The Fish by Written by: Elizabeth B

The Fish by
Written by: Elizabeth Bishop
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.


We know pretty early on in "The Fish" that having caught the fish, the speaker has to decide whether to keep it or release it. Either decision, of course, has consequences. If the speaker keeps the fish, the fish will die (and become dinner). If the speaker lets him go, then what? Well, from the outcome of the poem, it seems that the speaker feels quite satisfied and fulfilled with her decision to release the fish. It's up to you to figure out why.

The Fish" might be one of the most clear-cut examples of man vs. the natural world. The cool thing about this struggle, though, is that there is very little struggle at all. The speaker catches the fish (though the fish doesn't fight), then holds the fish out of the water for a bit (the fish is still not fighting), and ultimately lets him go. So while the scenario allows for the age-old man vs. wild battle, there is no real violence. The struggle happens within the speaker, and ultimately ends peacefully.
The speaker catches a huge fish while fishing in a little rented boat. She studies her catch for a while as, holding it up half out of water beside the boat. The fish is pretty old and gnarly-looking, with barnacles and algae growing on it, and it also has five fishing hooks with the lines still partially attached hanging from its jaw.

The speaker considered how tough this fish must be and how much he probably had to fight. She begins to respect the fish. The poem takes its final turn when the oil spillage in the boat makes a rainbow and the speaker, overcome with emotion by the fish and the scene, lets the fish go.


Questions About Choices
Do you think the speaker made the right choice in letting the fish go?
Why do you think the speaker released the fish? What lines from the poem support your opinion?
Do you think there was ever a point in the poem where the speaker considered the opposite choice (keeping/killing the fish)? Where?