The Fish - Elizabeth Bishop

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

commentary

The speaker catches a huge fish while fishing in a little rented boat. She studies her catch for a while as, holding it up half out of water beside the boat. The fish is pretty old and gnarly-looking, with barnacles and algae growing on it, and it also has five fishing hooks with the lines still partially attached hanging from its jaw.The speaker considered how tough this fish must be and how much he probably had to fight. She begins to respect the fish. The poem takes its final turn when the oil spillage in the boat makes a rainbow and the speaker, overcome with emotion by the fish and the scene, lets the fish go.Three sentences really stick out in the way that they are different from the rest of the poem. The sentences in lines 5 and 6 ("He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all.") recognize the change in the fish's behavior. The rusted hooks in his lip showed how he had fought before, but this time, he had given up and not even put up a fight. Another sentence, near the end, is so concise, yet has so much meaning. In the last line of the poem, the narrator says, "And I let the fish go." Here, the narrator is showing compassion and demonstrating respect for the fish and his efforts. Throughout the poem, the narrator describes the fish's appearance. Phrases like "battered and venerable," "his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper," "his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw," and "grim, wet, and weapon-like" The theme would be that we can learn lessons in life through small things .