I get goosebumps introducing you to today’s poem, if you don’t know it, and if you do, to rekindle your glow. The transaction is a little like offering you “a play you might like” and it turns out to be Hamlet.

Read then reread it before we talk. Speaking of goosebumps, right? That last line! Tears thrust into my eyes, even knowing it’s coming. Before ultimate beauty the world falls away and you see only it and life feels precious and humans salvageable. Humans can be so sublime it breaks one’s heart when we aren’t.

With many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems I have a hard time. Her approach is almost clinically objective. I see what she’s describing yet feel stumped why she’s showing me. She’s so detached she feels distant, almost indifferent. I cotton to makers who embrace me and strive to please, even when they overdo it. They hover over me like a chef, to see if I’m savoring. Bishop doesn’t much care. This is what I observed, she shrugs, take it or leave it.

Here she cares. Her story has a moral, which mugs you in that final line. You don’t see it coming. The poet, it turns out, has a big heart, which she hides – but for all her effort, can’t keep hidden. Her pain, rapture, and love become ours.

How does she do it? There is nothing overtly “poetic” about her account.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI caught a tremendous fishand held him beside the boathalf out of water, with my hookfast in a corner of his mouth.

In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the contest is self-consciously existential, heroic; here the poet is just an experienced fisher with an exceptional catch. So she caught a big fish – it happens.

Her comparisons can be ghoulish. The fish’s flesh like packed feathers? Its swim-bladder – an exact physiological term – like a peony? By comparing “his” eyes to her own, she half-transforms herself into Hannibal Lechter. She further anthropomorphizes her catch by giving him a “lip/ if you could call it a lip.”

Then our attention is drawn past the lip to the fish’s mouth, which contains battle-ribbons from five previous bouts with mankind, all of which this big fella won. Five! Of four he retains the (poetic?) lines, of the fifth “a wire leader/ with the swivel still attached.” (Our no-nonsense fisherwoman is equally a no-nonsense poet. She could talk sestinas and villanelles as drily as she talks oarlocks, gunnels, swivels, thwarts.) She almost gloats over her catch (Woman Bests Male Warrior!). She’s so thrilled, the gasoline spilled from the rusted (rented) engine onto the bilge water blossoms into “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” Who of us hasn’t felt such ecstasy at least once in our days. Hurray for me, I’ve got the stuff! And then? “I let the fish go.”

She had won her trophy – she and we will never forget it – but wasn’t this another creature, like us, who, through perseverance, had earned the right to live? The contest had been “tremendous,” but now let the fish – let us all – swim till our natural end.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe Fish

I caught a tremendous fishand held him beside the boathalf out of water, with my hookfast in a corner of his mouth.He didn't fight.He hadn't fought at all.He hung a grunting weight,battered and venerableand homely. Here and therehis brown skin hung in stripslike ancient wallpaper,and its pattern of darker brownwas like wallpaper:shapes like full-blown rosesstained and lost through age.He was speckled with barnacles,fine rosettes of lime,and infestedwith tiny white sea-lice,and underneath two or threerags of green weed hung down.While his gills were breathing inthe terrible oxygen-- the frightening gills,fresh and crisp with blood,that can cut so badly --I thought of the coarse white fleshpacked in like feathers,the big bones and the little bones,the dramatic reds and blacksof his shiny entrails,and the pink swim-bladderlike a big peony.I looked into his eyeswhich were far larger than minebut shallower, and yellowed,the irises backed and packedwith tarnished tinfoilseen through the lensesof old scratched isinglass.They shifted a little, but notto return my stare.-- It was more like the tippingof an object toward the light.I admired his sullen face,the mechanism of his jaw,and then I sawthat from his lower lip-- if you could call it a lipgrim, wet, and weaponlike,hung five old pieces of fish-line,or four and a wire leaderwith the swivel still attached,with all their five big hooksgrown firmly in his mouth.A green line, frayed at the endwhere he broke it, two heavier lines,and a fine black threadstill crimped from the strain and snapwhen it broke and he got away.Like medals with their ribbonsfrayed and wavering,a five-haired beard of wisdomtrailing from his aching jaw.I stared and staredand victory filled upthe little rented boat,from the pool of bilgewhere oil had spread a rainbowaround the rusted engineto the bailer rusted orange,the sun-cracked thwarts,the oarlocks on their strings,the gunnels -- until everythingwas rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!And I let the fish go.