Question

What does the title contribute to the reader’s understanding?
Who is speaking? What is the situation?
What difficult, special, unusual words does the poem contain?
What references need explaining?
How does the poem develop? Personal statement or a story?
What is the main idea of the poem?
What kind of figurative language is the poem using? What about symbolism or literary allusions?

Answer 1

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
5 He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
1 0 his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
1 5 stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
2 0 and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
2 5 fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
3 0 the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
3 5 which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
4 0 of old scratched isinglass.1
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
4 5 I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
5 0 grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
5 5 grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
6 0 when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
6 5 I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
7 0 around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts2
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels3 —until everything
7 5 was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.