Ode to a Large Tuna in a Market Literary Elements

A largely unidentified person visiting a vegetable market

Four free-verse stanzas of unmatched length

The speaker metaphorically compares the fish to various weapons, including a torpedo and a bullet, and uses similes to compare the fish to weapons including a harpoon. The fish is also compared via metaphor to a seed and via simile to a fir tree. Finally, through metaphor, the fish is compared to a warship.

The poem contains many examples of both, especially alliteration. Assonant “OO” vowels in “only you / lived through / the sea's truth…” evoke depth and slowness. Meanwhile, instances of alliteration include the "S" sounds in the phrase “sappy as a sprung fir /in the green turmoil, /once seed /to sea-quake,” and the "F" sounds in “fins fletched.”

One of the poem’s primary situational ironies is the fact that the speaker is deeply affected by his interaction with the fish, despite its inevitable one-sidedness. The other is the unexpected way in which the poem ends by concluding that death, for the fish, is not a dearth of experience but in fact a fascinating new realm of experience and knowledge.

Ode

A bustling urban food market

Awed, mournful, admiring, ardent

The tuna and the speaker can both be considered protagonists, while the human practices of consumption that resulted in the tuna's death can be considered the antagonist.

The poem contains several parallel conflicts: on the one hand, the speaker’s attempt to come to terms with the fish’s life and death, and on the other hand, the fish’s (imagined) fight to stay alive and maintain power in the sea.

The poem’s climactic moments come in its final lines, when the speaker shifts the metaphorical language around the tuna, comparing it to a man of war and comparing death to the sea.

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The poem as a whole is tonally hyperbolic and emphatic, avoiding understatement.

Through references to various types of weapons, the poem alludes to twentieth-century practices of warfare.

The phrase “the underwater dark” uses metonymy, naming the property of darkness to refer to the ocean as a whole.

The poem revolves entirely around the personification of the fish, though it is a complex personification, grappling with the ways in which the fish is unlike a person even while attributing human characteristics to it.

The speaker hyperbolically describes the tuna’s uniqueness with the repeated phrase “only you.”

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