Analysis

Bishop, known for her descriptive and vivid imagery, alludes to magical beings and portrays natural events in order to illustrate the idea of love and its distortion on earth. Throughout the first stanza, she references magicians and fortune tellers, alluding to their convincing delusional claims. At night, mentioned in the vivid description of the magician’s sleeve, things that seem so clear during the day are muddled into an illusion. The radio singers act as the magicians or fortune tellers, creating a magical, fanciful fallacy of love or whatever the listeners want to believe, as suggested in the last two lines of the first stanza. Overall, the first stanza reflects on the idea that just like fortune tellers or magicians, the radio singers appeal to their audience based on what they would be mostly likely to accept as true, thus not speaking the absolute truth about love.

In the second stanza, Bishop reveals where the true, realistic idea of love exists. She describes the event occurring at a Navy aerial yard, which would be an overhead view of a Navy yard on the coast of a body of water. From this view, the witness of love on these summer nights, a time known for love, are separated from the distorted views of love created on earth. She builds on this idea also when she alludes to the mythological Phoenix, which burns when being reborn. In the air, the “Five Lights” remain undisturbed or distorted by the dew on the surface of the earth. The water droplets that normally distort the object it lays on can be compared to the radio-singers mentioned in the first stanza, but they too remain on the surface of the earth. The phoenix in the air symbolizes love, such that away from the fallacies on the earth, it can be viewed wholly in its true form. From above, Bishop alludes to the idea that viewers can see all below, observing the entire picture before them. Up in the air where no distortion can occur, the natural presence of love, described through the phoenixes’ burning, remains pure, burning in the late air of the night.

NOTE: To hear a reading of "Late Air," click here.