The Fish: Motifs | SparkNotes

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Colors

The speaker uses color frequently to give their descriptions of the fish and the boat a vibrant clarity. In some instances, the speaker uses color in relatively conventional ways, employing color words as basic adjectives to describe the appearances of things. Thus, they use simple phrases like “brown skin” (line 10), “coarse white flesh” (line 27), “a green line” (line 56), and “a fine black thread” (line 58). In other instances, the speaker embeds color words in more complex and evocative descriptions, as when they speculate on the appearance of the fish’s interior in lines 30–32:

the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails
and the pink swim-bladder

Taken together, these and other references to color in the poem collectively constitute a rainbow. In this way, the individual references to colors collectively foreshadow the explosion of rainbows that concludes the poem, when sunlight gets refracted through a sheen of oil on water. As the speaker puts it: “oil had spread a rainbow around . . . until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” (lines 69 and 74–75). The repetition of the word “rainbow” has a jubilant quality to it, as if the speaker is celebrating the vibrancy of life, represented through the profusion of color.

Pattern and Texture

Just as the speaker uses color words to add vibrancy to their descriptions, they also reference different kinds of patterns and textures that bring a sense of tactility to the poem. The first pattern mentioned in the poem comes up in relation to the fish’s skin in lines 9–15:

Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.

These comparisons to patterned wallpaper bring to mind a vivid image defined more by pattern and texture than mere color. Indeed, the wallpaper may be “darker brown,” but what’s more important are the “shapes like full-blown roses / stained and lost through age.” Another vivid texture relates to the sharpness of the fish’s gills, which “can cut so badly” (line 26). Or consider the fish’s eyes, with “irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil” (lines 37–38) and distorted by the rough surface of “scratched isinglass” (line 40). As the poem moves toward its conclusion, the speaker describes the rainbow sheen on the bilge water’s surface, which suggests an oily texture made visible by refracted light. All these patterns and textures bring a feeling of tactility into the world described by the speaker. That is, they elevate otherwise purely visual imagery, investing the “flat” image with a fuller sense of dimensionality.

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