Close Reading: The Fish By Marianne Moore

588 Words2 Pages

Henry He
Professor Evgeniya Koroleva
ENG130
18 September 2015

Close Reading: “The Fish” by Marianne Moore In “The Fish”, Marianne describes the perpetual cycle of life and death that occurs within the sea. The poem introduces the sea as a cruel and hostile force, and compared to “black jade” for its ability to blot out light. It is later in the poem that the sea’s nurturing nature is exposed and acts as a refuge for the “ink- / bespattered jellyfish, crabs like green / lilies, and submarine toadstools”. Moore captures the of duality in the sea’s nature through the use of rhyme, syntax, and syllabic verse. “The Fish” adopts an AABBC rhyme scheme to create this sense of order that contrasts heavily against the sea’s chaotic nature. This rhyme scheme is dramatically enforced in stanza 4, where the word “accident” is broken into “ac- / cident” so that the first syllable in line 1 would rhyme with “lack” in line 2. Stanza 7 is unusual because it is the only stanza without a whole word for its first syllable and causes considerable confusion for the readers. However, Moore would tolerate this awkwardness, going so far to impose it on her …show more content…

The word “accident” is divided into two parts in stanza 7, but is still a part of the sentence that goes through stanza 6 to 8 (“ All / external / marks of abuse are present on this / defiant edifice— /all the physical / features of / ac- / cident—…). The “defiant” edifice is the cliff that bears the brunt of the sea waves, resulting in the “external marks of abuse”. At the same time, the waves are eroding and erasing these marks as “an accident” caused by the sea. The division between “ac” and “cident” mirrors the duplicity of the sea’s action; it heals and attacks the cliff. The clever syntax in the sentence gives a mundane word like “accident” a special meaning and reflects the sea’s interaction with other

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