Summary
The fish swim through the “black jade” while the mussel shells open and close like fans and adjust themselves as if on ash-heaps. Barnacles on the side of the waves find it hard to hide there because beams of sunlight stream in and fracture as if on glass. The light is moving in and out of the crevices of the turquoise sea.
Water as strong as iron assaults the cliff, and all the creatures like starfish and jellyfish and crabs slip and slide over each other like “green / lilies” and “submarine / toadstools." On this “defiant” cliff are marks of accidents—dynamite, burns, hatchet cuts—and it seems to be dead. The evidence shows that it can continue to live on what “can not revive / its youth,” and “the sea grows old in it.”
Analysis
It is probably not surprising to fans of Moore’s poetry that “The Fish” is only barely about fish; rather, it is a phantasmagoric and simultaneously beautiful and disturbing view of the ocean, its creatures, and the cycles of life and death.
Perhaps the most notable things about Moore’s form in “The Fish” are that it leads the reader right into the watery world, and that its rhythm mimics the rhythm of the waves it conjures; after all, Moore herself said “I value an effect of naturalness and feel that the notion of composition should reinforce the meaning and make it cumulatively impressive” (quoted in Ranta). First, the title “The Fish” actually is the first line, so the reader reads “The Fish” and then immediately “wade[s] / through black jade.” The reader thus jumps right into Moore’s murky, mysterious world. Critic Darlene Williams Erickson notes, “All the action occurs in a surrealistic kind of slow motion, a movement suggested both by the undulations of the sea world and the rhythm of the lines themselves...the stanzas themselves are a carefully contrived repetition of waves of sound.” Stanzas ebb and flow, build and break in cycles just like waves; they perfectly unite form and content. The order of the words on the page is also visually appealing, arranged in succinct, precise bursts, almost like a mosaic or an abstract painting.
The poem begins with the image of fish not swimming but wading through the water; this slows them (and the poem) down, as does the description of the water as “black jade.” The mussels are atop “ash heaps” and one is compared to an “injured fan.” This is the first evocation of violence and brokenness, and it is followed up by shafts of sunlight seeking out the barnacles as they try to adhere the waves. There is sibilance in the sound of the words, but the words themselves are strange and haunting. The sea is full of “bodies” and the water is like “iron” as it rams against the cliff. The creatures within it “slide each on the other” as if they have no “volition nor consciousness” (to quote Moore’s “A Grave”). The cliff itself has “external / marks of abuse” that came from “ac / cident -;” the splitting of the word “accident” literally enacts the work of rupture, damage, destruction that it represents. The cliff features “grooves, burns, and / hatchet strokes,” a nod to the (former?) presence of humans. This chasm side is emphatically “dead” and cannot “revive / its youth;” the sea too “grows old in it.”
Clearly many of the images are negative, presenting the ocean as a place of “infringement, violation, and injury; it is also resigned,” as critic Pamela White Hadas writes. Nature is “battered and violated” and full of death. That death and brokenness comes suddenly in the poem and does not let up. The immediate submersion into the water is followed by dissolution. There is something sublimely terrifying in the power of the sea and the massiveness of the “defiant edifice” of the cliff. It seems as if the two are eternally warring and the creatures living in the sea and thrown up against the cliff are privy to the vicissitudes of that war. Critic John M. Slatin sees the poem as an actual war poem, referencing the carnage and horror of WWI. The “sea / of bodies” is a reference to bodies piled up on the battlefield, the wading through the “black jade” is like moving through the muddy trenches, the sunlight shafts of “spotlight swiftness” piercing the crevices suggest no place is safe, and the waves slamming against the cliff side are an image of explosive battle.
This is not the only viable interpretation of Moore’s poem, however. For one, the poem's imagery is not entirely negative. The rhyme and the word placement provide visual pleasure, and the aesthetics hold their own against the poem’s putative meanings. The sea may “[grow] old” and the cliff may have a dead side, but both endure. There is death and life; damage accrues, but this world can be beautiful if one can open oneself to it. The sunlight, after all, will continue to illuminate the “turquoise sea.” Erickson explains, “the light is always there, illuminating the frightening darkness and making it appear surprisingly beautiful, comprehensible, and safe. [Things that are] foreign and alarming...are clarified and identified for what they actually are: merely mussel shells, jellyfish, and crabs.” Critic Christian Reed similarly notes, “The ‘sea / of bodies’ is not only a collection of physical remnants forsaken by death, but also a profusion of living, moving, embodied creatures.” The sea is beguiling and perhaps benign, pushing and pulling like a Hans Hofmann painting.
Critic Thomas Lisk accounts for the poem’s theme of opposing forces as well as “change and stasis,” commenting that it is the relationship between the sea and cliff that gives the poem its beauty. Overall “The Fish” is an “ecological poem that is not about either ocean or cliff alone, but about the way in which a poem can beautifully accommodate the relationship between them.”
