“The Fish”, by Elizabeth Bishop, was an eye-opening, thought-provoking poem about a simple fish, but in reality, it had a deeper and more obscure meaning. This piece of literature was known to be the genre of poetry. In the poem, the speaker caught a fish, admired it, and eventually released back to the water. It was a simple story about a woman fishing, but the twist was that she set the fish free in the end. In her poem, “The Fish”, Elizabeth Bishop portrayed different levels to the meaning of the poem, included forms of poetic elements, and added details to the text to contribute to the themes. The surface meaning of “The Fish” was how the speaker caught a huge fish while fishing in a little rented boat. She looked and studied her catch, holding half of the body out of the water. The fish…show more content… She used a lot of imagery in her text because she described the fish in full detail, “He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime…” (Bishop). An example of symbolism is the fish in the poem. The fish represents mutual respect, which is what the speaker had for the fish, and that is why she released him. Elizabeth Bishop also used similes and personification in this poem. She used them in order to bring the fish to life for the readers to fully understand its meaning. Her use of similes was mainly to describe how the fish looked like, “Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper…” (Bishop). She used personification by giving human-like qualities to the fish so that the readers could understand the significance of the fish. Throughout the poem, Bishop referenced the fish as a he rather than an it, “He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely” (Bishop). The poem was a free verse, which indicated that it had no set
