Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses": Five Interpretations

Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” (The New Yorker, August 9, 1947) is my favorite poem. I love it for two reasons: (1) its unconventional sense of beauty; (2) its movement from description to epiphany.

1. Unconventional Beauty

Not everyone sees beauty in fish scales and fishing shacks. Bishop did. In “At the Fishhouses,” she wrote, 

The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Note the repetition of “iridescent.” That’s a change from the New Yorker version. That version says “creamy iridescent flies.” When Bishop reprinted the poem in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Cold Spring collection, she doubled the iridescence, describing the wheelbarrow as “plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies crawling on them.” She calls the fish scales “the principal beauty” (“He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that black old knife”). 

Eleanor Cook, in her Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016), says of “At the Fishhouses,”

The scene is not a conventional thing of beauty, but Bishop’s eye sees the working tools and the iridescent patterns of countless fish scales as if in a painting.

2. Description/Meditation

“At the Fishhouses” is beautiful in another way. It shifts from description to meditation – one of my favorite literary moves. You don’t see it very often. It’s not a procedure; it’s more of a happening. In the first two-thirds of the poem, Bishop describes the harbour scene: the fishhouses, the old man, the wheelbarrows, the lobster pots, the herring scales, the wooden capstan, the black old knife, the long ramp descending into the water, the water itself (“cold dark deep and absolutely clear”). Details accrete; a scene is evoked. This is standard literary procedure; Bishop executes it masterfully. But in the poem’s last stanza, she does something extraordinary. She takes a big leap:

The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark-gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Seamus Heaney said of these lines: 

What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness actually taking the leap. [The Government of the Tongue, 1989] 

The leap, Heaney said, is from “the observed world” to “the world of meditated meaning.” Bonnie Costello, in her Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), calls it a “shift from description to meditation.” But she also says “the poem’s description prepares for a “visionary leap.” She refers to the “visionary thrust” of the poem. She says, “In this passage, in which the phrase “above the stones” is repeated four times, particulars are finally overwhelmed by a visionary flood.” To me, meditation is one thing; vision is another. Costello seems close to calling Bishop’s leap an epiphany. In fact, she says it: “Bishop seems to have yielded her consciousness fully to this epiphany.” But then she backs off: “This is hardly the certain rhetoric of epiphany.”

3. Description/Epiphany

As for me, I think “epiphany” is the right word. I find support for this in Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop (2015), in which he brilliantly compares the ending of “At the Fishhouses” with the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” He writes, 

This method, the movement from very detailed and exact description to a moment that is totalizing and hallucinatory in its tone, which moves above the scene and attempts in its cadences both to wrest meaning and create further mystery from the scene below, occurs also in the very final passage of Joyce’s “The Dead,” which, in describing the snow, also takes a leap.

The ending of “The Dead” is a famous example of literary epiphany: see Florence L. Walzl, “Gabriel and Michael, The Conclusion of ‘The Dead,’ ” (in Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, eds., Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, 1969 (“Dubliners as a collection and “The Dead” as a narrative both culminate in the great epiphany of Gabriel Conroy, the cosmic vision of a cemetery with snow falling on all the living and the dead”).

4. Baptism

Is there an alternative to the Heaney/Tóibín/Costello epiphanic “big leap” line of construction? Yes, there’s at least one – April Bernard’s “baptism” interpretation. In Bernard’s view, there’s no visionary leap. Instead, there’s a slow, steady descent to the water: 

We first look down, with the speaker, from a slight height to take in the scene—“All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over” and the five fishhouses, an old fisherman, fish tubs, lobster pots, the trees—before making our way downward, and then pausing. “The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. / He was a friend of my grandfather.” Then we proceed, down the boat ramp to the water itself, where, our narrator tells us, she often encounters a seal, to whom she sings “Baptist hymns” because they both believe “in total immersion.

We have swooped now, slowly down, and down, and are on our knees, as the poet urges us into the water, telling us, “If you should dip your hand in, / your wrist would ache immediately, / your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn / as if the water were a transmutation of fire.” [“Elizabeth Bishop 1: Nova Scotia” (books.substack.com, April 4, 2024]

She concludes:

The ending sends us off, as if we’ve been dunked into the water for our own transformation, our own baptism, and perhaps our own death, into the cold “element” that is thrillingly, and maybe terribly, our true home. Her confiding voice here whispers us into the deep.

Bernard eschews the epiphanic for the baptismal. Her interpretation is quite persuasive, taking its cue from what Bishop says about the seal: “He was interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.” But I resist it. I’m not religious. I resist interpreting this great poem religiously. 

5. Reality 

I prefer a realist interpretation. I think I’ve found one. Zachariah Pickard, in his excellent Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description (2009), points out that, even though the poem’s last stanza does “shift gears,” its description of water (and the knowledge derived from it) is still concrete: it tastes “bitter, / then briny,” and makes “your wrist” and “bones” “ache” and “your hand” and “tongue” “burn.” He says, “Far from other-worldly, this knowledge comes from “the cold hard mouth / of the world.” I agree. This great poem is grounded in reality.