Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish": Symbolism and Everyday Life

Introduction: Bishop's Poetic Vision

Elizabeth Bishop, author of numerous literary works and particularly celebrated for her poetry, was known for her vivid illustration of everyday experience through extraordinary depiction and interpretation. As an American poet and artist, Bishop was identified as a staunch supporter of numerous social movements that pervaded society during the twentieth century, including feminism, the emphasis on liberation through self-expression, and the adoption of a pluralist view of the world's cultures (Lensing, 1995).

Bishop's poetry is characterized by its centering on two important themes: travel and the mundane. Her love of traveling and discovering new cultures and societies around the world developed her propensity to observe and adopt an objective view when interpreting everyday actions and things — what she described as "commonplace objects and occurrences" — that she encountered in daily life. Her poetry is best summed up as a contemplation of her continuous drive to explore and discover life through travel (Microsoft Encarta 2002).

These themes of travel and mundane human experience are brought together in her poem "The Fish." This deceptively simple poem conveys numerous implicit and symbolic meanings that reflect Bishop's interpretation of what "travel" meant in her life. The Voice's expedition in "The Fish" is a contemplation of travel through life in general, and through the use of symbolism, connotation, and effective imagery, Bishop extends to her readers her thoughts on life and its difficulties — and on how the complex turns of life become channels through which humanity finds the strength and inspiration to move forward and live progressively and meaningfully.

The Fish as Symbol of Life and Struggle

Connotation is utilized in the poem to depict the theme of "metaphorical travel" through life that Bishop wished to convey. The subject of the poem, the fish, is used to connote life and its struggles in general. The implied meaning behind the choice of the fish as subject becomes clear when the fisher — the Voice — discovers, upon catching it, that "from his lower lip ... hung five old pieces of fish-line ... with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth." From this passage, the Voice realizes that, despite numerous encounters with death through being caught, the fish managed to survive each time. The fish's determination to live had ultimately overpowered the Voice's resolve to keep it, and so the fish succeeded again — for the sixth time — and escaped death once more.

The fish thus operates as a powerful symbol of resilience. Its scarred mouth, bearing the evidence of five previous struggles, is not a mark of weakness but of hard-won endurance. Bishop's poem invites the reader to recognize in the fish's survival the same tenacity that human beings must summon when facing repeated hardship, transforming what might seem like a simple observation of nature into a meditation on the courage required to live fully.

Connotation and the Metaphor of Travel

Another connotation used in the poem is that of fishing itself — an activity that appears mundane on the surface yet carries deep meaning for the Voice. It is through the act of fishing that the Voice is able to reflect on the meaningfulness of her own life, as seen through the image of the fish she has caught. Two distinct reflections emerge in the poem.

The first is the Voice's discovery that the fish she caught did not fight — not because it was weak, but because it was strong and confident enough that its experience as a survivor would prevail and life would allow it to live again: "I caught a tremendous fish ... He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all." This realization that the fish embodied strength and quiet confidence rather than weakness becomes fully apparent toward the end of the poem, where the fish's history of survival is chronicled through the "five old pieces of fish-line" visible in its mouth. Courage and survival are connoted through the following lines: "from his lower lip ... hung five old pieces of fish-line ... A five-haired beard of wisdom ... I stared and victory filled up the little rented boat." These lines reflect Bishop's belief that the journey through life becomes meaningful only when the individual survives and bears that survival with strength — as strongly as the fish bore its struggle against death. A meaningful life, in Bishop's vision, is a life courageously lived: the will to persist despite the numerous struggles and threats that life presents.

Conclusion

Bishop's poem "The Fish" illustrates that life should be experienced more than contemplated, for it is only through experience that the individual can fully reflect on his or her life — that is, experiencing is being. The poem is ultimately about life's journey and its challenges, seen through the eyes of a person engaged in a commonplace activity yet arriving at an extraordinary realization. Through connotation, imagery, and symbolism, Bishop transforms the act of catching — and releasing — a fish into a quietly profound affirmation of human resilience and the enduring search for meaning.