The Fish

Compare & Contrast

"The Fish" has many detailed words about the five human senses. The author in "The Fish", had me visualize the catching of the fish. He talked about the fish not fighting the hook when it was in the corner of his mouth. He described what the fish looked like. He had brown skin hung in stripes like ancient wallpaper, shapes like full-blown roses, stained and lost through age. It had barnacles on him with infested tiny white sea-lice. The Fish's gills were filled with blood from the hook but he was still breathing.

The man looked into the fish's eyes which were far larger than his but shallower, and yellowed. The irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass.

The fish had five other old hooks that he broke away from previously. Two of them were real big. The author described the fish hooks as medals from other fights with men. The medals' had frayed and wavered ribbons attached.

There was a puddle of bilge that filled the boat where oil had spilled out. The oil made a rainbow around the rusted engine and then everything turned into a rainbow and he let the fish go.

This poem "Reaper" didn't describe the actions very well. You couldn't visualize what happened as much as the other poem. It was also very short and kind of boring. It described sharpening of scyths and having the horses drag the blades through the fields of weeds. At one point in the poem, there was one part that made me visualize the rat in the path of the blades being chopped up in them. That was the only good part of the poem because no one really cares about sharpening scyths. That's boring.

Obviously "The Fish" was better because it had a better topic an d great descriptive vocabulary.