The Fish Study Guide

The Fish Poem Summary

Preview of The Fish Summary:

First Stanza

The first line of "The Fish" syntactically belongs to the title. In an almost filmic manner, the speaker focuses on fish "wading" through "black jade." These words are telling because they suggest a heaviness and a slowness to the fish's movement. Jade is opaque and is not naturally associated with water. The darkness of the water underlines the mysteriousness of the sea, the difficulty of knowing it. By calling the sand disturbed by the opening and closing of one of the mussels "ash heaps," Moore underscores not only the physical appearance of this action but also how the sea floor looks "disposable" to human eyes. By singling out one of the shells, noting how it is "adjusting" the environment around it, Moore suggests how the movement of the smallest thing can have an effect on the larger world.

Second Stanza

The second stanza picks up from the last line of the preceding stanza. By running her lines over, a technique known as enjambment, Moore foregrounds her own composing strategy, which highlights the interdependence of words and lines. Formally, then, the poem parallels its subject: the interdependence of the living and the dead, the individual thing and the context in which it exists. Her composing strategy, then, is also a composting strategy. She finishes the simile she began in the first stanza by likening the opening and closing of the mussel to an "injured fan." The sea now begins to resemble nothing so much as a hospital ward for sick sea life.

In this stanza, Moore focuses on the sea, pointing out the vulnerability of barnacles. By writing that they "cannot hide," Moore humanizes these underwater creatures. Barnacles are marine crustaceans that are free-swimming as larvae but...
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