“That’s exactly how it happened,” Elizabeth Bishop said nearly thirty years after her poem “The Fish” was written. “I did catch it just as the poem says. That was in 1938. Oh, but I did change one thing; the poem says he had five hooks hanging from his mouth, but actually he only had three. I think it improved the poem when I made that change.”

Talk about a fastidious sense of accuracy! But this emphasis on precision is a little misleading; the interviewer transcribed Bishop’s comment with the emphasis on exactly, but her poem is actually more concerned with exactly how it happened. Here’s the poem:

The Fish

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.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
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.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
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,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
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.
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—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
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
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.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

“The Fish” continues a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference the American continent offers, opportunities to be educated. The poem interprets a wordless, creaturely presence—like Whitman’s “noiseless patient spider” or Emily Dickinson’s “narrow fellow in the grass”—and provides, in its way, speech for that which is wordless. “Every object rightly seen,” wrote Emerson, “unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” The poet turns to the natural world, pays close attention, and is rewarded with instruction. The news this particular fish carries is the possibility of endurance; he’s an exemplar of survival—even victory—in the face of struggle. How could such a “battered and venerable” old soldier not serve as a heroic example?

But if this were the poem’s sole intent, it could have been much shorter. Instead of getting to the point, Bishop is concerned with the experience of observing; her aim is to track the pathways of scrutiny. Elsewhere, she praises “baroque sermons (Donne’s, for instance)” that “attempted to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose.” That’s precisely what’s going on in this poem: a carefully rendered model of an engaged mind at work.

First she notes sound and weight, fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase, “a grunting weight.” Peeling scales provoke simile: the fish’s surface is reminiscent of the condition and pattern of ruined wallpaper. There’s pleasure taken in working out this comparison, and these lines signal just how leisurely and careful an examination this will be. The poet seems to proceed from a faith that the refinement of observation is an inherently satisfying activity. To see is joy and scruple, privilege and duty. No wonder she loved Vermeer!

Now the poem’s structural scaffolding is established: a shuttling of attention from outward detail to inward association, mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie. The eye moves restlessly over the surface of the fish, as if seeking what might satisfy it. The “camera” roves, pans, lingers, moves in for an extreme close-up, fixes a moment on the pulsing of the gills:

While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
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,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.

Within this single sentence Bishop travels from fish body to human body and back to fish flesh again, entering deeply into what is literally the fish’s inner life, the hidden stuff of flesh and bone. It’s a painterly passage, with its arrangement of white flesh, “dramatic” reds and blacks, and the image of that startling flower-pink bladder hurrying us back to land, to some remembered garden, to the shape and sheen of a peony blossom.

The eleven lines that follow—about those haunting, yellowed eyes, with their scratchy shine—are the most extended and intricate of the poem’s descriptive acts so far, as if to focus our sights on the primacy of vision here, dilate our attention, and slow our movement forward. You can’t help but think about the speaker’s eyes, too, and the poet points attention this way carefully: “seen through the lenses,” “to return my stare.” Progress slows even further when the first of Bishop’s characteristic hesitations is introduced:

—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.

That little pause and gathering of breath—just a dash, followed by the careful qualifying phrase “It was more like”—makes a world of difference. What does it mean, for a poet to stop and consider, to question herself, just as she will again in a few lines at “—if you could call it a lip”?

This hesitation reveals that what’s been stated so far isn’t necessarily authoritative; each descriptive act is one attempt to render the world, subject to revision. Perception is provisional; it gropes, considers, hypothesizes. Saying is now a problematic act, not a given; one might name what one sees this way, but there’s also that one, and that one. And if we’re not certain what we should say, can we be certain what we’ve seen? A degree of self-consciousness, of uncertainty has entered the project of description.

This reflexive awareness enters the poem just at its moment of maximum strangeness, as the speaker tries to look into those shifting eyes that can’t be comfortably anthropomorphized. They don’t “return my stare,” and seem more like objects than like part of a living thing. And though the speaker has tried, as is her wont, to connect them to the familiar through similes, it doesn’t work; you can feel, in that hesitation, and in the close study of this alien gaze, the thrum of anxiety.

No wonder, after such a moment, that the speaker begins to seize on a meaning for what she sees, a means of interpretation. This old soldier’s war wounds (“like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering”) occupy so many lines because it’s here the speaker has seized on a way of “reading” the exemplar of strangeness she holds before her. She begins to claim him as a hero, attaching the poem’s gathered perceptions to a sense of meaning. Though it’s enormously to the poem’s credit that not all of her observations can be marshaled to support this “point.” There’s no necessary relation between “the pink swim-bladder / like a big peony” or those unsettling eyes and the fish’s ability to persist through adversity. A lesser poet might have edited out the material that doesn’t conform to the message. But the wealth of detail keeps the fish from becoming a symbol and allows it to remain creaturely, its inscrutability intact even as the poem offers us an interpretive act.

Every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world. Bishop’s work of seeing offers, ultimately, a precise portrayal of the one who’s doing the looking. Here stands a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility. A poem is a voiceprint; someone in particular speaks, and becomes, in the most accomplished poems, unmistakable.

You don’t need to know a thing about the poet’s life or circumstances. We can only guess why she might be concerned with defeat and victory, or with survival. It isn’t for us to know whatever hooks she herself may bear. Instead, we’re brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of her sensations. Subjectivity is made of such detail, of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us, known through our associations and histories, our scaffoldings of concerns and interests, the tones and shadings of our moods. We’re invited to form a sort of readerly alliance with Bishop’s speaker, brought close to what she’s feeling and seeing at a moment of intense clarity. Poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself.

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Excerpted from The Art of Description: World into Word with permission of the publisher, Graywolf Press.