspended.
Why, if the poem is out to shift time and put us inside a scene of altered awareness, has the poet chosen to use the past tense? An experimental recasting suggests the answer:
I catch a tremendous fish
and hold him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook.
He doesn’t fight.
He hasn’t fought at all.
He hangs a grunting weight …
This fails to convince. The present tense asserts that all this is being seen in the now, and that the poem’s a straightforward record of perception. But a reader feels intuitively that this isn’t so. The process cannot be this complete or leisurely as it is happening.
Instead, the examination of the fish is happening again in the composition of the poem, in a second layer of time. This “second layer” is the contemplative dimension of recollection—meditative but dynamic, penetrating deeply into the fish’s body, rigorously attending to the peculiar character of its gaze. Perhaps the experience of joy the poem chronicles, in the final lines, was the character of the original event (“that’s exactly how it happened”). But surely the understanding of that joy, the interpretive work that holds the sources of such feeling to the light, is the work that has gone on at the desk, where the dimensions of being open themselves to investigation. The poem’s a work of inquiry—or at least a compelling replica of such a process, designed to enlist the reader’s participation in a version of the work of consciousness.
Bishop tells us this event was in the past, then writes with such immediacy and vivacity as to deny us any sense of distance, and all the poem’s speeding up and slowing down suggests she’s out to play with time. In this light, her ending’s a small stroke of genius. We read the final line as past tense consistent with the body of the poem: I let the fish go yesterday, or last week, or years ago. But since let is also the present-tense form of the verb, the line also has the immediacy of something happening now, as if the poem’s final gesture of release is still taking place.
When she thinks of that stained rose wallpaper, our speaker’s attention has left the here and now; she’s no longer in the boat but in some other room, a landscape of memory or of daydream. She’s begun to slip the confines of the body, moving freely in time and space. Later, as she thinks of the “dramatic” landscape inside the fish’s body, she seems to have slipped out of herself, for a moment, to imaginatively penetrate the alien form. Studying the fish’s eyes again leads her to a highly specific association—the eyes of an old stuffed animal? the scratched isinglass of some Victorian child’s toy? Bishop doesn’t stop at the cornea but seems to come right up to the retinal backing of the eye, with its tarnished shine. In and out, from one to the other, until the speaker’s boundaries blur.
When the speaker in “The Fish” knows the fish’s jaw is “aching,” and when she perceives “wisdom” in his beard, she’s entered into the fish’s life. It’s this blurring that prepares us, as the speaker stares and stares, for the poem’s leap toward transcendence.
This fish may be a consummate survivor, but a heroic example isn’t enough to make the world before one seem filled with “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” We feel that way when we loose our boundaries in time, no longer imprisoned by the external narrative of chronology. People slip out of the story they’re living all the time; daily life is full of small moments of rupture, disappearance, and interiority. But sometimes these experiences are more lasting, and more profound. The woman in the boat holding her catch has floated out of causality; her encounter with otherness restructures her sense of the world.
Why should it be an animal presence that provokes happiness? Like the moose that engenders an experience of joy in another of Bishop’s poems, the fish may be a metaphor, but it can’t be just that. It remains charged with fascination, refusing to be subordinated to a point. Its strangeness persists, both as and after it is interpreted.
It must be in part the wordlessness of creatures. Our speech rushes in where there are no words, and in the process we understand that our acts of description are both bridges to animal life and evidence of our distance from them. The very tool we reach for to approach them holds us at bay.
“The fish,” Nicholson Baker says of this poem in his novel The Anthologist, “doesn’t want to be described.” Baker’s reading of the poem—or should I say his character’s take on it?—is dazzling: those lines hanging from the fish’s jaw are lines of poetry, “all the many other attempts to rhyme this old fish into poetry.” The fish must be released, he suggests, because “you have to return reality to itself after you’ve struggled to make a poem out of it…. It needs to breathe in its own world and not be examined too long.”
When our imaginations meet a mind decidedly not like ours, our own nature is suddenly called into question. We place our own eye beside that of the fish in order to question our own seeing. Consciousness can’t be taken for granted when there are, plainly, varieties of awareness. The result is an intoxicating uncertainty. And that is a relief, is it not, to acknowledge that we do not after all know what a self is? A corrective to human arrogance, to the numbing certainty that puts a soul to sleep. It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak and to speak, to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is. Perhaps the dream of lyric poetry is not just to represent states of mind, but to actually provoke them in the reader. Bishop’s poems restore us to a sense of energized, liberating uncertainty.
But there, I try to explain why the presence of the fish and the moose provokes joy and reinvigorates the self, and all I do is place another construct of language beside the speechless fact of the other. Baker has it right, “you have to return reality to itself.” The body of the fish, the moose’s hairy flanks elide certainty, refuse elucidation, blur the relationship between then and now, I and you. And they persist—if people allow them to—as presences that instruct and resist us at once.