Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, spent much of her childhood in Nova Scotia, and eventually settled in Boston. She attended Vassar College, where she earned a BA and met poet Marianne Moore, who dissuaded her from attending medical school in favor of pursuing life as a poet. Bishop published her first collection of poetry, North and South (1946), after traveling in Europe and North Africa. During an extended trip to Brazil, she published her second collection, A Cold Spring (1955), with the poems from North and South, in a single volume. This won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Bishop lived in Brazil for fifteen years; translated the Brazilian work Minha Vida de Menina as The Diary of Helena Morely (1957); and described her life in Brazil in her third collection of poetry, Questions of Travel (1965). Her last collection, Geography III, was published in 1976.

The Fish

Bishop lived in Key West, Florida, when she wrote “The Fish.” She was an avid fisherwoman, having grown up in a fishing village in Nova Scotia. “The Fish” was first published in Partisan Review in 1938.

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.

5

He didn’t fight.

He hadn’t fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and venerable

and homely. Here and there

10

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wall-paper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wall-paper:

shapes like full-blown roses

15

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

20

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

—the frightening gills,

25

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,

30

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes

35

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

40

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.

45

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—

50

grim, wet, and weapon-like,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

55

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

60

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.

65

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

70

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

75

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

(1938)