An Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" is a narrative poem, told in the first person, about the confrontation between an amateur fisher--fishing in a "rented boat" (Bishop 1212; all references to the poem are to this edition)--and a "tremendous" battle-worn fish. A poem that acknowledges awareness in nature, "The Fish," although a narrative, sings in the way we expect lyric poetry to sing, for it is rich with imagery, simile, …showed first 75 words of 922 total…

…showed last 75 words of 922 total…and the individual consciousness becomes an undifferentiated part of a greater whole" (18). 3Harry Levin defines Joyce's "'epiphany' [. . .] as a sudden illumination if not a divine revelation, a slight but definite insight into other lives, a fragmentary clue to the meaning of life as a whole" (8). Here, of course, the other life is that of a fish, but Levin's words describe what the poem describes rather accurately, even though he was not writing about Bishop's poem