Please respond to the questions (and sub-questions) below. Please make sure that your answers are focused on the questions and that you’re writing as grammatically as possible!. Please use quotes to support your answer, but try to quote only a line or two at a time, maximum: Mostly, I want to read your analysis! When you answer questions, always explain why you’re answering them in the way you’ve chosen to answer them.
In total, you should write about 750-1000 in total for this assignment. (More is fine, and even recommended!)
1. Drama—Imagine that a friend has come to you for help. She is auditioning for a play, and she wants to use "The Fish" as her dramatic monologue. She wants you to help her craft the best performance possible. So she asks you to help her figure out:
A. How should her emotional state change as she reads the poem to convey the realization the narrator has at the end of the poem?
B. How should she play the narrator? How old is this person, what is their personality, what do they value. etc.?
C. Your friend doesn’t want to put on a costume for the audition, but she does want to imagine what her character looks like and is wearing while she performs. What do you suggest?
D. Likewise, she can’t build a set, but she wants to imagine a location where this is taking place. What do you suggest?
E. What lines of the poem do you think she needs to emphasize most in her performance?
2. Fiction
A. The poem almost wholly devoted to describing a fish. How does the description of the fish become the plot of the poem? In other words, how do the descriptions help you understand what the narrator is thinking, and how do those thoughts lead her to what is perhaps the unexpected ending? (Remember, use examples to explain your thinking!)
B. What is the tone of "The Fish"? How does the tone help you understand the descriptions?
C. What lesson(s), if any, do you think this poem is trying to impart to readers?
3. Poetry
A. What are some specific images that Bishop uses that are unusual? How do these unusual images lead the reader to an understanding of the poem?
B. The poem is slim on the page; its lines do not often end where a sentence or even phrase ends. In other words, Bishop is breaking the line of poetry early and often in "The Fish." Why? How do the line-breaks and the slimness of the poem contribute to a reader’s understanding of it?
C. "The Fish" is a very famous poem, but it is clearly using elements of drama (specifically, dramatic monologue) and fiction (e.g. it has a very clear plot). What does this dramatic story gain by being written as a poem?
The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
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.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
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