The Fish Essay Questions

How do the poem's structure, rhythm, and sound contribute to its meaning?

The poem is a triumph in terms of formal mirroring of content. Visually the poem flows and contracts on the page. The stanzas and lines ebb and flow, coursing into each other like waves. The syllabic structure is intricate, but the words are simple. Everything, as Darlene Williams Erickson writes, is "in an ethereal, surrealistic kind of slow motion." Alliteration and consonance are used to link lines together in a sensuous fashion or highlight violence and brokenness.

How does the poem contrast man and nature?

Man is not explicitly mentioned in the poem, but the lines describing the cliff imply that he was there: "all the physical features of // ac- / cident -lack / of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and / hatchet strokes, these things stand / out on it." The lines are ragged and broken, just like the marks they describe. They are words of injury, of abuse. Man wounded the cliff; human activity harms the integrity of the cliff, and, indeed, of the poem itself. If the poem is to be read as a war poem, this also conjures up the burned-out wasteland and ragged trenches of Europe during WWI. However, man is no longer there, and the cliff endures, so the message of human devastation is countered by the reality that man is not as powerful as nature.

How does the concept of the sublime manifest itself in this poem?

As Harold Bloom writes, the poem "has a strong sense of the sublime, the beautiful and the awful, coexisting as tensions in the sea." On the one hand, the sea is powerful, indifferent, violent, and unfathomable. It is terrifying in its might. On the other hand, it teems with glorious life—"stars, // pink / rice-grains, ink—/ bespattered jellyfish, crabs like green / lilies, and submarine / toadstools." The sun shafts manage to pierce the "turquoise sea" and illuminate all the crevices. There is beauty here, as well as a strange sense of oneness. Moore refuses to deal in absolutes, instead presenting the sea in all of its multifaceted wonder.