A critical analysis of THE FISH by Elizabeth Bishop

An Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" is a narrative poem, told in the first person, about the confrontation between an amateur fisher--fishing in a "rented boat" (Bishop 1212; all references to the poem are to this edition)--and a "tremendous" battle-worn fish. A poem that acknowledges awareness in nature, "The Fish," although a narrative, sings in the way we expect lyric poetry to sing, for it is rich with imagery, simile, …

…and the individual consciousness becomes an undifferentiated part of a greater whole" (18). 3Harry Levin defines Joyce's "'epiphany' [. . .] as a sudden illumination if not a divine revelation, a slight but definite insight into other lives, a fragmentary clue to the meaning of life as a whole" (8). Here, of course, the other life is that of a fish, but Levin's words describe what the poem describes rather accurately, even though he was not writing about Bishop's poem