Reflections on Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish.docVIP

Reflections on Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish 　　Elizabeth Bishop is considered the most prominent poetess after Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore in American poetry in the 20th century. The Fish is the most representative among the early poems in Bishop’s voice. This paper intends to take The Fish as an example to do a close text analysis of it especially from its language features. 　　The Fish is well-developed by Bishop’s ground narrative language as well as her dramatic figurative language. In the first 9 lines， Bishop provides a setting in a straight-forward narrative way to point out that the fish didn’t fight at all. In line10-21， Bishop employs simile three times to describe vividly the fish’s appearance whose pattern is like “wall paper” and shape is like “roses”. In these similes， Bishop endows the fish with different life forms in which “wall paper” is artificial and man-made， whereas “full-blown roses” and “rosettes of lime” is full of natural sense， hopeful and energetic. In line22-33， the metaphorically feather-like flesh and peony-like swim-bladder hit readers mind with deep impression. In line 34-44， Bishop returns to the narrative telling of the eye contact between the speaker and the fish， which is the first interaction between the seemingly lifeless and hopeless fish and the dominant and victorious speaker. Then in line45-64， Bishop carries out a heroic image of fish warrior with thorough descriptive language as well as fantastic imagination which wholly subverts the previous weak image of the fish. In line65-75， the speaker’s epiphany together with the emotion develops to the utmost in the combination with narrative language and figurative language in which Bishop’s outstanding use of language is fully demonstrated to readers. 　　Besides the different language style， Bishop’s language is also full of tension in this poem where a large amount of contrasts and comparisons are used to fulfill the tension. In The Fish， Bishop creates several types