Thursday, June 6, 2019

The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop Essay Example for Free

The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop EssayIn my answer I provide be lecture intimately my ideas on the contents, 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 displace to a mental hospital for five years. They were separated in 1916 until her mother finally died in 1934. She was raised by her grandp arnts in Nova Scotia. There are quaternity main themes in the poetry of Bishop. These include nature, tiddlerhood, domesticity/motherhood, and the resilience of the human spirit. The two poesys I will be discussing about in my answer related to the spare-time activity themes are Sestina and The Filling Station. The two themes I will be discussing about are domesticity and churlhood. The first poem I will be discussing on is Sestina. The theme in Sestina, which I will be discussing, is minorhood and domesticity. In Sestina Bishop is looking back at her childhood in a childs 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 still 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, chain of mountains, grandmother, child, and almanac are utilize 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 beguiles. 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 childs emotion. I think this is a expectant way of doing so, after all a picture tells a thous and words. The picture the child draws therefore reflects truly what the child dreams of, a rigid house and a man with buttons worry separate.Apparently, this is a complete contrast to the current situation. It is a able past that shell 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 childs picture atomic moons fall down like trees from between the pages of the almanac into the flower bed 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. Its about restoring hope in the face of affliction. This is clearly shown at the beginning of the last stanza. The verse time to engraft tears, says the almanac mark the turning point of the poem. It is also at this moment that the child becomes happy, therefore not being complete ly unhappy. Its 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. 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 laborious 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 lose 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 little, filling station. Instead of saying its an oily filling station, she describes it further in saying its oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all desolate 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 doily and the plant. She becomes very interested in these two domest ic objects because they greatly contrast the atmosphere which the poet saw the filling station to be, person 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 somebody in stanza six to be a caring mother. This may be linked to Bishops personal manner in that she lost her own mother and is longing for a caring mother figure in her smell, or, at least, in her life as a child.The realisation that the mother isnt to be seen happens gradually as we see that its a family filling station and that there is wickerwork furniture, a womans touch surely, but then the sudden realisation floods Bishop in the sixth stanza when she repeats the word somebody again and again. The repetition of 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 lac k 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 much(prenominal) a great poem. The main thing I like abou t this poem is the vivid imagery Bishop gives, especially when describing the fish. In this poem, the central image is of the poet retentivity the fish beside her rented boat. There are three main roots of factual images. The first group contains thirteen physical images of the fish tremendous fishmouth brownness skin speckled with barnaclesinfested with tiny white sea-licehis gills were breathing in the terrible oxygenthe coarse white flesh the big hit the books and the little bones his shiny entrailsthe pink swim-bladderhis eyesmechanism of his jawhis lower lipThe second group contains seven factual images of the boat beside the boatthe little rented boatthe pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orangethe sun-cracked thwartsthe oarlocks on their stringsthe gunnelsThe third group contains seven factual images of fishing my hook fast in a corner of his mouthfive old pieces of fish-lineor four and a equip leader with the swivel still attachedwith all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouthA green line, wear out at the end where he broke ittwo heavier linesand a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap 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 coevals 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 distributed 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.

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