The Fish
The Fish - meaning Summary
Kinship Within Mortality
The poem begins with a childhood catch and its death, then turns the act of cleaning and eating the fish into a meditation on kinship. The speaker recognizes that human life depends on other living bodies and remains bound to the sea’s larger cycle. Pain, consumption, mortality, and nourishment are presented as inseparable parts of a mysterious natural order.
Read Complete AnalysesThe first fish I ever caught would not lie down quiet in the pail but flailed and sucked at the burning amazement of the air and died in the slow pouring off of rainbows. Later I opened his body and separated the flesh from the bones and ate him. Now the sea is in me: I am the fish, the fish glitters in me; we are risen, tangled together, certain to fall back to the sea. Out of pain, and pain, and more pain we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished by the mystery.
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