Thursday, May 1, 2014

The fish and the hawthorn

Wow...talk about tragic past for this woman. If this kind of stuff happened to any of my parents, I think I would become a poet to. I can only imagine, this lady simply had a lot to write about. Strangely, she didn't write about her personal anguish all that much. She chose to write more in selective styles that weren't exactly in the style of mourning.

The contents of her poem contain deeper meanings to the subjects she wrote. For example, her poem "The Fish" has a ridiculous amount of figurative language in it. Lines such as "He was speckled with barnacles, fine rossettes of lime, and infested with tiny-white sea lice" and "I thought of the course white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails" give the reader a deeper look into the life of the fish of how worn out the fish really was when he was caught. "He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung at a grunting weight" shows that the fish was completely through with his life. He had given up. The overall tone for the fisherman was sympathy. The fisherman somehow felt the pain for this fish and by the end of the poem, he lets the fish go on his merry way. I guess you could say the undertone of this poem could be a person that is completely worn out by the life. They have gone through it all. They have completely given up and then another trial comes and they just don't fight at all. They simply just let it go. Finally, life throws them a bone, so to speak and lets them go.

George Stanley wrote a poem on Lemonhound that caught my eye because it had similar structure to Bishop's poem "The Fish". The whole poem has a deeper meaning within it. The actual poem "The White Hawthorn" speaks of a flower and the attractions around it but has a deeper meaning of the life presented around it as it ages.
http://lemonhound.com/2014/04/21/george-stanley-two-poems/

1 comment:

  1. I wrote on Bishop's "The Fish" as well, but didn't think about it like you did. I think you make a good point in showing that the fish was ready to give, as perhaps Bishop was ready to give up as well. Good job!

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