The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

The speaker in the poem seems to alternate between projecting her human world onto the fish and objectively observing a specimen from the natural world. However distinct these worlds at first may appear to the speaker, they intrude upon each other as she continues her meditation. The four hooks and a leader hooked through the fish's lower jaw are likened by the speaker first to medals of honor, and then they suggest to her a vision of the wispy white beard of an Asian sage. The victory that the speaker alludes to is perhaps the dawning of the awareness of the absence to any strict demarcations between subject and object. Oil spread a rainbow on the water and the speaker is also flooded by rainbow colored light--the speaker does not appear able to put a stop to the vision of the interdependence of all things--which signals an illumination of sorts that prevents the speaker from taking another's life, even if it's only a fish, for in the fish she sees part of herself. Letting the fish go is a sign that she has "killed the will to kill," as the Buddha once taught.