Living and Dying in Oliver’s Waters: An analysis of Mary Oliver’s 'The Fish'
An Analysis of the Interconnectedness Between Life and Death, and Man and His Environment in Mary Oliver’s 'The Fish'"
Sardine Art Fish Oil Painting by Arsen Galikeev.
Read “The Fish” here: https://www.poeticous.com/mary-oliver/the-first-fish
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“The first fish” the speaker ever caught “would not lie down / quiet in the pail”. The first 2 lines of The Fish by Mary Oliver epitomize the poem’s poetic focus on the interconnectedness of man and his environment through a scene in which the speaker catches and consumes a fish. In this poem, Oliver explores themes of overconsumption and its consequences.
Firstly, it can be seen that the entire poem is a singular stanza, through which the speaker describes the process of fishing and the preparation of the fish itself for consumption. The effect of this allows the reader to experience the procedure as a continuous, linear flow of events, highlighting the process as familiar and tested. However, Oliver dramatizes the catching of the fish: the fish does not “lie down / quiet” but instead “flailed” and "sucked". Through the use of such kinetic diction, she exemplifies the struggling of the animal to cling to life. The use of enjambment in lines 6 to 7, “the air / and died” creates a demarcated boundary between air; essential for life; and death, emphasizing the abruptness with which life can transition into death and reinforcing the fragility of existence. This holds true even for a mere fish. Moreover, how the fish “die(s)” in the pail is almost romanticized. In lines 6 and 7, the fish is personified as sentient. It physically reacts to “the burning / amazement of the air”. Living its entire life in a body of water, the fish is seen to live out its last moments in wonder of a world of air that it has never experienced; yet, this is a double-edged sword – this “amazement” is accompanied lexically with the word “burning”, showing the intense pain the fish feels as a result. The romanticization of the fish’s death is further seen in lines 8-10. Oliver states that the fish “died / in the slow pouring off of rainbows”. Rainbows, commonly associated with feelings of hope and joy, are ironically juxtaposed as a metaphor for the scales of the fish which are skinned for the purpose of consumption. Thus, the imagery transforms a violent death into something almost tender and luminous. In doing so, she invites the reader to reflect on how awe and suffering often exist side by side in the natural world, and how death, though cruel, can be rendered poetic in its final moments.
The interconnectedness of man and his environment is evident in lines 11 to 17. Oliver utilizes enjambment again in lines 11 and 12; the speaker “separated / the flesh from the bones”, highlighting the physical dissolution of the fish and further emphasizing the violence of the act. The diction of “I opened his body” is also strangely intimate and unsettling as the speaker attributes the humanistic pronoun of “his” to the non-human fish, making the cooking process seem like a gross violation of a sentient, human, body. This alludes, too, to man’s destruction of nature through over-fishing. The speaker builds on this idea of interconnectedness in lines 13 to 14. After “eating (him)”, “the sea / is in me” (referring to the speaker). The singular, first-person pronouns “I” and “me” refer to the speaker, and by stating that “I am the fish, the fish/ glitters in me”, there is an evident melding of the fish and the speaker into one body because of this act of consumption. The next line contributes to this idea when the speaker says that “we are risen, tangled together”. Here, the pronouns have shifted from the singular – “I” and “me” to the collective “we”, showcasing the complete fusion of the two organisms. However, the diction of “tangled together”, and that this connection is brought about “out of pain/ and pain, and more pain” suggests that this fusion is not a seamless interconnection but rather a twisted amalgamation of nature. The repetition of the word “pain” further points to the truthfulness of such a claim.
In the last two lines, in writing that “we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished / by the mystery”, Oliver suggests two things: firstly, in relation to “this feverish plot”, we can understand this to be a critique of the cycle of overconsumption that causes this aberrant, distorted interconnection – this “feverish plot” between man and the food he consumes; secondly, she seemingly accepts that mankind is “nourished” by such a cycle in place, perhaps an admittance that this system is a necessary evil for the survival of society.
