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Manipulation Of Form In Scarry's 'The Fish'

Decent Essays

Bishop’s manipulation of form further intertwines the reader with the speaker’s three-fold experience of catching, analyzing and then releasing the fish. Although she could have shortened “The Fish” or divided it into several stanzas, Bishop presents her poem in a compact lyric of seventy-six free verse lines, all in one stanza spanning across two pages. At first glance, the poem almost resembles a long descriptive list, particularly because each line of the poem is approximately the same length. Yet, a closer analysis reveals Bishop’s effective method of transposing the speaker’s active thought process into words. In a sense, the poem’s form cleverly mirrors its content, inducing readers to actively engage with the text. Just as the speaker …show more content…

Rather than simply “telling”, the poem moves from observation to illumination, and the fish’s pain is “revealed” through the content and literary devices of the poem.
By personifying the title fish and giving it human-like qualities, Bishop objectifies and allows its pain to be more clearly communicated. As Scarry theorizes, “If the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body, the the sentient fact of the person’s suffering will become knowable to a second person” (Scarry 13). While Bishop’s personification does not explicitly present the fish as a human body, the implicit similarities underscored by the juxtaposition between the fish and the speaker allows the fish to transform from an alien “other” into a familiar one imbued with human qualities such as aging, perseverance and defeat. Bishop begins attributing human-like personalities to the fish early in the poem when the speaker observes that “He (the fish) hung a grunting weight, / battered and venerable/ and homely…” (7-9). By genderizing the fish, Bishop describes the fish in human terms and provides it with a personality.

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