First Stanza

The first line of "The Fish" syntactically belongs to the title. In an almost filmic manner, the speaker focuses on fish "wading" through "black jade." These words are telling because they suggest a heaviness and a slowness to the fish's movement. Jade is opaque and is not naturally associated with water. The darkness of the water underlines the mysteriousness of the sea, the difficulty of knowing it. By calling the sand disturbed by the opening and closing of one of the mussels "ash heaps," Moore underscores not only the physical appearance of this action but also how the sea floor looks "disposable" to human eyes. By singling out one of the shells, noting how it is "adjusting" the environment around it, Moore suggests how the movement of the smallest thing can have an effect on the larger world.

Second Stanza

The second stanza picks up from...