In the poem "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop, what images or metaphors are at work to convey the speaker's feeling about the death of animals?

A meditative
lyric, "" bydisplays what critic Lloyd Scwartz terms ut picture
poesis.  That is, the use of Nature is like art, as in a painting or in a poem, and
Nature speaks to the viewer or reader. Elizabeth Bishop's descriptive images of the fish urges
others to read the world around them.

In her efforts to have readers
interpret the world around them, Bishop's poem has a connectiveness of the image to a word,
creating a narrative, then, that exists outside the art. For instance, after the speaker has
caught the "venerable" and "tremendous fish," Bishop employs color images in
describing the"ancient wallpaper" with its patterns of dark brown, 

shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost throught
age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and
infested with tiny white sea-lice.

Further the images of
the gill "fresh and crisp with blood,"  and the

dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails

indicate the fish's struggle with death. The fish, perhaps a Muskie, is a large fish
who has escaped capture many times as the speaker notes the "five old pieces of
fish-line" that hang from hooks that have grown into his mouth. That this old fish has
beaten five other fisherman causes the speaker to revere the fish. She "stares" and,
in a beautifulobserves, "victory filled up the little rented boat." Looking in the
hull of the boat where oil has spilt and "spread a rainbow [metaphor for the image], the
speaker perceives everything as "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!"

With
this philosophical epiphany, the speaker realizes the wisdom of revering life, especially the
life of one who has struggled to live and endure. So, with respect for the fish who has won five
previous battles she throws him back into the lake. Clearly, Elizabeth Bishop's verse is deeply
sympathetic to Nature: Beauty--"rainbow, rainbow, rainbow"--has emerged from
destruction. "I let the fish go" becomes, then, a metaphor for renewal of life because
the speaker renews life in the act of throwing the fish back, an act of reverence. The act of
reverence, then, becomes victory both for the fish and the speaker.