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The Fish Analysis

Decent Essays

Sometimes unforeseen events just happen to a person. These people may have had no power over what happened, but they have power to use these events to better themselves. Elizabeth Bishop’s life started out pretty rough. Her dad died before she was even one, and her mom was admitted into a psychiatric hospital forcing Bishop to live with her mother’s parents. Eventually, she was forced to move in with her father’s parents. She didn’t have the best childhood, but she changed her future. Instead of making bad choices and dwelling on the past, Bishop lived life to the fullest taking all the chances she could. She wrote poetry to express herself and by doing so she inspired others. Her poetry uses techniques like imagery, metaphors and similes, …show more content…

In her poem “The Fish,” Bishop uses many different descriptive words. She writes, “brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper //and its pattern of darker ///brown…” (11-14), “the dramatic reds and blacks / of his shiny entrails, // and the pink swim-bladder...” (37-39), and “around the rusted engine/ to the bailer rusted orange, // the sun-cracked thwarts...” (87-89). The words used to describe different things in her poem create the image she is trying to convey. The reader can start to see the fish while she’s describing its skin and fins. In “I Am in Need of Music,” Bishop writes, “over my fretful, feeling/ fingertips// over my bitter-tainted,/// trembling lips...” (3-6). This creates the feeling of nervousness and anxiety that the narrator is feeling in the beginning of the poem. The way Bishop creates imagery throughout her poems greatly affects her style and helps contribute to the effect of the …show more content…

Rhyming often makes the poem easier to read and more interesting. In Elizabeth Bishop often uses rhyming in her poems. In her poem “I Am in Need of Music,” she follows a rhyming pattern of A, B, B, A, A, C, C, A. Bishop uses words like flow, slow, low and glow to rhyme and words like fingertips, lips, dead, and head in the first stanza. In the second stanza she uses melody and sea, cool and pool, and sleep and deep. These rhyming words also help to create a rhythm throughout the poem. In her poem “Insomnia,” she connects the second and third stanza by using rhyming words at the end of the first sentences- deserted and inverted. Bishop tended to rhyme the last word of the second and fourth line only in this poem. In stanza 1 she rhymed miles and smiles, in stanza 2 hell, dwell, and well, and in stanza 3 right and night. By using the rhyming words, Bishop creates the rhythm and keeps the readers interested in her

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