What images does she use to describe "The Fish"? Elizabeth Bishop relies on precise imagery in this poem, not only to describe the fish, but to also...

's poetry is
descriptive, and in "" the speaker paints with images. Thethat describes the fish and
the speaker's reactions is mostly visual.

These images are reflective not
only of nature, but of the self-referential element of art. For instance, the skin of the
captured fish looks to the speaker like peeling "ancient wallpaper"; on the fish's
side, there seem to be shapes resembling "full-blown roses" with petals that have
become stained while some have fallen off. This old fish has barnacles on him that appear as
rosettes with "tiny white sea-lice" while green weeds that look like rags hang from
him.

At the end of the poem, the images are conjoined in the visual imagery
of a rainbow when the self-referential speaker envisions "victory" filling up the boat
because of her catch (the spilled motor oil and water) along with the fish's victory over other
fisherman evinced by the hooks in his lip. Seeing these images of a rainbow on the sides of the
old victorious fish as well as in the boat, the speaker sympathetically releases him:

...everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! 
And
I let the fish go.