What Fish Feel - Analysis

Not Knowing as the Most Honest Kind of Attention

This tiny poem’s central move is a refusal: it starts by reaching toward other lives, then stops short at the boundary of what a human can actually claim to know. The speaker names two kinds of creatures—“fish” and “birds”—as if casting a wide net across water and sky, and then admits, plainly, “I don’t know.” That confession doesn’t shut the world down; it clears space for a quieter, truer kind of attention. Instead of pretending to translate animal experience into human feelings, the poem lets the gap remain.

Water and Sky, Then the Human Limit

“What fish feel, / birds feel” sets up a wish for empathy that is almost childlike in its directness: not what they do, but what they feel. Fish and birds also suggest two extremes of movement—below and above—so the speaker’s curiosity seems to stretch everywhere, yet it can’t cross into certainty. The tone is restrained, even gentle: “I don’t know” isn’t dramatic; it’s a calm acceptance of limitation. The tension here is clear and sharp: the desire to understand other beings collides with the honesty of not inventing an answer.

The Year Ending as a Pressure on Meaning

The final phrase—“the year ending”—acts like a soft turn. Suddenly the question about fish and birds feels less like casual wonder and more like a year-end reckoning. As time closes, the mind looks outward and inward at once: outward to other forms of life that continue without our explanations, inward to the human habit of taking stock. The ending doesn’t resolve the speaker’s ignorance; it reframes it. Against the backdrop of a year “ending,” not knowing what fish or birds feel becomes part of a larger truth: the world goes on, rich with experiences we can sense around us but cannot fully enter.