Although “At the Fishhouses” consists largely of description, it also seems to offer a formulation of the relation between humans and nature, or humans and truth, which approaches that achieved by some of the poems of Robert Frost, in which daily occurrences are made to yield deeper meanings through a juxtaposition with larger themes. In this poem, furthermore, the precise descriptions that in many of Bishop’s works are simply a fact of style come to take on the quality of content, being put in context by the sudden shift to abstraction of the work’s final six lines.
The self-effacing narrator begins by description, sketching the old man who sits mending his nets, until nearly halfway through, where he or she appears for the first time in a possessive pronoun: The reader is told that this man “was a friend of my grandfather” (the word “I” is not used until even further down). The reader is given the silver surface of the sea, the benches, the lobster pots; even the tubs are lined with iridescent scales on which walk iridescent flies. Suddenly the man becomes real: He accepts a cigarette, a Lucky Strike. A line break introduces the reader to the theme of the water, that element from which come all these silvery riches and that forms the source of this man’s life and livelihood. This separate section of six lines is tied to the first through the theme of color: In the water lie silver tree trunks.
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(The entire section is 528 words.)