What Is The Mood Of The Poem The Fish

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Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish” is seventy-six lines long, written in a single long stanza. Each line is relatively short with the lower end being two words and the upper end reaching seven words. What is notable about the rhyme or meter here in “The Fish” lack of particular form, placing it as free verse. The closest to rhyming the poem gets is the word “wallpaper” and “lip” for a possible identical rhyme (Bishop 11, 13, 48-49). There is also a repetition of the word “and” throughout the poem, totaling a massive twenty-four mentions. A lesser repetition appears surrounding the fish’s mouth and its related parts, six times in total. The speaker of the poem is a fisher whose gender is left ambiguous. They are not likely professional as evidenced by the “little rented boat” which is not well cared for; it is rusty and leaks oil into the water surrounding the boat (67). …show more content…
These similes litter the entire poem. They are used to compare the fish’s skin to “ancient wallpaper,” its flesh to being “packed in like feathers,” the swim-bladder’s similarity to “a big peony,” and the hooks in its lips as “medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering” (11, 28). There is one use of personification applied to the fish’s face as being “sullen” (45). Bishop also uses imagery appealing primarily to the reader’s sense of sight with the repetitive use of colors. The colors range from the very dull “brown skin” of the fish to the rainbow of the oil upon the water (10,

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