At The Fishhouses literary devices

The two most important literary devices in “At the Fishhouses,” by Elizabeth Bishop, are ambiguity and imagery. The ambiguity of the words opaque and translucent in “All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence, like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls.,” (Bishop lines 13-20) is the reason ambiguity is a central key of fully understanding the poem. If the reader didn’t know the denotative meaning of the two words, the theme of the poem would be lost to them. But by understanding the ambiguous form of the words, the reader understands the message the speaker is trying to convey. Another small form of an ambiguous word in the poem, “At the Fishhouses,” is “and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail” (Bishop lines 23-25). The denotative meaning of the word “mail” is a flexible armor made of interlinked metal rings, which the speaker used to display the scales as armor. Once again, if the reader did not know the full meaning of the word, they would miss the symbolism.
The extensive use of imagery in the poem demonstrates the speaker’s felt distinction between the opaque and the translucent. In almost every line of “At the Fishhouses,” something is being described. From “it is a cold evening” (Bishop line 1), at the beginning of the poem, to “dark, salt, moving, utterly free” (Bishop line 79) at the end, the narrator uses descriptive words to show the contrast between the fishhouses and the rest of the world around her. The scales, “the principal beauty” (Bishop line 38), appear everywhere in the mind of the narrator, and symbolize the translucence she associates with the fishhouses. The sea, described with an oxymoron, “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” (Bishop 60), symbolizes the resemblance between it, and knowledge. The use of imagery clearly demonstrates the speaker’s struggle to understand the sea in relation to the fishhouses, and symbolically, the relation of everyday life to knowledge.