Tone Of The Poem The Fish

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Over the course of Elizabeth Bishop's life, Bishop was known to have a rough start due to her earlier childhood experiences. At a young age, Bishop lost her father and her mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital due to her mental illness. Many of Bishop's crafts reflect her keen eye and attention to detail, as well as the events in her life that have helped shape her writing. In Elizabeth Bishop’s most notable poem "The Fish", there are many strategies readers can note about her work.One can gather that there exists a deeper more intuitive element to the poem than what is provided for readers to gather from the outside. When reading and observing the poem, "The Fish", Bishop provides her audience with selected types of tones and moods …show more content…

The speaker says proudly, "I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat "(Bishop, Elizabeth. "The Fish."). We can hear the boast in her voice as if she had just achieved a mission she had longed to reach. The speaker observes her catch with great detail as if to study and absorb every detail of the fish's appearance including its flaws. She begins to grow an attachment and a connection with the fish as she is holding it up, almost like a holding a trophy. She writes, "He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down" (Bishop, Elizabeth. "The Fish."). As she begins to describe the fish in more detail, we hear a more judgmental tone. We almost begin to wonder if perhaps, Bishop's keen eye is only watchful of what is on the outside of the fish, not of the things such as how the fish evolved to be this tremendous fish she describes. She later demonstrates a deeper understanding of the fish this towards the end when says, "I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw" (Bishop, Elizabeth. "The Fish."). This line is evident of the growing respect and curiosity the narrator develops for the fish, leading up to the end where she finally decides to liberate the fish. The speaker is slowly and surely over the course of this poem, considering how tough this fish must be and how much he has had to

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