rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

I was second-guessing including this entry/ anecdote on Elizabeth Bishop, but Alicia’s entry inspired me to go ahead and do it.

Imagine, when I first came across Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” it was in the form of a badly Xeroxed copy in a college classroom. I don’t remember the course I was taking, but I remember the assignment: to study the poem over the weekend and be ready to discuss it the next time class convened. And so I took the poem, and I read it, reread it, and I loved it—especially that last line: “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” What a celebratory declaration.
The speaker opens the poem with “I caught a tremendous fish,” and then proceeds to examine it, scale by scale, from fin to fin, awe-struck by its beauty—the triumph of it, the trophy of it—but then comes the dramatic turn:
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.
The fish transforms into a creature of survival, its battle scars in tow. The fish at the end of the line grows from “catch of the day” to an encounter with the divine. Witness the way the bilge and the rust of “the little rented boat” become blessed with the magic of bright color, yes, “until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”
I remember adopting the phrase like a mantra—“rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”—everything is beautiful! I could spin around the room to it. The fish, like a god, had entered my world.
But no sooner did I walk into the class the following Monday (before I even took my seat) that the instructor informed us that the bad copy had cut off the actual final line of the poem, which was: “And I let the fish go.”
Well, knock me over with a fishing rod! I must have stumbled to my desk as I repositioned my relationship to the fish god. He was too good for this world after all. He was too beautiful, too grand to remain among us, and the speaker recognized this, so the fish was let go, the memory of it enough to sustain us until its next brief appearance.
Years later, I would find an echo to this wondrous fish in Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya’s classic novel Bless Me, Ultima, about a young boy struggling with the colliding faiths of Catholicism and indigenous beliefs, with the need to respect the mystery of the natural world and to embrace the impulse to challenge the culture of dominance taught by the industrialized one.
The fish, such a wise, wise being.