The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop Essay Example for Free

The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop Essay In my answer I will be talking about my ideas on the themes, styles, and images in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop was born on the 8th of February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother, in shock, was sent to a mental hospital for five years. They were separated in 1916 until her mother finally died in 1934. She was raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia. There are four main themes in the poetry of Bishop. These include nature, childhood, domesticity/motherhood, and the resilience of the human spirit. The two poems I will be discussing about in my answer related to the following themes are ‘Sestina’ and ‘The Filling Station’. The two themes I will be discussing about are domesticity and childhood. The first poem I will be discussing on is ‘Sestina’. The theme in ‘Sestina’, which I will be discussing, is childhood and domesticity. In ‘Sestina’ Bishop is looking back at her childhood in a child’s perspective. The use of the third person voice in Sestina blends the poets adult perspective with the childs. A sestina is a seven stanza poem with 6 lines in every stanza except for the last one, where there are only three. If we look at the last word in every line of the first stanza we realize that house, almanac, stove, grandmother, child, and almanac are used over and over again as the last word of every line, except the last stanza where there are two words in every line. The reason why Elizabeth Bishop titled her poem after the form it was written in was because she wanted the reader to understand the way a child sees. A child rearranges things until it makes sense, the way the words are rearranged over and over again. In stanza five of the child is drawing a picture. The picture is an outlet of the child’s emotion. I think this is a great way of doing so, after all a picture tells a thousand words. The picture the child draws therefore reflects truly what the child dreams of, †Å"a rigid house† and â€Å"a man with buttons like tears†. Apparently, this is a complete contrast to the current situation. It is a happy past that she’ll never have again. It is the bitter mirror image of the present and the past of dream and reality. Although, in the last two stanzas the mood of the poem takes a turn for a brighter theme because of the child’s picture â€Å"†¦little moons fall down like trees from between the pages of the almanac into the flower bed†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Personally, I take the image of flowers in the rain as a very interesting one. It resembles the silver lining in every cloud and the light at the end of the road. It’s about restoring hope in the face of affliction. This is clearly shown at the beginning of the last stanza. The verse â€Å"time to plant tears, says the almanac† marks the turning point of the poem. It is also at this moment that the child becomes happy, therefore not being completely unhappy. It’s time for the grandmother to bury her tears in the earth and grow hope. The message of the poem is then unveiled: there will be a rainbow after the rain, just as there will always be hope for tomorrow. â€Å"The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house†. The grandmother stops crying and starts to sing, the child stops dwelling on the past and starts to draw the future. The almanac in the poem represents the domestic. Its secular and full of information. We have this domestic scene with a stove a grandmother and a childbut then we have tears. The tears tip the poem towards the absurdity. The child can sense the grandmothers tears even though she is trying to hide it. The child expresses this through the picture she drew if a man with buttons like tears,, and by watching the teakettles small hard tears dance like mad. And in the last stanza where it ends with an inscrutable house, the last thing that should be inscrutable is her house. But in this case there are many symbols and the child is having a difficult time making sense out of things, so even though we have this domestic scene, it isnt really. I think that the tears are from the lack of the grandmothers children, the childs mother. Maybe thats the unspoken reason. The second poem I will be discussing is ‘The Filling Station’. In this poem I will be discussing the theme of domesticity/motherhood. I think it is the domestic details that fascinate the poet in this poem. I think so because the poet seems to write in a lot of detail about the domestic items in the â€Å"little, filling station†. Instead of saying it’s an oily filling station, she describes it further in saying it’s â€Å"oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency†. This is one example of her in-depth detail of the filling station in the poem. The two things in which she goes into extreme detail in are the â€Å"doily† and the â€Å"plant†. She becomes very interested in these two domestic objects because they greatly contrast the atmosphere which the poet saw the filling station to be, â€Å"somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant, or oils it maybe.† This shows how interested the poet was in these two objects. I understand the â€Å"somebody† in stanza six to be a caring mother. This may be linked to Bishop’s personal life in that she lost her own mother and is longing for a caring mother figure in her life, or, at least, in her life as a child. The realisation that the mother isn’t to be seen happens gradually as we see that it’s a family filling station and that there is wicker furniture, a woman’s touch surely, but then the sudden realisation floods Bishop in the sixth stanza when she repeats the word â€Å"somebody† again and again. The repetition of â€Å"somebody† appears to be a method of ignoring who this person might be even though the association is obvious. Bishop seems to be hiding from the realisation, reinforcing the thoughts that this is about her own lack of a mother. One of the things I love the most about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop is the imagery. Elizabeth Bishop is well-known for her ability to take the mundane or most unimportant things in life and use her imagination to change it into something completely out of the ordinary. ‘The Fish’ is a great example of this. Elizabeth Bishop is renowned to write poetry about the beauty of poetry. This poem is not an exception. Bishop merely catches a fish, yet by her imagination and creativity, which is a part of her poetry, she is able to imagine the fish beyond what it is, not only talking about its skin but also talking about its innards and portraying it as a war veteran. In fact, the ending speaks of how Bishop even begins to see the colours of the rainbow. Sad to say, the poem focuses more on poetry itself; it is unlikely the poem is speaking of morality or life and death between herself and the fish. This is what makes it such a great poem. The main thing I like about this poem is the vivid imagery Bishop gives, especially when describing the fish. In this poem, the central image is of the poet holding the fish beside her rented boat. There are three main groups of factual images. The first group contains thirteen physical images of the fish: â⠂¬Ëœtremendous fish†¦ mouth†¦ brown skin †¦ speckled with barnacles†¦ infested with tiny white sea-lice†¦ his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen†¦ the coarse white flesh the big bones and the little bones†¦ his shiny entrails†¦ the pink swim-bladder†¦ his eyes†¦ mechanism of his jaw†¦ his lower lip’ The second group contains seven factual images of the boat: ‘ beside the boat†¦ the little rented boat†¦ the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine†¦ to the bailer rusted orange†¦ the sun-cracked thwarts†¦ the oarlocks on their strings†¦ the gunnels†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ The third group contains seven factual images of fishing: ‘ my hook fast in a corner of his mouth†¦ five old pieces of fish-line†¦ or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached†¦ with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth†¦ A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it†¦ two heavier lines†¦ and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap †¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Overall, there is a great variety in the imagery used in this poem, which is why I like the imagery in this poem. The writing style of Bishop was very different in comparison to her notable contemporaries such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman. In contrast to their confessional style involving large amounts of self-exposure, Bishops style of writing, though it sometimes involved sparse details from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed and objective, distant point of view and for its necessity on the personal subject matter that the work of her contemporaries involved. In contrast, when Bishop wrote about details and people from her own life, as she did in her story about her childhood and her weeping grandmother in Sestina, she always used discretion. Sestina, in other words, is not personal confession, as the lack of personal names indicates, but representative in the way that a tale is. Along with the persona, the point of view, and the poetic form, the language creates a complex experience for the reader. One sympathizes with the grandmother and the child, sensing sorrow, yearning, and the tensing of the childs effort to be an individual within the sheltering, suffocating domestic scene. Yet one also hears wariness in Bishops telling of their story.