Question

For the short essay assignment you will compare Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish.” I would like your analysis to focus specifically on the poets’ use of figurative language (metaphor and simile, in particular). How does the speaker in each of the poems feel about the fish? How does the poet’s use of figurative language contribute to the poem’s tone? Your short essay needs to be 750+ words and written in MLA format. Your paper should consist entirely of analysis. Both poems are included below along with reading questions to help guide your analysis. Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market By Pablo Neruda & translated By Robin Robertson Here, among the market vegetables, this torpedo from the ocean depths, a missile that swam, now lying in front of me dead. Surrounded by the earth's green froth —these lettuces, bunches of carrots— only you lived through the sea's truth, survived the unknown, the unfathomable darkness, the depths of the sea, the great abyss, le grand abîme, only you: varnished black-pitched witness to that deepest night. Only you: dark bullet barreled from the depths, carrying only your one wound, but resurgent, always renewed, locked into the current, fins fletched like wings in the torrent, in the coursing of the underwater dark, like a grieving arrow, sea-javelin, a nerveless oiled harpoon. Dead in front of me, catafalqued king of my own ocean; once sappy as a sprung fir in the green turmoil, once seed to sea-quake, tidal wave, now simply dead remains; in the whole market yours was the only shape left with purpose or direction in this jumbled ruin of nature; you are a solitary man of war among these frail vegetables, your flanks and prow black and slippery as if you were still a well-oiled ship of the wind, the only true machine of the sea: unflawed, undefiled, navigating now the waters of death. Questions for “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” by Pablo Neruda 1. Compile a list of words from the poem that deal with weapons or warfare. 2. Annotate all of the metaphors and similes in the poem. What do you notice of the balance of similes and metaphors? 3. What’s the subject of the poem? 4. Who is the speaker? 5. What’s the tone of the poem? 6. How does Neruda marry form and content in the poem? 7. Do you like the poem? Why or why not? 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. Elizabeth Bishop The Noonday Press Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems Questions on Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” 1. Define the following words: venerable, barnacles, rosettes, sea-lice, entrails, peony, irises, isinglass, sullen, grim, swivel, fray, bilge, thwarts, oarlock, gunnels. 2. What is the subject of the poem and who is the speaker? 3. Find all of the similes (a comparison of two things using the words “like” or “as”) in the poem. Which of them, in your opinion, is the strongest and why? 4. Explain the following image: “Like medals with their ribbons/ frayed and wavering,/ a five-haired beard of wisdom/ trailing from his aching jaw.” What does she mean by “a five-haired beard of wisdom?” Why do you think Bishop chose to use the word “medals?” 5. Track Bishop’s use of color in the poem. Find the instances where she mentions specific colors. Why do you think that Bishop writes, “until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” towards the end of the poem? 6. Bishop repeats words and phrases throughout the poem. Choose an instance where she uses repetition and explains how it contributes to the poem. 7. Explain the tone (the speaker’s attitude about the subject matter) of the poem. Use evidence from the poem to support your answer 8. What, in your thinking, is the strongest aspect of this poem? Do you like the poem? Why or why not? 9. Fill in the outline of a fish with 15 details from the poem. Please label each of the details. Feel free to add to the area around the fish.

Answer 1

‘Ode to Large Tuna in the Market’ is about the author walking through the market and seeing a variety of different vegetables but only one fish, and the fish is what catches his eye and he goes on to brag about the greatness of this sea fish.

The poem presents an ordinary everyday scene of walking through a market. However, what is peculiar is the poetic imagination which brings forth the life of a sea creature at par with that of human beings. Neruda goes on to admire the fish for what it has done, and he seems to envy it when it was alive.

This poem is made up of four stanzas of varying lengths without any purposeful rhyme schemeor meters. However, we should keep in mind that this poem was originally written in Spanish. It builds a sense of harmony through the interplay of metaphors which build an analogy between the vulnerability of nature as akin to the destructive technology of the human race. For instance, the poet compares the fierceness and strength of the tuna with a varsity of modern weapons- harpoon, bullets of an ammunition, javelin, torpedo, and arrow. What is presented here is the ironic death of a tuna through the very means of weapons with which it is compared. The fate of this majestic sea creature is finally terminated on the fish monger’s table in the vegetable market which is compared to a coffin. But unlike the grace that is met to a dead body inside a coffin, the death of a tuna exposes the condition pathos that underlies death and the tuna itslef is left amidst a disconcertingly unfamiliar and dissimilar environment made up by vegetables. The latter is used as a metaphor for the lifeless state which is offered by human activity onto the vivid elements of nature and the tuna itslef in its end is conferred a fate like vegetables. The poem thus uses the life (or death) of a tuna as an allegory for humankind’s disengagement from nature and it’s reprecussions on the general conditions of life for other species.

In a similar way , Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘the Fish’ presents a narrative about the coexistence between human beings and nature. Like Neruda, The poetess describes a scene of overhauling of a fish and her own emotional trajectory in response to the rather ordinary incident. However, unlike Neruda who remind a passive observer to the scene of destruction, Bishop assumes a proactive position wherein she reflects on her ecological awareness and her own responsibility in acts of cruelty towards other living creatures. Finally, a harmonic closure is reached in the poem when she leaves the fish free. Her decision to set the fish free comes only after her identification of herself with the fish. The identification asserts her belief in the interlinkages between the different elements of nature. The use of metaphorical relationship between the rust of the ship against the rainbow of the sky suggest such an idea about interdependence. The rust in the engine and rainbow are related to express her awareness that killing of the fish can rust the ecology. And rainbow reinforces the awareness of transitoriness of human achievement over other forms of life. Within this context, he down professional identity as a fisher woman create further discourses about the dangers of commercialisation and how a radical transformation of human ethos lies in a non-Male, non-White interrelationship. In contrast to the Biblical social belief in the superiority of human race over other species, for her, The life of the fish is far more important than her victory.

The style of the poem is lyrical and she uses a folk narratives style to share her an introspective, sensitive, and heroic movement where she decides to let her victim go. By avoiding the Romantic and phallic attitudes, Bihsop’s poem "The Fish" invokes a non-European, non-Christian, non-male and even a non-human subjectivity.