To begin, Bishop sets the tone for the entire piece by telling a story about a fish—not just any fish, but a “tremendous” fish. Especially with poetry, in which the substance of the piece is there as soon as it begins (contrasted with prose, where you usually have a little while for the author to warm to his task and show you a bit about himself before he hits the subject of interest), the author sets the tone of the piece in large part by selecting its subject. It is understood that the poet is not relaying a factual account of his experiences, but rather has chosen his language and indeed the subject of the poem with care to achieve his desired effect.

This is important for “The Fish” because when one asks what a poet might think to achieve by telling a story about a fish (especially a “tremendous” fish, one that gets away—or, as the poet would have it, was voluntarily released), the intuitive answer is that the poet wants us to be skeptical. The speaker in “The Fish” is participating in a long rhetorical tradition of telling stories about “the one that got away.” And it is part and parcel of “the one that got away” stories that they are full of tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, and though they purport to be relaying actual experiences, they are instead a sort of language-game, a kind of verbal “king of the hill” in which participants attempt to unseat the dominant player by recounting grander and more impressively absurd tales. In sum, such stories are intended to be taken seriously, but never literally. And so the tone of this poem, for me, is one of mock gravitas.

The words chosen are very serious, and from the author’s diction you would never get a hint of mockery. But consider, as I have, the context of the tale, and how it is situated within the discourse of “the one that got away” stories. And consider, also, just how hyperbolic the poet’s language is. She catches a fish, not a big fish, but a “tremendous” one. He is not old, but “venerable” and “ancient.” His gills breathe in “terrible” oxygen, and those gills are “frightening.” His eyes are “far larger” than the poet’s and he is large enough to be “speckled with barnacles,” yet somehow he is still small enough for her to lift him into the boat. His lip is “weaponlike” and he has broken five lines already.

To further strengthen my interpretation, consider the staccato rhythm of the lines and the heavy use of the abrupt em dash. The shortness of each line creates a feeling that the poet is hesitating, as if making up the poem on the spot. Indeed, the rhythm is highly inconsistent, so much so that it reads almost as a paragraph of prose to which some mad editor had inserted line breaks at nearly regular intervals. The rhythm is strange enough that it prompts the audience to ask, as they did about the choice of subject, “why write a poem at all?” And the answer that appears to me, based on the hesitant feeling created by the line breaks, is that Bishop wished to give this poem an improvisational feel. Such a tone would be consistent with the genre of “the one that got away” stories: those stories are made up on the spot, but generally based on a real, half-remembered past event.

So what do we arrive at, when we take this seriously but not literally, thinking of it as being part of the tradition of stories about “the one that got away”? By my lights, we have two possible answers, and I think that either or both could be true. The first is that this poem, half paean to nature’s immensity and half satire of human rhetorical traditions, is a very pointed but subtle critique of human interactions with nature. On this reading, the plain falsity of the poet’s words about the fish are intended to draw attention to the dominance relation between human and nature. By misrepresenting the fish, the poet turns the real fish into a fiction, making it solely a creature of the poet’s will. But the real qualities that the poet’s words are based on are intended to remind the audience that such a relationship is fundamentally wrong; in other words, that when we reduce nature to our plaything, we lose out on its good and valuable qualities.

Let me put it another way. As I mentioned before, “the one that got away” stories are grounded in a real fish, just awesomely exaggerated. So the real fish, not the fish of the poet’s story, was not tremendous, but was big. It was not ancient, but it was old. It had not broken five lines, but maybe it had broken two or three. Its lip was not “weaponlike,” but it did suggest to the poet as she stood in her boat that this fish had been capable of violence, that it had killed to eat, and that it in sum had a real past existence before it flopped into her boat. By satirizing “the one that got away” stories, Bishop draws our attention to the sufficiency of these qualities. She asks us why we need the fish to be tremendous or ancient: is it not enough that it was big and it was old? When we demand more—when we adopt our imagined nature instead of nature as it really is—we lose out on the bigness and oldness of the whole affair, and the tremendousness and ancientness of our imagination, being fictional, is no substitute.

The other possibility—and, note, I think they both could be true at once—is that Bishop is satirizing nature poetry itself. On this perspective, she takes a story about something very ugly, an old, nearly dead fish that flops into her boat. She transforms it, using her craft, into a nearly ecstatic vision (“everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”). But why? To what end does she tell this story, recounting these thrills of emotion? We begin with a completely mundane task: catching fish. We end with a completely mundane decision: releasing fish. What happens in the middle is also completely mundane—and yet, to explain how she got from one mundane experience to another, the poet transforms the intervening mundanity into something ecstatic. Why does she do this? The poem itself gives us no clue, but the context of “the one that got away” stories may shed some light.

Those stories are part of a social game played between a group of people with roughly similar social standing and highly similar interests. Their social status becomes temporarily reduced to an ability to tell an entertaining and almost believable story about their fish. So it is with poets. They operate, for the most part, from a roughly similar pool of experiences; the differences that do exist between them surely are not so pronounced as to give some poets access to transcendent experiences and deny that access to others (just as no fisherman has ever captured a leviathan, but many have told stories as if they have). And so Bishop tells this story to satirize itself and the craft that produced it.