"The Fish" is one of the best-known English-language poems about an encounter between a human being and an animal. Here, Bishop describes an ordinary fishing trip that develops into a transcendent experience after a human speaker closely observes a fish, gaining a sense of both what they share and the fish's almost incomprehensible strangeness. Bishop was part of a long tradition of writing about relationships between animals and people. While this topic has always fascinated writers, individual poets have approached it in vastly different ways—often reflecting their society's broader relationship to the natural world and to animals. Here, we'll discuss a number of poems describing meetings between animals and humans, written by Elizabeth Bishop's predecessors.
The Scottish poet Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse" (1785) is similar to "The Fish" in the sense that it describes an interaction between a human speaker and a vulnerable animal, whose fate depends upon the decisions of the speaker. In this case, the conflict is not a fishing trip but instead the human speaker's accidental destruction of the mouse's nest. Whereas Bishop's poem is interested in the unknowability and difference of the fish, Burns's attends to the mouse primarily as an allegory for vulnerable humans facing oppression and deprivation. Burns's speaker, as suggested by the title, addresses the mouse in the second person, and in this way anthropomorphizes it—in contrast to "The Fish," which describes the fish in the third person and resists anthropomorphizing the animal or treating it as a metaphorical representation. Burns's poem, in other words, vividly depicts the mouse but does so within the context of very human sociopolitical concerns.
Anna Seward's 1792 poem "An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy," meanwhile, takes the opposite approach: rather than addressing the work to an animal in the second person, Seward takes on the voice of her feline subject, making it the work's speaker. The poem describes a dying cat's realization that it will miss its human owner. Though the work's tone and topic are sad, the use of an animal speaker allows the work to take on a certain playfulness—one that echoes the satirical wit so dominant in the poetry of the mid-to-late eighteenth century. For instance, the work's speaker humorously describes her hopes for a heaven in which birds and fish cannot easily escape. Here, the differences between animals and humans are enumerated, and treated as amusing and engaging rather than incomprehensibly mysterious.
Meanwhile, D.H. Lawrence's "Snake" (1923) describes a human speaker's internal conflict as he comes face-to-face with a venomous snake. The speaker contends with his own instinctive, simultaneous feelings of fear and generosity, as well as with a sense that he must prove himself by killing the animal. Some readers have argued that this poem represents an early work of eco-criticism, with its focus on the systemic power of humans over animals. Though the individual snake in Lawrence's poem has as much power (if not more) than the human speaker, the power conferred on the speaker through the overall structures of human-created society complicate their encounter. Moreover, by focusing on the sensory experience of the snake, Lawrence suggests that notions of human superiority or separateness are misguided at best—and delusional at worst.
Many of these poems are concerned with humans' ability to destroy and alter animal lives with ease, though—whether in the case of Seward's affectionate cat or Bishop's merciful fisherman—they also delve into moments of human kindness to animals. Some of these works speak to the relationship between domesticated animals and humans, while others focus on rare encounters between wild, even dangerous animals and people. Perhaps the widest range of approaches is evident in these works' approach to point of view. Some assume animal perspectives, attempting to transmute their experiences into human language, while others meticulously avoid speculation about animal consciousness. "The Fish" forges a nuanced and complicated path, in which compassionate curiosity about animal experiences is directly rooted in the fundamental strangeness of those experiences for a human observer.
