Deconstructing Absolutes In 'The Fish'

Chloe Jennings

Professor Zeiger

American and British Poetry 1900-1960

28 July 2017

Deconstructing Absolutes in “The Fish”

Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” questions traditional notions of life and death. The poem itself is reminiscent of the sea: its physical structure resembles waves, and its enjambment brings a similar, wave-like quality to the poem. The poem employs this sense of rhythm to convey themes of tenacity, continuity, and the cyclic nature of life. Specifically, the mussels and the cliff in “The Fish” serve as natural representations of resiliency and the coexistence of life and death.

The ashes flowing through the mussel is a metaphor for the concurrence of life with death. Dark imagery creates a sinister atmosphere in the first stanza:

Then, an image that hints at death, this time less obliquely: the mussel-shells are “adjusting the ash heaps”

(Moore 4). In the ash-heaps, there is a Biblical symbol of death. The mussel-shells interact with death directly; one of the shells, for example, continually opens and shuts itself like an “injured fan” (Moore 7). If ash represents death, then the continual flow of the ash in and out of the mussel illustrates the mussel’s synchronicity with life cycles. Nonetheless, that the mussel allows death to flow through it does not suggest that the mussel remains unharmed; its comparison to an injured fan implies that, though the mussel might continue its own metaphorical whir of life, its brushes with death leave tangible wounds.

The cliff, which endures abuses wrought by both man and nature, is a more overt symbol of resiliency. While the mussels exist alongside death, the cliff faces death head on. The cliff is engaged in perpetual conflict with the water: “The water drives a wedge/of iron through the

Like the mussel, whose involvement with death leaves it broken, the cliff indicates signs of its abuse. The edifice, though, is “defiant”; the speaker explicitly states that the cliff “can live/ on what cannot revive/ its youth” (Moore 29, 38, 39, 40). The personification of the cliff and the mussel suggests that these notions may have been born of the First World War – perhaps Moore is suggesting that we continue to live despite surrounding death and abuse. As for the cliff, though it is pockmarked and eroded, it stands tall against the sea. This illustrates a willingness to conquer adversity that further emphasizes the strength emanating from the iron edifice in the fourth stanza. Moreover, the description of the cliff as half-dead emphasizes the notion that life and death can coincide in one physical and metaphorical structure.

The mussel and the cliff convey themes of inextricability that recur throughout the poem.

In the mussel and the cliff, life and death prove not to be mutually exclusive but instead exist simultaneously, morphing into one another. Similarly, the initially rigid and foreboding image