By Elizabeth Bishop

The Fish

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.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
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,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
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
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
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
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.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels-until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

The Fish Commentary

In this poem the fisherman meets a fish that reflects his life. The fish had gone through many things in his life that the fisherman can relate to. The older people are the more experienced they are in life. When people get old we can see aging in our skin and hair. For a fish the signs of aging are in their lips. The lips of the fish in the poem have "hung five old pieces of fish-line." In the poem the author say the fish had a “five –haired beard of wisdom” this compares the fishes’ five hooks to a beard that a man with wisdom would have. These two have the hardships of life in common. 

Verb Commentary

I think the poem speaks about the loss of action, the loss of the strength of words. A verb is an action; it represents the fact that something is being done. The speaker wants words to come out as intense as they are thought. With time, people have become more silent in some ways, stopped saying things the way they think them--dressing them up for others to feel better, people feel afraid to act; to oppose what they feel is unfair. I think the speaker wants these instincts to be free again. I think the author feels like people don’t work as hard as they used. He wants the blood, sweat , and tears of the word verb to come back. This message is sent by this line, “the blood of   those  who  have  spoken  and  those  who  have not spoken.” 

By Pablo Neruda

Morning

Naked you are simple as one of your hands;
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.
You've moon-lines, apple pathways
Naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;
You've vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.

Naked you are tiny as one of your nails;
Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
And you withdraw to the underground world.

As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;
Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.

By Pablo Neruda

Verb

I’m going to wrinkle this word, 

I’m going to twist it,
yes,
it is much too flat
it is as if a great dog or great river
had passed its tongue or water over it
during many years.

I want that in the word
the roughness is seen
the iron salt
The de-fanged strength
of the land,
the blood
of those who have spoken and those who have not spoken.

I want to see the thirst
Inside the syllables
I want to touch the fire
in the sound:
I want to feel the darkness
of the cry. I want
words as rough
as virgin rocks.

Sonnet 27, Morning by Pablo Neruda read by Robert Ricardo Reese [Poetry ...

First Death in Nova Scotia Commentary

This poem was included in Bishop’s third collection of poetry - Questions of Travel – in 1965. Bishop was in her fifties, and trying to come to terms with events in her early childhood. ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ is an elegy for her young cousin Arthur (his real name was Frank) who died when Bishop was four.  The poem begins in a simple way. We visualize Cousin Arthur's wake through a child's eyes. It is winter in Nova Scotia, the parlor is cold. Elizabeth had a hard time figuring out how death really works we can see this because she calls the loon a “he” instead of it. I liked this poem because Elizabeth actually remembers the death of her cousin from when she was a four year old girl. I also like that she writes from the perspective of the little girl. This puts you in her shows and shows what she could have been possibly thinking  as a little girl seeing a dead body for the first time at such a young age.