The Goose Fish

In “The Goose Fish,” two people who are in an illicit romantic and sexual relationship come upon a hideous dead fish and choose to believe that the fish’s apparent grin symbolizes a kind of grotesque approval of what they have just done together on the sand. The poem is also an enigmatic comment on the human tendency to interpret some random event or phenomenon in nature in symbolic terms, as if it supplies a meaning that would otherwise not be apparent.

In the first stanza, the two lovers on a deserted shore at night under moonlight “suddenly embraced” (Line 3), and the rush of passion that engulfs them transfigures the entire scene. Before, it was an “ordinary night” (Line 5), but the thrill they experience during their lovemaking lends a kind of grace or sanctification to the scene, and they feel like they are in paradise. This suggests the power of human love and sexual passion to transform the way people perceive the world, to lift the burden of the ordinary and return human consciousness to a lost pristine perfection. The only phrase that suggests the possible presence of something of a different character is “their shadows were as one” (Line 4), which suggests a darker coloring of the scene. The shadow is a term often used in psychoanalysis to describe the darker, unconscious side of the psyche, including repressed negative emotions.

Line 10, the first line of stanza 2, acts as a foreshadowing of what is about to happen. The couple are “as if shaken by stage-fright.” They become self-conscious and embarrassed, which likely means they feel shame, whereas in the previous stanza they were swept up in the passion of the moment. Stage fright can occur when an actor has to face an audience; in the poem, the couple had thought they were alone, but they now seem to have an intuition that they are being watched, and this makes them nervous. The tone changes in Line 11, also, “Beneath the hard moon’s bony light,” which amplifies the mention of the moon in Line 1 but not in a way that lends any romance to the scene. The phrase “still conspiring” in Line 14 suggests the guilt that the lovers feel, and this is also emphasized two lines later. The theme of guilt will occur again in stanza 4. At this point, it is as if they have been conspiring together in some manner. The poem then moves on, if not to comedy, at least to something wholly unexpected: the grotesque, dead goose fish, which suddenly appears close to their feet. (A goose fish is of the Lophiidae family of marine fish. It a has a large flattened head, a wide body, sharp teeth, and a large mouth. It lives at the bottom of the ocean in mud and sand.) The couple react to the grinning goose fish; it is as if “the world had found them out” (Line 16). Nemerov has now set up the poem for the musings that follow.

Stanza 3 emphasizes the unpleasant appearance of the goose fish. It is “ancient and corrupt and grey” (Line 20). It must have been washed up by the tide. Corrupt it may be—that is, decaying— but its wide, open mouth gives the impression of a smile. The appearance of a smile gets the attention of the two lovers. Just a little while earlier, they had been ecstatically happy. Then, they began to feel awkward. Now, in stanza 3, having seen the fish, they wonder what his smile “seemed to say” (Line 22) to them.

They feel that in some way he is communicating a message. He is commenting on them; he is there for a reason, it seems. The great force of nature has tossed up something that they feel compelled to muse about. Only moments before, things were simpler; they had made love on the sand and thought that by doing so they would create a world of their own. They would be self-sufficient, just the two of them, although the fact that their act is described as “violence on the sand” (Line 25) suggests that it was more problematic than they realized.

Whatever their intention, in stanza 4 their attention is wholly grabbed by the dead fish. They puzzle over what it means, suddenly to have a grinning dead fish at their feet. They do not assume it means nothing. They seem to regard the goose fish as a messenger from the whole of nature, expressing an opinion about them and their “guilty love” (Line 34), which the whole world—likely meaning the society in which they live—now knows about (or so it seems to the lovers). The smile is enigmatic in the sense that it could be understood in different, opposite ways. It is both “peaceful and obscene” (Line 29) and might express “failure or success” (Line 32). In the end, the lovers decide on the most positive interpretation possible. The smile is an “emblem” (Line 33), that is, symbol, of their “sudden, new and guilty love” (Line 34), but the goose fish is taking their side. He does not condemn them. Instead, he is a “rigid optimist” (Line 36), rigid because he is dead—and thus stiff—and an optimist because he is smiling.

It is perhaps not only the fish that is smiling. The narrator is enjoying the satirical joke too, as will the reader. The satire lies in the fact that the couple assume there is some meaning that they must somehow determine, instead of laughing off the sudden appearance of the dead fish as just a random, meaningless incident. They are looking for meanings that do not exist, or at least are not conveyed by the “smile” of a dead goose fish. Perhaps that reveals how oppressed they have suddenly become by their guilty feelings and how important it is for them to assuage those feelings. Their feeling that the appearance of the fish means that the world has found them out is a sign of the depth of their ambivalence about their love and the shame they now feel about it.

The satirical tone continues into the final stanza. The notion of a hideous dead fish becoming the lovers’ “patriarch” is incongruous to say the least, since a patriarch is a respected figure of authority. Line 38 continues the opposites with which the fish has been described. Now it is “dreadfully mild,” and instead of the moonlight of the first and second stanzas, the setting is now described as “the half-dark,” which sounds much less optimistic and romantic. Indeed, the description of the fish gets more repulsive and negative; he seems to be choking on sand and his teeth “left their mark” (Line 40), which suggests that they have bitten something, whereas they are in fact only forming the appearance of a smile—a smile that the fish never explains. He does not say what is amusing him and making him smile. It is like a private joke, a puzzle, that the lovers continue to contemplate as the moon goes down.