nyanya new 3

After you have read the poem, consider the following:

"Sometimes beauty can be seen in the oddest or ugliest of places or objects."

1. What does the speaker find "beautiful" about the fish?

2. Which lines provide especially vivid details about the fish?

3. How and where does the speaker show her feelings about the fish? What details make the fish seem almost human? (reference specific lines)

4. How is the fish characterized; in other words, what kind of "personality" does the fish have?

5. Re-read the last 12 lines. Why do you think she let the fish go?

The Fish

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 darker brown

was like wallpaper:

shapes like full-blown roses

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled and 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 shinny 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 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 orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop