I was second-guessing including this entry/ anecdote on Elizabeth Bishop, but Alicia’s entry inspired me to go ahead and do it.
Imagine, when I first came across Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” it was in the form of a badly Xeroxed copy in a college classroom. I don’t remember the course I was taking, but I remember the assignment: to study the poem over the weekend and be ready to discuss it the next time class convened. And so I took the poem, and I read it, reread it, and I loved it—especially that last line: “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” What a celebratory declaration.
The speaker opens the poem with “I caught a tremendous fish,” and then proceeds to examine it, scale by scale, from fin to fin, awe-struck by its beauty—the triumph of it, the trophy of it—but then comes the dramatic turn:
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.
The fish transforms into a creature of survival, its battle scars in tow. The fish at the end of the line grows from “catch of the day” to an encounter with the divine. Witness the way the bilge and the rust of “the little rented boat” become blessed with the magic of bright color, yes, “until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”
I remember adopting the phrase like a mantra—“rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”—everything is beautiful! I could spin around the room to it. The fish, like a god, had entered my world.
But no sooner did I walk into the class the following Monday (before I even took my seat) that the instructor informed us that the bad copy had cut off the actual final line of the poem, which was: “And I let the fish go.”
Well, knock me over with a fishing rod! I must have stumbled to my desk as I repositioned my relationship to the fish god. He was too good for this world after all. He was too beautiful, too grand to remain among us, and the speaker recognized this, so the fish was let go, the memory of it enough to sustain us until its next brief appearance.
Years later, I would find an echo to this wondrous fish in Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya’s classic novel Bless Me, Ultima, about a young boy struggling with the colliding faiths of Catholicism and indigenous beliefs, with the need to respect the mystery of the natural world and to embrace the impulse to challenge the culture of dominance taught by the industrialized one.
The fish, such a wise, wise being.
Rigoberto,
Thank you for your insightful comments about one of my favorite poets. Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry resonates with such wonderful imagery and music, and “The Fish” is just one of many memorable works. For someone who only published approximately a hundred poems in her lifetime, Bishop has had a tremendous, well-deserved impact on many poets, especially when one considers her contemporaries (Lowell, Schwartz, Berryman, Jarrell).
Other poems of hers that are equally exquisite include “Filling Station,” “At the Fishhouses,” “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “The Riverman,” “Large Bad Picture,” “Insomnia,” “Robinson Crusoe in England,” “One Art,” “Sestina,” “The Moose,” “The Man-Moth”–I’m sure others could list more titles of their favorite Bishop poems.
All the best,
–Robert
What a great story! I can’t tell you how often I’ve been reading a poem in a magazine, and thought, yes, that is a nice ending, only to turn the page! Imagine if we only had Bishop in fragments, a la Sappho, we might think that was the end of the poem.
Well, we do have a Bishop in fragments, thanks to Alice Quinn’s collection of her unfinished and unpublished work!
Ah, yes, that project of Ms. Quinn’s…people (and critics) had mixed reactions to this “recovery” project. I myself have to admit I didn’t buy it or read it because I’ve been waiting for a convincing argument to delve into the unfinished writings of Elizabeth Bishop…perhaps as archival curiosity, maybe that’s the best lens. I don’t know.
I suppose we DO have a Bishop in fragments! I did buy the Quinn book, despite sharing some of Rigoberto’s unease about it. Actually, I felt more uneasy about the drafts that were published in The New Yorker as if they were finished poems–that, I think, was misleading, and I cannot imagine Bishop being pleased about it. But Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke Box itself is a fascinating book and a must-have now for Bishop fans. The context of the book (and occasional facsimiles of the notebook pages in it) makes their unfinished nature very clear–even if it is impossible to read a draft printed on a page the way you would read it scrawled in a notebook. Well, I am grateful for the book and would recommend it.
I think Alicia’s exactly right (and only wish Quinn’s had been a proper critical edition, though you can see why nobody’d think it “marketable.”) It’ll be extremely interesting to see how people respond to the forthcoming Library of America Bishop volume, which may well go a long way to restore some context for the unfinished work, letters, incidental pieces, and so on. Even the wonderful collected poems we’ve had all these years has the liability of omitting the prose pieces that were woven together in the inexplicably out-of-print Questions of Travel. For too long it has been almost impossible for the casual reader to discover what Bishop’s own books were like!