Questions of Travel

The language here moves not across the fish, but across the processes by which attention and description interinform, the texture of the stripped skin evoking wallpaper which then prompts a recognition of the similarities between wallpaper and patterns in the fish’s scales. The lines narrate the realization of resemblance, a habit of mind that governs the poem’s unfolding: “He was speckled with barnacles,” Bishop reports, and then continues in a figural register, “fine rosettes of lime” (ll. 16-17). The roses in the wallpapery skin are elaborated into the matter that crusts the fish’s body, and then flower further beneath the surface: