The Fish By Elizabeth Bishop Essay

765 Words4 Pages
“There's such an extreme feeling to be in love, especially in quite an emotionally destructive relationship, where you're both kind of really bad for each other, but you love each other so much. Those extreme emotions, I think, can only be described with extreme imagery (Florence Welsh).” In the poem The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop, Bishop uses intense imagery to present an experience that conveys a message of struggle. The colossal amount of imagery used by Bishop allows the readers to take on her feats and accomplishments as their own. In The Fish Bishop describes her experience of catching an old fish, this experience led her to a discovery that inspired her to throw the fish back into the water. The fish served as a lesson for her, it exemplified something that struggled through life like she did. The experience of catching this fish endowed Bishop with a great respect for natural life. The fish represents perseverance, the despair of life, and renewal.…show more content…
The adjectives used to describe the fish can easily be compared to words one might use to describe an old pair of jeans. The fish seems to symbolize nostalgia to Bishop rather than just a catch from the sea. She later goes to explain how the fish managed to survive after being taken out of its habitat. “While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen” (Bishop,22-23). Bishop connected with the fish in this situation being that she is an asthmatic, she understood the terrible pain of not being able to breathe. Bishop realized that although the fish wasn’t able to breathe it still managed to stay alive. This fish symbolizes tenacity. “His brown skin hung in strips, like ancient wallpaper” (Bishop, 9-10). Bishop’s keen descriptions of the fish give readers an impression of age. Not only does Bishop give vivid descriptions of the fish but she allows the reader to compose their own notion of the
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