Summary
The speaker turns her attention to the fish's mouth and jaw, and then sees that it has been caught, and has escaped, several times before. Four pieces of fishing line, plus one leader (the end of a fishing line), are lodged in the fish's mouth, with their hooks attached. The speaker describes the different types of fishing lines—one green and fraying, two hefty, one thin and black. Several are frayed or creased, marking the way that the fish broke them in his escape. These five remnants look like medals with worn-out ribbons, or like a wise man's beard. As the speaker stares, a feeling of victory fills the speaker's rental boat. The mundane interior of the boat, from the pool of spilled oil on the floor to the seats and the places where the oars attach to the ship, all seem full of a rainbow glow, and the speaker releases the fish.
Analysis
In the final lines of the poem, the speaker comes to fully identify with the fish. This culminates in a decision to release the fish that is suffused with euphoria: the speaker's affinity with the fish is so strong, and her empathy for its struggles is so great, that its triumph becomes her own. This shift towards total, joyful compassion is linked to the speaker's recognition of the fish's history. When the speaker glimpses evidence that the fish has been caught before, she seems to register his status as an independent being with a subjective experience of his own. Crucially, there is also evidence that the fish escaped, exercising its will and physical strength in order to stay alive. Despite the fact that the fish is in so many ways foreign to the speaker, the evidence of its strong will to survive allows the speaker to relate to the fish, and thus makes this encounter between human and animal seem momentous and dramatic. It also recasts the speaker as a mere episode in the fish's life—in contrast to the poem's opening line, in which the fish is presented as a mere object in the speaker's life.
Throughout the poem, metaphorical language about the fish offers a clue about the speaker's thoughts. Noticing the hooks lodged in the fish's mouth, the speaker draws two comparisons: one to medals, and one to a beard. These both connote wisdom and experience (and, in fact, in the latter case the speaker explicitly compares the wires to a "beard of wisdom"). These remnants of the fish's previous fights for its life, then, are construed as evidence not of its difference, but rather of its similarity to admired human figures: military heroes and sage elders.
Now, it is not the fish but rather the speaker's own familiar environment that seems strange. As the speaker experiences a rush of joy and releases the fish, she takes note of the way this joy casts a rainbow-like glow on her surroundings. These surroundings, following the work's in-depth description of the fish, are both deeply mundane and odd—or, more specifically, they seem suddenly odd in all their human everydayness. Bishop exaggerates this blend of the everyday and the strange by using technical terms to refer to the various parts of the ship. Now, with its history exposed, the fish itself is lively and dramatically charged, while the speaker's boat is relatively uninteresting, rendered cold by jargon. Only through the glow of the speaker's empathetic thrill does the ship itself become joyful in turn.
