Bishop Sample Essay

‘Elizabeth Bishop poses interesting questions delivered by means of a unique style’.

Elizabeth Bishop’s honest and engaging poetry poses interesting questions delivered by means of a unique style. This style, which is accomplished yet subtle enough to convey strength of her emotions in a manner that captivates, is used by Bishop to question ideas about identity, religion, home and even knowledge itself.

In more than one of the poems by Bishop, selected for study for the Leaving Certificate course, we are presented with deep and searching explorations of childhood. And frequently, these explorations result in thought provoking and fascinating questions about amongst other things: the past’s ability to impinge on the present, the meaning of home and the notion of identity. Perhaps, nowhere are such deep and searching questions asked as in ‘Sestina’. The poem is structured around the very effective conceit of a child’s drawing. The opening lines set the tone for the entire poem. In the dying of the year, autumn ‘rain falls on the house’. It is dark in this house and the ‘old grandmother / sits in the kitchen with the child’. Any hope of warmth suggested by the ‘marvel stove’, jokes and laughing is quickly dispelled in the final line of this first stanza when the speaker tells us that the grandmother is merely ‘laughing and talking to hide her tears’. The entire poem is steeped in an atmosphere of loss and sadness and one of Bishop’s real achievements in ‘Sestina’ is the degree to which she makes us feel this sadness. She defines her grief through a series of precise and evocative adjectives ‘falling’, ‘small’, ‘hard’, ‘rigid’ and ‘winding’. Furthermore there is a poignant inevitability to the sadness that pervades the poem: because as the speaker tells us, the entire scene was ‘known to grandmother’ and ‘was to be’. However, in a very interesting manner that is typical of Bishop’s unique style, the strict use of the sestina form prevents this poem from becoming too sentimental. In this manner, Bishop asks us to question many universal concerns such as the degree to which the past creates the present, the notion of identity and of course what constitutes home.

Similarly, in ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, Bishop’s childhood memories lead us to interesting and highly charged questions about death and the after-life. Where ‘Sestina’ omits a mother figure, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ links the mother to the child’s first encounter with death. The poem, told entirely in the past tense, opens by telling us that Arthur was laid out in the ‘cold, cold parlor’. The scene is carefully and vividly depicted in the opening stanza. The body of the speaker’s dead cousin Arthur lies beneath: '.. the chromographs; / Edward Prince of Wales; / With Princess Alexandra, / And King George with Queen Mary’. Once again, Bishop’s style is dominated by a restrained simplicity to the language that she uses. We learn that her dead cousin ‘Arthur was very small’ , that ‘he was all white like a doll’ and that ‘Jack Frost had left him forever’. The broad vowel sounds and predominance of cold adjectives are juxtaposed in a unique way with the nursery rhyme-like-rhyme to offer a chilling glimpse of a child’s first encounter with death. In keeping with the emptiness we find in ‘Sestina’, Bishop refuses to provide any comfort for the child. And yet while this is a genuinely sad poem to read, it is difficult not to be struck by the fact that ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ leads us gently towards deep questions about where the speaker’s dead cousin is going. Prepared to greet him formally, the assembled royalty are present in formal clothes of ‘red and ermine’. Clutching the flower that the speaker placed in his hand, Arthur is forced to decline their offer to attend the court ‘But how could Arthur go, / with his eyes shut up so tight / and the roads deep in snow?’. The fact that Bishop fails to offer us the comfort of an afterlife makes it more difficult to accept Arthur’s death. Arthur is not invited to heaven rather to ‘court’. And in the end, we are forced to ask ourselves, if there is anything beyond death other than the coffin for little Arthur?

Bishop’s poems do not merely confine themselves to explorations of self and identity. She is also a skilled observer and these observations frequently yield deeply philosophical questions. One of the most interesting stylistic techniques that Bishop employs is her tendency to make the familiar look strange. While this of course is not unique to her, it is nevertheless very effective. For example, in ‘At The Fishhouses’, the poem opens with a very familiar setting only to yield to an almost surreal meditation on the question of knowledge. We learn that even though it is cold, ‘an old man sits netting, / his net, in the gloaming almost invisible’. The depiction here is a timeless one that evokes a sense of continuity and a vanishing way of life. The fisherman continues his work to the backdrop of the setting sun and ‘the fishhouses with their steeply peaked roofs / and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up / to storerooms’. The entire scene is bordered by the sea, which in a moment of marvellous sibilance is ‘swelling slowly as if considering spilling over’ and is bathed in a ‘silver’ light. For the briefest of moments, it is as if the speaker becomes transfixed by the movement of the sea. However, she forces her attention away from the sea to focus on ‘the benches’, ‘lobster pots’, ‘masts’ and ‘small old buildings’. Then, in line 40, which marks the beginning of the short second section of the poem, a shift occurs. Here, the speaker describes the area near ‘the water’s edge [...] where they haul up the boats’. In a slow, measured fashion, her attention is drawn ‘down and down’ towards the water. The detailed descriptions of the fishhouses and the microscopic examination of the ‘wheelbarrow’, ‘the old man’s hand’ and the ‘capstan’ now give way to a strange, almost unrecognisable place. Then in the final section of the poem, the beautiful ‘surface of the sea’ becomes what ‘we imagine knowledge to be’. It is ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world’. This is such an unusual yet completely apt metaphor for knowledge that it forces us to question many of our preconceived notions about how we view understanding and learning. Knowledge, Bishop seems to be suggesting, is difficult yet always changing and ‘flowing’.

Similarly, in her poems ‘The Fish’ and ‘Filling Station’, the familiar also becomes almost surreal. In ‘The Fish’, we witness a kind of transformation where the ‘tremendous fish’ that was battered and venerable is released and the familiar world of the fish boar is altered until it becomes ‘rainbow, rainbow, rainbow’. Furthermore, in ‘Filling Station’, the detailed, almost photographic description of the ‘oil soaked, oil permeated’ filling station gives way to a completely different viewpoint. Suddenly, in the final lines of this poem, Bishop leads us to question whether or not the station is indeed symbolic of the fact that ‘somebody loves us all’.

Overall, there is no doubting that Bishop’s poetry is challenging, however her poetry rewards the reader’s attentive efforts. Her keen eye for detail, her restrained, yet deeply emotional poems and her mastery of form deserve our attention and admiration, because they pose interesting questions delivered by means of a unique and easily identifiable style.