Literary commentary on Grace Chua's '(love song, with two goldfish)

In order to explore the concept of entrapment and the limited existence one subsequently experiences, Grace Chua uses goldfish as the embodiment of two humans who fall in love. It is through this representative and the continued use of parenthesis, that allows Chua to successfully achieve her aim of presenting a different perspective to the universally experienced feeling of desire. In the poem, it is the male fish who craves the attention of the female goldfish; he is “bowled over”. However, these feelings are not reciprocated, the reason being her wish for “ a life beyond the bowl”; this being the one thing he cannot provide for her and therefore signifying the end to their relationship. The key themes in (love song, with two goldfish), are confinement and escapism, both providing a platform for Chua to further her development of the contrasting ideas; discontentment and desire. During the second stanza, the reader discovers the fish are “bound by round walls”, the rhyming sounds of “bound” and “round” emphasising the restrictive nature of the fishbowl and introducing connotations of encirclement. Chua juxtaposes the limitative size of the bowl with the ambition of the male goldfish to “take her to the ocean”, creating opposing images of total confinement and utter vastness. The dynamic verbs describing the movements of the two goldfish demonstrate differences in their attitudes towards life. The female “darts” whilst the male is a “drifter”, suggestive of her restlessness and his lack of direction, foreshadowing the downfall of their relationship. This is also ironic as “drifting” can have positive connotations of freedom and capability, yet the fish are confined in a bowl.  However, the male dreams also for a life beyond the bowl’s walls, in the “submarine silence”. The sibilance assists with Chua’s intent to effectively remind the reader of the fish’s isolation. It emphasises the male’s desperation for companionship and his wish for the two goldfish to “share their deepest secrets”, thereby reinforcing the concept of loneliness. Many images created in the poem are polysemantic. The male fish floats around because he has “nowhere else to go”, this not only describing his sole interest in the female fish and subsequent indifference to anything else, but also his inability to leave the bowl; it is both literal and metaphorical. This technique is also used when the female fish revokes his advances in the fourth stanza, the male “stares emptily through the glass”. Interpreted as the fishbowl being the glass, this highlights the unfulfillment his confinement brings him yet interpreted as a drinking glass; it describes the human mannerism of drinking heavily and then staring at the empty glass, a gesture generally associated with regret or grief.