Summary
The speaker repeats that only the tuna has knowledge of the sea. He compares the fish to weapons like an arrow, a javelin, and a harpoon, describing it coursing through the ocean, still strong despite being wounded. He imagines the tuna being in harmony with the water's currents. Then, returning to his surroundings, the speaker repeats the observation that the tuna is lying dead before him rather than swimming through the sea. It was once as lively as a growing tree, and was the seed or root cause of underwater earthquakes. Now it is dead, and yet even so it is the only form in the market that seems to possess dynamism and purpose. Surrounded by vegetables, the fish resembles an enormous, streamlined, and shining ship—still perfect and dignified but now sailing through the mysterious territory of death rather than that of the ocean.
Analysis
One way to track the emotional and thematic trajectory of this poem is through its metaphorical language. It's hard to miss the fact that, as the speaker becomes more imaginatively invested in the tuna during stanza three, he turns to metaphors of war and weaponry. The weapons to which he compares his subject are unified by speed and flight. Javelins, arrows, and harpoons are all designed to fly rapidly through space to reach a target. Therefore, these images convey certain information about the fish's physical movement: they help the reader picture him moving in a graceful and streamlined way. But the comparisons to weapons reveal something more abstract about the fish, at least as the speaker imagines him. The speaker sees him as a warrior of sorts, capable of handily targeting enemies. This raises a subsequent question: who exactly is the tuna's enemy? The poem implies that his adversary is humanity itself—after all, it is humanity that has ultimately defeated him in spite of his strength and capabilities.
As we transition into stanza four, though, we also transition away from weaponry metaphors into those drawn from the natural world. The tuna is compared to a seed and to a tree. Having previously compared him to human-made objects, the speaker now allows him to remain, metaphorically, in an entirely natural realm. By switching course in this way, the speaker implies that the fish—despite its warrior-like attributes—also possesses certain other traits that lie well outside of human understanding and render it thoroughly foreign to the speaker. On the other hand, the images of a seed or a tree are drawn from land, suggesting that the speaker lacks the vocabulary to truly visualize the tuna's undersea home. In other words, he is foreign enough to the speaker that, even as the speaker attempts to describe his foreignness, he is forced to fall back on familiar concepts from his own life.
At the poem's end, the speaker's chosen metaphors again undergo a change. He compares the tuna to a "man of war," a nickname for a type of military ship. In a sense, therefore, we have returned to the metaphors of war and weapons. The speaker even goes out of his way to describe the imagined man of war's size, sleekness, and power. In many ways, we appear to be dealing with ideas similar to those we saw in the poem's third stanza. Yet at the same time, the man of war evokes images and associations quite different than would an arrow or harpoon. It calls to mind gravity, slowness, and weight. In this way, it links the earlier wartime metaphors to the description of the dead fish, creating a bridge between images of speed and stillness, lightness and weight. Furthermore, while the man of war is linked to battle, it is notably not a weapon in and of itself: its function is movement. Therefore, the metaphor lays the ground for the poem's final lines: "navigating now / the waters of death." In other words, the tuna may no longer be like an arrow or a javelin, because it has, in a quite literal way, been defeated. But, the speaker argues, while it can't fight, it continues to exist on its own terms and even to explore. Yet again, the tuna has access to experiences unknown to the speaker and the other people surrounding him. By killing him, the speaker argues, humans have merely given the tuna access to yet another experience that remains inaccessible to them.
