Sai

Fish in Possession are more than details of natural scenery: they recur at the boundary between visible and hidden worlds, carrying meanings shaped by legend, poetry, and the limits of observation. The drowned City of Is places fish among submerged and silenced beings, while the frozen pool at Seal Court turns the question of whether fish are present into a scene of uncertain perception and unexpected human contact.

Myth and the Drowned City

When the City of Is comes up in conversation, it is described as a Breton legend: a city drowned for its wickedness, ruled by Queen Dahud, and associated in some versions with transparent women. Christabel LaMotte wrote a poem about it. Fish appear in the poem’s submerged world, where the mackerel passes between a glossy, mirror-like structure and the images of roofs and rocks held as if inside glass.

The poem gives the drowned creatures a strange, suspended relation to one another: “And damned and drowned transparent things / Hold silent commerce.…” The fish belongs to a world that remains present beneath a surface, yet is difficult to see directly. Its literary function is bound to the poem’s crossing of air and water, life and submersion, visibility and opacity; the drowned city is not simply a setting but a place where ordinary boundaries have become uncertain.

Fish as an Image of Female Desire

In a letter to Maud Bailey, Leonora Stern proposes a study of water, milk, and amniotic fluid in the Melusina tradition, and asks why water is so often understood as female. She connects water spirits and the women perceived as dangerous with the drowned women of the city, suggesting that the surrounding fluid might represent female sexuality as a wider, non-genital erotic field. This is an argument Leonora advances in her letter, not a settled explanation supplied by the novel.

Within that proposed reading, fish inhabit water as part of an encompassing image rather than as a single, fixed symbol. The submerged environment links the drowned women, fluid, and female embodiment, while resisting an interpretation limited to phallic imagery. Leonora also connects this possibility to the image of a woman or dragon stirring the water of a large marble bath. Her reading makes the fish and their aquatic world relevant to the novel’s larger concern with how poetry can figure women’s desire indirectly, especially where social and literary constraints shape what can be said.

Christabel’s Winter-Garden Pool

At Seal Court, Maud visits the winter garden during snowy weather. The enclosed space was built for Sophie Bailey and was much loved by Christabel. Within its evergreen boundaries lies a pool in which gold and silver fish had been placed to add flashes of colour to the gloom. Christabel had described them as the place’s darting genii, giving the fish a lively, almost supernatural presence within the garden.

Maud brings the place into relation with Christabel’s verse, which pictures two fish shining against green and grey. Yet the living scene is held in winter’s suspension: snow covers the pool, and the ice prevents Maud from seeing what lies below. She crouches at its edge and clears a small area of snow with her gloved hand, but the water remains hidden under ridged, bubbly ice. The poem’s fish are sharply imagined; the fish in the garden, by contrast, cannot be confirmed by sight.

The Uncertain Image and Roland’s Arrival

As Maud polishes the ice in small circles, she sees her own face faintly reflected in its dark surface. The reflection, rather than the fish, is what the pool makes visible. Her question of whether the fish are there remains unresolved at the moment when Roland appears beside her and touches her arm; startled, Maud screams and scrambles to her feet, then faces him angrily as he apologizes.

The scene brings the fish motif into the action without resolving its mystery. The frozen surface separates observer from whatever may be beneath it, while returning Maud’s image to her as a wavering reflection. Roland’s unexpected arrival abruptly breaks her solitary act of looking and turns attention from the unseen fish to the encounter between the two researchers. Across the legend, the poem, and the garden, fish mark the persistence of a submerged world that can be imagined, interpreted, or reflected, but not necessarily seen.