Previous

Imagery

Bishop was a poet who excelled in her use of evocative and detailed imagery, and “The Fish” beautifully demonstrates her skill. What makes the imagery in the poem so effective is the precision of the language and the attention to detail. For instance, when the speaker first pulls the fish out of the water, they liken the appearance of the fish’s skin to that of dark-brown wallpaper, featuring “shapes like full-blow roses / stained and lost through age” (lines 14–15). This image gives a strong impression of what the fish looks like, while also implying the weathered quality of its skin. Contrasting with this image of age is the startling image of the fish’s “frightening gills, / fresh and crisp with blood” (lines 24–25) as it desperately gasps for life. But the speaker doesn’t stop at describing the fish’s physical appearance. They go further and speculate on the appearance of the fish’s insides in lines 27–33:

     I thought of the coarse white flesh
     packed in like feathers,
     the big bones and the little bones,
     the dramatic reds and blacks
     of his shiny entrails,
     and the pink swim-bladder
     like a big peony.

Here, the speaker imagines the internal appearance of the fish with exacting precision, attending at once to color, shape, and texture. The strong imagistic quality of these and other passages is a key hallmark of this poem.

Simile

A simile (SIH-muh-lee) is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two unlike things to each other. Bishop frequently uses similes throughout “The Fish,” often when the speaker is describing the fish’s physical appearance. However, despite using similes in the service of imagery, Bishop deploys this figure of speech with an interesting variety of effects. For example, when the speaker initially describes what the fish looks like in lines 9–15, they use the same simile twice in quick succession:

                             Here and there
     his brown skin hung in strips
     like ancient wallpaper,
     and its pattern of darker brown
     was like wallpaper.

It may seem odd for the speaker to compare the fish’s skin to wallpaper twice in a row. Yet this doubling shows the speaker thinking in real time. It’s as if they make an initial comparison between the skin and wallpaper and feel unsure about it, but then decide the comparison is justified and say it again. In another example, the speaker imagines the fish’s “coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers” (lines 27–28), which makes an intriguing comparison between two very different animals: fish and bird. In yet another example, the speaker radically abbreviates the simile to a single word: “weaponlike” (line 50). These and other similes in the poem provide depth and texture to the speaker’s descriptions.

Assonance and Consonance

Assonance and consonance play an important role bringing a poetic flair to the otherwise casual-sounding language of “The Fish.” Assonance and consonance are sibling concepts, in that they both refer to the repetition of certain sounds in adjacent or nearby words. Assonance specifically refers to the repetition of vowel sounds, whereas consonance refers to the repetition of consonant sounds. Bishop’s poem makes ample use of both types of repetition to create a subtle sense of cohesion within individual lines or across multiple lines. Let’s start by looking at examples of assonance in lines 19–21:

     with tiny white sea-lice,
     and underneath two or three
     rags of green weed hung down.

Note the i sound that repeats three times in the first line, as well as the ee/ea sound that repeats five times across all three lines. Now let’s look at the examples of consonance that appear in the same passage:

     With tiny WHite sea-lice,
     and underneath two or three
     rags of green Weed hung down.

The examples of consonance in these lines are more numerous and varied, including W sounds in the first and third lines, t sounds in the first and second lines, d sounds in the second and third lines, and g sounds in the third line. Bishop’s use of assonance and consonance here and elsewhere gives the poem’s otherwise casual-sounding language a rich sonic texture.

Previous section Rhyme

Take a Study Break