The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop's

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Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”: A Psychoanalytic Reading Elizabeth Bishop’s speaker in “The Fish” describes her catch— “battered and venerable and homely”—with a mixture of sympathy and bravado. This fish, with his hook-filled mouth, emerges as a symbol of pain, an occasion for the speaker to confront that which is normally repressed and unseen. But with her elaborate, lyrical description, the speaker can be read as an artist who is able to translate this anguish into a “fivehaired beard of wisdom.” As the she celebrates her mastery over the fish, the poem ends triumphantly with the paradoxical suggestion that creativity is produced through destruction: suffering, Bishop concludes, can be the impetus for the imagination. Bishop’s speaker first describes the fish as a relic, a living diary upon which layers of meaning are physically inscribed. Coated with relics of the sea, he is “speckled with barnacles” and “infested with tiny sea lice.” In the fish, the speaker sees not only the vestiges of the sea, but also the traces of a domestic, human scene. She characterizes him in familial terms: his brown skin is like “ancient wallpaper” in “shapes like full-blown roses/stained and lost throughout the ages.” At the beginning of the poem, the speaker, solitary and introspective, observes with cool detachment her fish “beside the boat/half out of water.” While the fish is initially only partly visible, he soon emerges for the full scrutiny of the speaker and her reader. Though “tremendous” and “of a grunting weight,” the fish remains passive and resigned; unresponsive to her gaze, the fish becomes a spectacle that she may probe and interrogate. She describes each crevice of his body, providing a detailed inventory of each physical attribute: I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic
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