I'm sitting here now, wondering how I can assign myself a project to experience just what the speaker in the poem tells us all of, and record it. Perhaps in poetry form. I want to understand the history of something by studying my perception of its inner feelings and outer design, like the speaker found in the fish. I'm going to let it catch my eye one day, completely by surprise, instead of looking for it myself. I'll post it when I find what I'm looking for...
Sunday, March 4, 2012
"The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop
In my journal entry about Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," I wrote about Bishop's explicit descriptions of the fish caught on the speaker's hook. Many commentaries believed the fish to be a metaphor--that Bishop personified the fish with human emotions and such. I think otherwise. In the poem, the speaker marvels over the fish and its antiquated wonders, and tastes what its like to be a fish in this fish's situation in particular; old, battered, worn from battle and struggle, and hope-forsaken. It is man's nature to believe these emotions were borrowed from those of a human. I think the beauty in Bishop's poem is that all the descriptions of the fish were actually those of a fish-- Bishop is begging us to see the true nature around us for what it is and even deeper, because there is so much that we can learn about ourselves if we can take the time to study the life around us.
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Your "antiquated wonders" arrested me for a second. I thought you had something there. I read this poem of hers in the context of Moby Dick and Sylvia Plath's "Mirror." Ahab catches a fish that consumes him. At the end of "Mirror," Plath sees a terrible fish that "Rises toward her day after day" that she, too, feels will consumer her. In both cases, the fish is a kind of monster, an internal monster that eats away at creative and productive energies. And I believe the fish is a symbol for the submerged material that forms our fears, those things to which we are defensive, and hate others seeing. Bishop's treatment of her fish is remarkably different from the other two. Bishop tames the fish. She admires and celebrates it as a symbol of survival. The fish has endured five, life-threatening snares with the hooks to prove it. The narrator's line that the fish ". . . hadn't fought at all" is a reference to Moby Dick. Ahab was obsessed with revenge. Plath consumed by it too. Bishop mediates it, comes out a winner. She lets light and warmth pierce the clouds on her mind, and rainbows multiply, "Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow / And I let the fish go." She humanizes the brooding monster, examines how organized it is with its ". . . white flesh / packed in like feathers" and releases it. She lets it go. Not an easy task for those who've caused us enduring pain. She leads us through a description of the fish the way a host would invite guest into a decorated parlor. It is absolutely beautiful. It's loving. And it's instructive. She is saying that when it comes to the body of hurts that we carry around--to not focus on them as wounds but honor them as venerated experiences that are a testament to problem-solving and surviving so much. The antiquated elements that you begin to describe are the old and forgotten hurts.
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