The section of the poem that you refer to does form part
of the epiphany that the speaker of the poem experiences once she truly looks at the
fish and sees the evidence of the previous struggles for victory that the fish had
endured and triumphed over. Once she sees this aspect of the fish, her immediate
response is just to "stare and stare" as "Victory filled up / the little rented boat."
The quote you have highlighted indicates the way that even nature in the form of oil and
bilge water in the boat and sunlight combining together parallels this moment of inner
insight and epiphany with the rainbow that they form.
There
definitely does seem to be a sense in which this epiphany is related to the speaker
seeing something of the condition of humanity in the situation of the fish. Let us
remember that the fish is being lifted "half out of water," occuping a kind of liminal
location between his natural environment and the environment that will kill him. This
situation is paralleled by the way that the speaker is on water, not her natural
environment, and in a boat that is "rented." Perhaps she sees another parallel in the
way that the fish has had to struggle so hard for life, just as we as humans face grim
struggles in our own lives for survival. It is this that causes the speaker's
identification with the fish, which is in turn mirrored by nature in the form of the
rainbow that is created. Her act of letting the fish go seems to challenge the idea of
victory entailing a winner and a loser by letting both the speaker and the fish share
the victory at the end of the poem.
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