I am new to poetry so bear with me these questions might sound dumb. I was given three poems to read and can't find anything on them. They are The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop, The Dance by William Carlos Williams, and When I Was One and Twenty by A.E. Housman. Do they have something in common? What does the rainbow, rainbow, rainbow mean in the Fish? Where might I find help with understanding the self expression that each poet brings to his or her poetry? Any help is greatly appreciated...........MJ

When I was one-and-twenty
by Alfred Edward Housman

WHEN I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free. "
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

The Fish
Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

The Dance
William Carlos Williams

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess

Thanks for posting those, Pam. I'm guessing we will have to infer that the instructor has given these three works to the student, and asked that similarities be found and discussed. Are there in fact any similarities among the three? Except for all being written in English, I mean. Not many, no.

One is rhymed and metered, another is blank verse and the third free verse. Do they all possess imagery and other literary devices? Yup, I guess so. Two paint or discuss a picture (or a scene), but not the third.

Here is (likely) what WCW was writing about:

[www.wga.hu]

Williams did a number of poems on paintings, and many suspect his famous Red Wheel Barrow one was a description of exactly that - a barnyard scene. Is this one anything but a snapshot? Doesn't seem to be, no.

The repeated rainbow line seems to me to suggest the fisher is getting dizzy, thinking about the floundering fish and its dangerous existence. I can see self expression in Houseman's self-effacing lines about being one year older. Also, an appreciation of a fish's existence in the Bishop. But what about the Williams's? Dunno.

Hugh,

That's about my conclusion. To add one more, the Housman gives his heart away, Bishop gives the fish away (back to its life), but does Williams do anything of the sort? I don't see it.

pam

MJ, it may be a good thing that you haven’t found any commentary on these poems. It means you can start by forming your own impressions of them, without being predisposed by what other people have said. Very important with poetry to respect your own personal taste (which will of course develop, the more you read), and to understand that poetic tastes differ widely. Just as poems do. There’s no absolute right or wrong about poetry appreciation. There may be widespread agreement on some things among poetry lovers, but even then you don’t have to agree. It’s not dumb to have questions about poems you read. It’s the start of intelligent appreciation. The more poetry you read, the easier it will probably be for you to come up with answers you personally can be satisfied with. Don’t be worried if others have different ideas. I expect your teacher is not looking for ‘right’ answers about the three poems you have been given, but rather hoping you will be able to formulate some personal points of view and explain them.

I suggest you start by reading each of the three poems carefully several times and asking yourself whether you like it or not (you might even rank it on a scale of 1 to 10), and deciding – generally, and in detail if you can - what it is about the poem that you like or dislike. Does it move you emotionally? If so how? Does it bore you? If so, why? Does it evoke images that you can relate to? Does it say something likely to stick in your memory? Is the subject easy or difficult to understand? Do you think the writer has done justice to the subject? Do you like the writer’s choice of words? Are there any words you need to look up?

For the time being, while you are a beginner with poetry, I suggest you don’t worry much about identifying and labeling formal aspects such as rhyme scheme and meter (or their absence). Just notice that one of the poems uses rhyme and is broken into stanzas, and the other two aren’t. The poems also have very different lengths and forms. As part of the process of deciding what you like and dislike, you might however ask yourself whether the length and form seem to you to be about right (or not) for the subject of the poem.

You might also notice whether the poet has made use of similes (saying that one thing is ‘like’ something else) or metaphors (saying that one thing is something else, leaving the likeness to be implied). These are common literary devices for heightening the impact of description.

Through this process, you should soon discover whether or not these three poems have anything in common according to your taste, besides the fact that they all claim to be poems.

As regards ‘the self-expression that each poet brings to his or her poetry’, there’s a difference between the expressiveness of a poem as a piece of writing, derived from choice of words, images, similes, metaphors, etc, and any expression of the personality of the writer. Some writers intrude their personality; some keep it at a distance. Inferences about a poet’s personality and taste in poetry may possibly be drawn from the number and kind of poems he or she writes, but just because a poem is written in the first person doesn’t mean it’s autobiographical. It may be; or it may just relate to an imagined situation. The ‘I’ of such a poem is often referred to as the ‘persona’, to avoid necessarily identifying it as the author.

You have probably gathered by now that I’d rather not feed you answers that you would do much better to work out for yourself.

You have however asked a specific question about ‘rainbow, rainbow, rainbow’, so I’ll say how I read that. For me it expresses a moment of epiphany. After examining the old fish in detail, the persona begins to sympathize with all the difficulties he has survived. Though he wasn't able to fight – because he was too old – and she has won a ‘victory’ by catching him, she is moved to sudden awareness of the variety and beauty and glory of creation, not just in the scarred fish, but even in the scarred old boat she is sitting in. The rainbow doesn’t refer just to the light refracted in the bilge oil. It is a flash of the divinity in all things. Its implicit message is that she must live and let live. So she lets the fish go.

Ian

Thanks Ian for the information. You are right about just getting into it, but for a newbie sometimes that can be a daunting task...........mj