Imagery In The Fish Poem

When you use imagery in a poem, you are using words that appeal to your senses. This makes the readers experience much more memorable because it brings memories back to when the reader encountered a certain situation. When the words or phrases are used well, this helps the reader imagine the poem as if they were experiencing the same thing the author did. In Elizabeth Bishops poem, “The Fish” she uses great examples of imagery. In this lengthy poem you are able to go back to a time when you first caught a fish and what your experience was like. She uses great words and phrases to explain what the fish looked like. She goes into depth when explaining what is on the fish and the color. Lines eight through twelve is just the beginning of her

Within these lines, it describes how old the fish is. Anything that has lived in the water for so long and grows barnacles is definitely old. “Rosettes of lime,” what does that mean? Rosettes are a pattern or shape that looks like roses. By lime, Bishop is not referring to the fruit, she if referring to the alkaline substance which is a natural occurrence. Bishop likes to use “seemingly beautiful language to describe sort of nasty things (shmoop.com).” Another example of great imagery in poetry would be Theodore Roethke’s, “Root Cellar”. It is a simple poem but Roethke uses such great words and phrases to describe the root cellar. He describes everything in the cellar is dead or really old. In the first line he says “dark as a ditch.” He uses the literary term, simile so it is easy for who are picturing the cellar as a ditch because we all know what a ditch looks like. Ditches collect puddles of water and are almost always moist. It’s muddy and could possibly smell. Now we know that the root cellar is by no means clean, it is dirty and wet. The second line says,
Bulbs broke out of boxes, hunting for chinks in the

We now know how dark the cellar is. It’s like the plants were forgotten or was dying.
Roots ripe as old bait, pulpy sterns, rank, silo-rank, leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery plans
This part of the poem is what gives us the sense of smell. When the reader reads this poem and gets to the part where it describes the smell, you can just smell the mold, rot, and manure. The author uses words like that to “intensify the meaning (hubpages.com)”. The last two lines of the poem are what pull the poem together, what give it its meaning.
Nothing would give up life
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath
This last part of the poem explains how the bulbs in the cellar were left behind to die but they are still breathing. They were not going to give up. Imagining something you read and taking yourself to where the author is describing or doing what they’re doing really helps the reader understand what is going on. It makes you put yourself in the reader’s shoes for a moment. Memories replay in one’s head when reading a poem that hits home. When all five senses are triggered, or even if two out of five are triggered, it is enough for someone to understand where the author is going with the