The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop's

Elizabeth Bishops The Fish: A Psychoanalytic Reading
Elizabeth Bishops loudspeaker in The Fish describes her catchâ€" battered and
venerable and unmixedâ€"with a mixture of sympathy and bravado. This lean, with his
hook-filled mouth, emerges as a type of pain, an occasion for the speaker to confront
that which is normally repressed and unseen. But with her elaborate, melodic description,
the speaker can be read as an artisan 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 proposition that creativity is produced through
destruction: suffering, Bishop concludes, can be the impetus for the imagination.
Bishops speaker first describes the fish as a relic, a living diary upon which
layers of meaning are physically inscribed. surface 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 antiquated wallpaper in shapes like full-blown
roses/stained and lost end-to-end 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
ab initio only partly visible, he soon emerges for the full exam of the speaker and her
reader. Though tremendous and of a grunting weight, the fish remain passive and
resigned; unresponsive to her gaze, the fish becomes a spectacle that she may analyze and
interrogate. She describes separately crevice of his body, providing a detailed inventory of
each physical attribute:

I thought of the coarse etiolated flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big(p) bones and the niggling bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.

Suddenly...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



If you want to get a full essay, wisit our page: write my essay .