according to their lights

“Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.” Two free associations here. The first: a friend of Elizabeth’s gave the book in which this poem appeared to her husband, himself something of a fisherman. He singled out “The Fish” for special praise, saying “I wish I knew as much about it as she does.” Four years later this man published a novella, a fishing story some of us will remember as ending quite differently from the poem. He called it The Old Man and the Sea. Now what are the facts behind such fictions? It would surprise nobody to learn that, in his long career as a sportsman, Ernest Hemingway let go far more fish than Elizabeth Bishop ever hooked. Besides, her fish wasn’t let go at all, not in real life; she told in an interview about bringing it proudly back to the dock—intact. But both she and Hemingway, whatever their private strengths and weaknesses, were concerned in their work with attitudes, “emblems of conduct”—or shall we say, some form of moral headgear—for the reader who wanders out unprotected into the elements Thus, both fish are invested with grandeur and wisdom, and the respective fishermen behave nobly, even reverently, according to their lights. That remark about her poem, Elizabeth told the interviewer, “meant more to me than any praise in the quarterlies. I knew that underneath Mr. H. and I were really a lot alike.”

—James Merrill, “A Class Day Talk,” Recitative (Northpoint Press, 1986)