Returning Reality to Itself

10 Sep, 2025

I was in a conversation yesterday about Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "The Fish.” I had a friend that I remember wrote a dissertation on the poem, but I hadn't read it in a while, and reading it this time with others was a new experience. (Reading with others seems often like reading it for the first time)

In this conversation I was having, while the woman read it aloud, I kind of fell into a trance of some kind. Trance is a bit too much, but it was definitely some sort of visual experience. Not much happens in the poem — I mean there's very little actual narrative — a lot of it is just describing the fish caught in a ‘rented boat’ by the speaker of the poem. In a way, a lot of the words spent in the poem are describing the fish, its weight, and the skin, and the eyes, and even going inside of the fish, thinking about its white flesh, and bones, and bladder. You kind of fall into a bit of, I don't know, you have some sort of a timeless limbo as if the poet is giving you an experience of the fish, not just of catching it. It's the experience of observing it.

I remember in the conversation I asked: am I to be impressed with these amazing descriptions of the fish, or the fish itself? (We had just read William Carlos Williams' poem the Red Wheelbarrow and it was so simple and spare) It seems I'm mostly impressed by the metaphors and such that the poet is using. For example, the brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, or shapes like full-blown roses, fine rosettes of lime, the flesh packed in like feathers, the bladder like a big peony. I think the eyes were like tarnished tinfoil, like old scratched isinglass(?) I think in the lip there were five old hooks like medals with their ribbons. I mean, all of these are amazing kind of mental pictures for the different pieces of the fish, as you kind of work your mind and eye over the fish. It's kind of like a little bit of a firework show of associations and images to recollect.

But my question was: am I impressed by those poetic fireworks, or is there something of the real fish to be impressed with, or the fish itself? I think in her response she said "fish qua fish" — which I thought was funny. And then she said, probably this is a false dichotomy, because we only can experience this fish through language, through the poet's language. And I thought that was probably true. Our experience of "fish qua fish" is not what we're going towards. What we're going for is the experience of this language.

It made me think: what's being caught here is not a fish — it's an experience of wonder caught in the thin filaments of language, brought up from these darker waters to be shared or shown to others.

At the end of the poem, the last line in fact: "And I let the fish go." In the Mark Doty book ¹, he quotes Nicholson Baker in something called "The Anthropologist": 'the reason the fish has to be released is because you have to "return reality to itself.”' That's kind of interesting to me —to return reality to itself. What we have is the uncertain perceived experience imprinted on the page, like a blurred photo negative, some sort of a poetic experience, preserved in language.

I think we are compelled to speak, to communicate, to converse, probably because of our inherent isolation from others or the world. But still, the reality, the real, exists just beyond the curb of our articulation. Our attempts to communicate are still exhilarating—a joy really, a potential moment of connection, some kind of completed synapse of feeling, a spark between two orbiting beings.

What's actually caught in the poem is that experience, a shared experience of looking and wonder. And it affords this mysterious connection between beings outside of time. And we can let the real, like the fish, go and return to the darker waters.