Imagery In 'The Fish' By Elizabeth Bishop

In “The Fish”, Elizabeth Bishop described the fish that was being caught and through the imagery readers can decipher the age of the fish. In lines 9-11 of the “The Fish”, it describes that the fishes’ “brown skin hung in strips like an ancient wallpaper”, the readers can use this information and guess that the fish must be at an old age. It would be different if Bishop said that the fish was old because then you couldn’t see why the fish was considered old. Bishop described that the fish has five old fishing hooks stuck in its’ mouth and they swayed and frayed, “like medals with their ribbons” (62). The fish won the fight of being caught five times and all five hooks had grown firmly in his mouth, showing again the age of the fish. Because of the appearance of the fish, the readers can sympathize with the speaker and understand why the speaker let the …show more content…
The poem expressed all the things the speaker was thankful for during the war. The speaker didn’t know “what made the grass sway / seconds before the Viet Cong / raised his soundless rifle” (3-5). This imagery informs the reader that the speaker survived a bullet against the Viet Cong because the grass swayed revealing the Viet Cong. The description of the soundless rifle allows the reader to know how dangerous it is during a war because you wouldn’t even know how you died. The speaker was thankful for the fact that the hand grenade that landed next to his foot did not explode even though it was meant to be, “Again, thanks to the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai. I’m still / falling through its silence” (31-34). If the poet had vaguely wrote that the hand grenade didn’t explode when it was next to the speaker, then the reader wouldn’t had felt how great this event was for the speaker and how thankful he was for being alive that he still remembers it until this