The Fish And The Moose Analysis

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the world’s most well known poets that has survived the ages with her excellent use of imagery and words to paint her poem as a picture. It is common in Bishop 's poems for her to use a certain style of writing out of habit as it is common in more than one piece, but sometimes that habit seems to creep toward an obsession. With some of Bishop’s poems, it is nice to use these words as a paintbrush on an easel, but for most of her work, it becomes more of a hindrance than a helpful tool. If Bishop had the power to keep her thoughts in control and not let her painting flow free by using words that told her tale instead of using underlying meanings, it might have had a stronger sense of understanding to the reader. Instead, …show more content…
While Fortuny wrote a bit more focused on the Pink Dog poem, she does talk about The Fish and The Moose, both of which have heavy use of animals in the poems. Joelle Biele gives a detailed report about many uses of vivid colors in Bishop’s papers, calling her a painter instead of a writer. Biele does so because Bishop uses very imaginative colors to describe her scenes, and it is common in multiple pieces she has written. William Logan’s article is a bit more broad as it does not only touch on her use of animals or colors, but has some useless information about Bishop as a person and why she writes a certain way, which is similar to the article written by Richard Tillinghast. Tillinghast talks about Bishop as a painter and gives background to her life and to what made her who she …show more content…
This is not very easy to find out either, as at a first glance, many readers will think of the animals as just that; animals. In my case, when the moose made it’s presence on the side of the lake, I did not think of the animal as any sort of underlying message or hidden meaning, but just thought of it as an animal in the wild. If the poem had better context clues or made it a bit easier for the reader to find out what Bishop was hinting towards, then it would not be as bad. Animals are not the only expression that Bishop uses in her poems, and that are repeatedly multiple times throughout her writing career. Elizabeth Bishop was a painter as well as a writer, and it shows in her writing work. It is easy to see she is an artist because when she writes a poem, many times she will use such vivid colors to explain the setting that she essentially paints a picture in the reader 's head. Biele comments on this agreeing that Bishop’s vivid definitions were special to her work. “Bishop 's visual imagination is one of her work 's defining characteristics. It is, perhaps, the major element that separates her poetry from that of her contemporaries. “ (Biele) With the addition of these undisclosed parts of the stories, it adds depth to a story that is inherently depthless, especially in poem form. These parts of the stories do help tell