The Fish

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ENG 229 Intro to Poetry Writing. It's the early 1990s. Ruth is a non-traditional college student in her late thirties in a class with 20-year-olds who are educating her on current music before the professor arrives. 10,000 Maniacs and these new friends are helping her see that these are the days. On the first day of class they had filled out a survey about their personal mythologies, a term Prof. Wakoski took from Carl Jung and focused on in her poetry and teaching. Ruth revealed she was a Baptist preacher's kid wrestling with the hook, line and sinker of the faith of her parents. A few weeks into class, Prof. Wakoski reads The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop. Before this class Ruth has never heard or read much poetry outside of the cultural icons such as Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Thomas' villanelle Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Immediately upon hearing The Fish, Ruth is hooked. Wakoski finishes the poem and asks:

Did Bishop intend her poem to be about Christ? In her bottomless, observant description, she gave us material to interpret it that way if we want -- the fish, a symbol of Christ, and the five wounds (Jesus' were two in his hands/wrists, two in the feet, and then the lance in his side). Maybe there's more. But it doesn't matter to me, because her language and imagery are so achingly beautiful (ugly fish, yet beautiful too), that the poem, just about a fish, is plenty. My favorite word in this poem: isinglass.

The Fish

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.

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I named our elegant barn cat Bishop after Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop the barn cat understands the silent graces, and teaches them to me. (But I think she would not have let the fish go. And that is another kind of grace.)

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