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“The Fish” is structured as one long poem with no stanza breaks. The lack of stanza breaks gives the poem a sense of continuity and allows the speaker’s running thoughts to cascade down the page. This real-time unfolding of the speaker’s experience gives “The Fish” a quality reminiscent of lyric poetry. The term lyric typically applies to any poem with a first-person speaker whose speech exhibits their state of mind through their shifting perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. “The Fish” is lyrical in the sense that we readers follow the speaker’s thoughts as they examine the large fish they’ve pulled out of the water. But the poem lacks one crucial feature of lyric poetry, which is an examination of the speaker’s internal state. Indeed, the characteristic structure of lyric poetry often moves from the external world to internal experience. We certainly do get a sense of the speaker’s reactions to, say, the fish’s “frightening gills” (line 24), or to the colorful rainbows that ultimately inspire them to release the fish. However, these reactions reveal little about the speaker’s internal experience. They function instead to demonstrate just how externally focused the speaker is, thereby underscoring their profound fascination with the natural world.

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