The Fish And The Moose Analysis

In Elizabeth Bishop’s two poems The Fish and The Moose the speakers detail an encounter with two very different animals, due to circumstances that could be considered mundane. However, due to Bishop’s masterful use of descriptive and careful imagery, these chance meetings are elevated and transformed into poetic experiences. The Fish and The Moose additionally achieve a level of surreality through their imagery, one by paying careful attention to the animal itself, and the other commits to developing an effective environment and mood before revealing the titular creature. Our two poems start with our speakers carrying out two ordinary mundane tasks, fishing in The Fish, and travelling by bus in The Moose. In both poems the action truly
While the focuses are different between the two, the imagery serves to ground the reader firmly in the world of poem, from the tremendous fish in the caught on the speakers hook, or the moose suddenly appearing in the road. In The Fish the majority of the text is devoted to the thorough description of the hooked creature with visceral detail, “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” (Bishop, 6). Careful attention is paid to the color and the texture of the fish and the speaker immediately begins to draw comparative similes to aid in the description process, pulling associations from everyday life, such like the patterns of wallpaper. And further on, the speaker even begin to imagine imagery of the inner workings of the fish, “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” (Bishop, 6). On the surface, this tangent of imagery demonstrates the speaker’s own knowledge of fish and their inner anatomy, but it also serves to create a more complete picture of the fish as a living breathing being. The description
The moose leaves in a similar manner, but remains consistent with the rest of the poem, leaving a lasting effect upon the environment, “there’s a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline” (Bishop, 14). These two endings serve to highlight the differences between the poems, The fish being all encompassing about the titular fish, whereas The Moose pays extra attention the the surrounding environment in addition. And finally, these animal encounters are elevated from their mundane occurrences into near-spiritual experiences through the realization of the ancientness that both creatures hold in their very beings, and act as a reminder of our own