In the following essay, Ranta examines Moore's "The Fish" and her other "sea" poems, emphasizing the role of the wave and rhythm in her poetic expression.

Marianne Moore's poetic depiction of the sea offers special challenges to her readers. For one, there is a disparity between the largeness of the subject "the sea" and the specificity of Moore's formal methodology in treating it; the connection between the two is subtle and generally difficult to apprehend. We see this when we realize that, despite the attention given to her poems of the sea, we are left with an interesting, unanswered question: What is Moore's sea as sea and as poetic construction? For a second, no single verbal formulation seems satisfactory for the many features of the sea that Moore treats when she writes about it. Her focus is constantly shifting and the reader is hard pressed to keep...