Seeing as Living for Elizabeth Bishop s Fish. In her poem The Fish Elizabeth Bishop portrays our powers of perception as the

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1 Dave Stone Intro to Literary Studies Fall 2013 Seeing as Living for Elizabeth Bishop s Fish In her poem The Fish Elizabeth Bishop portrays our powers of perception as the essence of living and as being opposed by the ravages of time. Rather than define life in objective, biological terms, she reduces it to the inductive: to live is to experience and yet, as C.K. Doreski puts it in her analysis, the phenomenal world... thrives or fails on the basis of our ability to see it rather than on the strength of its independent experience (16). She relates this through the image of an old, weathered fish that the speaker of her poem catches and has to decide whether to keep, thus killing it, or let go. The fish is presented as a representative of nature and a symbol of life, that owing to its battered appearance it is difficult to find beauty in. But the speaker over the course of the poem manages to do just that, and thus concludes that the fish is worth perceiving, as such deserving of existing, and therefore releases the fish to live on, perceive and be perceived. The key to seeing the nature of The Fish in this manner can be found in the concluding lines in which victory (66) is said to fill up the speaker's boat. Bishop does not clarify how an intangible, abstract concept like victory can fill a material object. On the contrary, she only emphasizes the oddity of the notion by relaying the physical dimensions of the spread, from the pool of bilge (68) to the oarlocks on their strings (73), and to cap it says that everything becomes rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! (75). This is by far the most metaphorical language in the poem. Somehow the speaker s drawn out period of staring at the fish results in a sense of victory and of rainbow ness (whatever that means) all over the boat. The common denominator of victory and rainbows are that neither exist bodily in a

2 conventional sense. Rainbows are an optical illusion and victory is at best a neurological brain state, and typically we think of it as simply a subjective impression. People can experience both the perception of a rainbow and a sense of victory, but both are also 'untouchable'. This, combined with a close grammatical analysis of the text, in which the spread of victory can be found to be covering the everything that becomes rainbow, leads to the conclusion that Bishop is associating the two concepts. In some way, an impression of rainbow ness is tantamount to a sense of victory. If one considers rainbows as being at their heart a simple collection of colors that happen to be pleasing to perceive, then on an abstract level one can start to comprehend Bishop's claim that everything on the boat becomes rainbow ish. Throughout the poem she incessantly notes colors, and the speaker creates a mental list of those perceivable on the fish: brown skin (10, 12), lime (16) barnacles, white sea lice (19) and green (21) weeds hanging, she begins with, then her imagination takes over and she thinks of the inside of the fish, its white flesh (27), the reds and blacks of his shiny entrails (30 31) and pink swim bladder (32). Finally she brings herself to look into the yellowed (36) eye, forcing herself to confront the fact that the fish is a perceiving and therefore a living being. Immediately thereafter she for the first time acknowledges something admirable about the fish, in its sullen face (45), no less. She has begun to find the beauty in the at first glance gruesome fish. She continues to examine it, and pay special attention to colors; after the eyes and face she looks at its jaw and (following the brief act of humanization of ascribing to it a lip/ if you could call it a lip (48, 49)) is taken aback by the grim... weaponlike.../ old pieces of fish line (50 51) hooked into its mouth, including a green (56) and a black (58) one. Her growing empathy for the fish causes her to declare these lines to constitute a decidedly human bona fide five haired beard of wisdom. All these colors add up to a dizzying,

3 kaleidoscopic experience for the speaker, and so her subsequent sense of rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! is understandable, as is her less eloquent speech. The speaker's powers of perception, her ability to find beauty in the world as embodied by the fish, prove superior than the ravages of time that afflict the fish. This is her victory: the fish benefits, to be sure, as the speaker lets it go (76), but the victory belongs to the speaker, and the victory is her successfully perceiving beauty, a figurative rainbow, when she looks at the fish. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so the victory is too, as the speaker crafts the beauty out of the raw materials provided by the fish. At first she does so clumsily and half heartedly. She observes his peeling skin and notes idly that it reminds her of ancient wallpaper (11), then tests imposing the image of wallpaper flower design onto the skin, only to find that, while she can vaguely perceive rose like shapes (14), they are stained and lost through age (15): so much for that. Next she tries to find beauty in the parasitic barnacles, and does better. At least with them the rosettes (17) are readily discernible. The speaker also successfully imagines the fish's swim bladder to be like a big peony (33) flower, and the hooked lines to be like medals with... ribbons (61), alluding to the practice of including designs, often rosettes, recalling the aforementioned barnacle rosettes, on the ribbons of medals. The fish is battered and venerable and homely (8 9), and more telling than these superficial attributes is the fact that it didn't fight at all (6) upon being hooked. It is worn out, able to live but not to battle death. Its eyes are large, but encapsulated in tarnished tinfoil (38), shallow and yellowed (36). Its sight, its primary mode of perception, is blemished and faded, and its ability to live is proportionally diminished in turn. Perhaps the best indicator of the transmutability of the ability to perceive and the ability to live is the description of the fish's eye's lenses as old scratched isinglass (40). Isinglass is

4 a pale, somewhat translucent substance that is best known for its use as a clarifier of wine's appearance, making it a strong symbol of perception, that is created out of the swim bladders of fish. The function of swim bladders, meanwhile, is to help the fish remain buoyant at a certain depth of water, helping them remain at a desired level without expending effort swimming up and down, a sort of cruise control. The placement of isinglass in the eye entails a placement of the swim bladder there as well. In so doing the eyes, the perceivers, are equated with the management function of the swim bladder. The decreased powers of perception that the fish must have on account of its age result in a loss of control over its life. With this in mind, the most pronounced adjective illustrating the ravaged state of the fish's eye, and from that its power of perception and its ability to live, becomes the previously not particularly harsh sounding qualifier 'shallowed'. Given the isinglass based association of the eye and, through the buoyancy managing and isinglass producing swim bladder, the water level situation of the fish, this word becomes morbid; the fish is struggling in shallow waters, flapping about, half exposed to the air. This scene is reflected in the material reading of the poem's tale: the fish is caught and held half out of water (3), forcing it into breathing in/ the terrible oxygen (22 23). Even before being caught and examined by the speaker, thus making the issue literal, by virtue of its 'shallowed' eyes its life is in question. It is having difficulty perceiving simply due to physical wear and tear, which leads to its having difficulty controlling its life, as demonstrated by the correspondence of the eye and the swim bladder, which includes its inability to fight death, something evidenced by its not having fought at all (6) when it was hooked. The speaker is disappointed by the fish. Its lack of fight took the challenge out of the catching: passive resistance deprives the [speaker] of her triumph (Doreski, 39 40). When the speaker repeats the fact of its not having fought, she is embittered. There is an almost

5 symbiotic relationship between the two, but the fish is literally not living up to its end. For the speaker to live life to its fullest, in the context of this poem, is to perceive as much beauty, 'rainbow ness', one might say, as possible, but the fish is a just a gross, grunting weight (7), a bit of pulp more than a living thing that would make life worth living and perceiving. She wants the illusion of having ascended the trappings of the terrible flesh into the ethereal victory by encountering the ripped flesh of the fish and letting him go, (Tatum 2010) writes one critic, positing that the speaker is rooting for the fish to live up to the standards she has for a creature being worthy of living, as much because it would validate herself continuing to live and perceive, as it would mean that there remain things in the world worth perceiving. As Tatum says, Bishop wants her speaker to study the fish... a projection of her... self...and learn about life from him. No wonder, then, that the speaker is so sympathetic for the fish when she sees the blood on its gills (25) that she has caused with her hook. It's not the implication of pain, or even the presumptive fact of the blood's vivid color, that strikes her, but how the blood on the gills reminds her of times that she herself has been cut by fish's gills (26). She relates to the fish through the image of bloody gills; fish have cut her with them, and now she has bloodied a fish's. She finds herself reflected in it. The speaker's examination may even be more of a self examination than one of the fish. When the speaker looks at its eyes, they do not meet hers. Instead, they tip like an object toward the light (43 44). On the one hand, here the fish is partially de animated, its eyes seen as objects, but at the same time that they are looking toward the light suggests to the speaker that it recognizes illumination, and wants to use it to perceive what it can. It tips its own eyes towards a light source as a human would hold something up to a candle, in hopes of elucidation. It wants to rejuvenate its isinglass lenses just as isinglass is used to clarify wine. Humans will rub their eyes or glasses, but the fish obviously cannot reach its own eyes, so it tries to self improve its perception

6 capability by tipping its eyes toward the light. In doing so it shows a will to perceive and live, a quality which the speaker empathizes with, respects and ultimately honors. The speaker finds beauty in the fish and this sense of beauty transfers to her general perception of the world. Her boat doesn't in and of itself sound too fetching, with its pool of bilge (68), oil leak (69), rusted engine (70) and bailer (71) and sun cracked thwarts (72), but the speaker declares that everything is rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! (75). As with the fish, the separately garish conglomeration of colors and substances when taken as a whole are found to be beautiful, and the choice of a rainbow as the symbol for the beauty makes sense in light of the physical context of the scene. True rainbows require sunshine, water and reflection. The presence of water is obvious given the setting, and its role as something to be toyed with and examined can be seen as being embodied by the examination of the fish. Sunshine is also literally present, and the image of illumination as a means to reflection can be seen in the tipping/... toward the light (43 44) of the fish's eye sequence. The deliberateness of the rainbow metaphor can also be inferred from the specific qualifications of the parts of the boat: the rust on the engine and bailer represent the presence of water, while the thwarts being sun cracked have a self explanatory connotation. Finally, the pool of bilge, a leak of dirty water, has an oil leak mixing in that the sunlight beating down on creates a proper rainbow on, blooming like one of the flowers that the speaker is so given to picturing, nurtured by sun and water. Here in miniature the greater story of the poem is mirrored: a few individually unattractive and potentially annoying forces combine to create beauty. Bishop in The Fish argues that this occurrence need not be limited by scientific phenomena, but that we can create mental rainbows whenever we take the time to appreciate the world. After all, she presents perceiving as being synonymous with living, so while an impression of

7 rainbow ness may be subjective, to her that doesn't make it any less valid. All it does is make it beautifully personal. Works Cited Bishop, Elizabeth. The Fish. Doreski, C.K. Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language. New York: Oxford University Press, Print. Tatum, Karen. Drawing the Eczema Aesthetic: The Psychological Effects of Chronic Skin Disease as Depicted in the Works of John Updike, Elizabeth Bishop, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Journal of Medical Humanities 31.2 (2010) : Web. Nov