Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry changes everyday scenes to vivid imagery. Bishop has a keen eye for detail as she converts the visual images that she sees into words of poetic language that creates vivid images in the reader’s mind.
The poem “The Fish” is bombarded with intense imagery of the fish. The fish is ‘tremendous’, ‘battered’, ‘venerable’, and ‘homely’. Bishop is very sympathetic towards the fish’s situation as she imagines the fish’s life stories. She compares the fish to familiar household objects: “here and there / his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper, / and its pattern of... (More)