"The Fish" is one of Elizabeth Bishop's most celebrated and widely anthologized works. First published in 1946 in the collection North & South, the poem describes the experience of a speaker who catches a fish and then closely observes its appearance and actions. Over the course of the work, the speaker veers between two opposite perceptions: at once, she feels that the fish is familiar and humanlike, and that it is deeply foreign or even bizarre. The speaker notes that the fish has been caught and escaped before, as evidenced by the fishing wires and hooks stuck in its mouth. This prompts her to understand, in a fit of transcendent joy, that the fish has a full range of subjective experiences, including triumphs over death. Overcome by joy and by awareness of the fish's past victories, the speaker releases the fish into the water.
This work is written in a single flowing stanza of free verse, consisting largely of long, roving sentences that track the speaker's close yet wide-ranging attention to the fish. While it has no set rhyme scheme or meter, Bishop is attentive to sound, making extensive use of slant rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. It contains a great deal of figurative language: through similes and metaphors, the speaker compares the fish to familiar objects from the human world, sometimes creating an ironic contrast with the animal's own wildness.
Bishop described the poem as a partially autobiographical one, noting "That's exactly how it happened. I did catch it just as the poem says. That was in 1938. Oh, but I did change one thing; the poem says he had five hooks in his mouth, but actually he only had three. I think it improved the poem when I made that change."
