Poem-A-Day/April 16
https://poets.org/poem/fish-1
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Read this poem aloud. Read it slowly, savoring every phrase. Note how it deepens and we move forward, its own tentative journey into darkness and fear and even (amazingly) "injury" and "abuse--revealing, along the way, magnificent life forms.
You may (Moore will permit it, though probably wouldn't agree) see this as a poem about the self as it accumulates hurts, physical and emotional scars (whether from accident, or from intentional harm, by oneself of by others); and about how landscapes and bodies reveal past traumas.
https://poets.org/poem/fish-1
***
Read this poem aloud. Read it slowly, savoring every phrase. Note how it deepens and we move forward, its own tentative journey into darkness and fear and even (amazingly) "injury" and "abuse--revealing, along the way, magnificent life forms.
You may (Moore will permit it, though probably wouldn't agree) see this as a poem about the self as it accumulates hurts, physical and emotional scars (whether from accident, or from intentional harm, by oneself of by others); and about how landscapes and bodies reveal past traumas.
I love this poem and wrote a paper about it in English 120. If anyone wants to read my take on it (from two years ago), I've pasted the relevant section below.
ReplyDelete.
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Even before the body of the poem truly begins, the reader begins a jarring investigation of the particular versus the vast. The title “The Fish” suggests that the poem will focus on a singular sea creature: one individual animal in the starring role. Immediately after, however, the speaker begins with “wade,” a plural verb form (Line 1). The title, forming the first part of the poem’s first sentence, must refer to multiple fish rather than one. In this unexpected twist, the speaker calls attention to the way in which a single object or image in a poem, though simple on its surface, can in fact represent a more expansive idea when investigated.
The fish themselves illustrate this concept as they “wade / through black jade” (Lines 1-2). This pointed image and the halting rhythm of the phrase suggest a dark, treacherous struggle to survive. The fish must wrestle through solid stone, just as the reader must wrestle through the rocky rhythms of the poem. The large visual gap between the title and the next piece of the sentence forces the reader to take a massive pause in the middle of the thought. This division, along with the startling enjambment after ‘wade,’ makes reading the poem an effortful experience. The poem thus places the reader in the same position as the fish: trapped in a laborious, dark existence.
The halting rhythms persist throughout the poem, providing a brilliant example of Moore’s syllabic style. Each stanza follows the same pattern, invariably starting with one-syllable lines and proceeding to three, nine, six, and finally eight syllables per line. These rhythms mirror the repetitive, periodic tides of the ocean, a powerful and unavoidable force throughout the poem. The waves, while merely fluid, become “a wedge / of iron” against the cliffside as they repeatedly bombard it over time (Lines 18-19). The speaker’s observation of the “hatchet strokes” also invokes an image of destruction after repetitive attack (Line 34). These unyielding forces eventually lead the speaker to remark that “the chasm-side is / dead,” an announcement she rhymes with “Repeated” (Lines 35-36, 37). This distinctive light rhyme forges a connection between death and repetition. Thus, the unchanging, cyclic sequences in both rhythm and image throughout the poem mirror the inevitable, unending cycle of life and death.
The speaker also flits between contrasting imagery, reflecting the sudden and ubiquitous shifts between survival and cessation. While the first stanza consists of sinister “black” and “crow-blue” coloring and macabre “ash-heaps,” the imagery slips into the more optimistic “shafts of the / sun” “illuminating / the / turquoise sea” in the following stanzas (Lines 2, 3, 4, 10-11, 15-16). Yet again, however, the poem slips back into morbid language, as the reader continues past the enjambment to discover that “bodies” fill this glimmering sea (Line 18). A tumultuous back and forth thus arises in which neither life nor death dominates, but each endlessly dives in and out of focus over time. We see a cycle once again.
Continued: What message, then, are we to take from the poem as a whole? Do death and destruction tip the scales, overpowering life? While Moore leaves the answer characteristically unclear, I certainly see evidence for a hopeful conclusion. In the face of an arduous existence and unending ruin, an undercurrent of perseverance runs beneath the poem’s surface. The fish never stop their wading, and the brave mussel “keeps / adjusting” the sediment surrounding it (Lines 3-4). The speaker observes that
ReplyDeleteThe barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices–– (Lines 8-15)
The pervasiveness and inescapability of the sun – even in the darkest of crevices – suggests that life can indeed prevail. The extensive alliteration present in this section of the poem further emphasizes the expansiveness of light. Overall, the “defiant edifice” shows that “it can live / on what can not revive / its youth,” demonstrating that while time will forever continue to corrupt youth, with enough determination one can survive the trials of life (Lines 29, 38-39).
The physical structuring of this poem is so interesting and regular. I can't keep thinking that (in keeping with the poem's subject) the stanzas look almost like part of a ship.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that really struck me about this poem is how certain immaterial things are given a physicality and tangibility. The sunlight transforms into a ray of glass, searching out hidden barnacles and the water itself seems to become iron at one point. For two things that I usually imagine as soft and fluid, it's interesting to see them depicted as such rigid bodies.
This poem is delicious, and Chloe--your analysis is excellent. In my preternatural optimism, I didn't see this as a "journey into darkness and fear" at all--even the opposite. Most simply, because it begins in darkness: as Chloe says, the first and second stanzas are black, the third white or gold light, the fourth turquoise, and the fifth pink and green. So by the time we reach the "external / marks of abuse" in stanza six/lines 28-29, we've already made it, already survived. The abuse has happened, and the sea is still alive and full of "bodies" [19]--which I read as sensual rather than morbid (perhaps the sea creatures that "slide each on the other" [26] are influencing me here as well). The cliff and the sea are both "defiant edifice[s]" [30]; the sea has the power to carve into the cliff like iron [19-20] while the cliff is itself iron [20-21].
ReplyDeleteGrowing up near California's Big Sur coast makes this image strangely dear to me--the dance between jutting cliffs and carving sea is ever-changing and eternal...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Big-Sur-hit-again-as-huge-landslide-covers-11167872.php#photo-12956249