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The first impression one gets from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” is that of a poem about your basic fishing trip. A closer look at the imagery used by Bishop reveals a poem that has a different intended meaning. She has created a poem that enables the reader to feel what the characters go through. The real theme of Bishop’s poem is that of humanitarianism and respect for a fish’s lifelong will to survive. Most people have been fishing before, but never stopped to think how the fishes feel when they are captured. By cautiously and effectively describing the captured fish, the reactions the fish portrays after being caught, and the symbolic marks on the fish’s body of his past struggles from struggles to stay alive, Bishop creates, through her images of elegance, victory, and survival, something more than a simple fishing story. She creates a path for the reader to see and feel the fish’s side of the story. The first four lines of the poem are for the most part normal and contain just the facts: 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. (1-4) Except for tremendous, Bishop’s persona uses no exaggerations unlike most fi