ELIZABETH BISHOP

THEMES

Many of Bishop’s poems have their roots in childhood memories: Sestina In the Waiting Room First Death in Nova Scotia CHILDHOOD

Childhood for Bishop seems to be a world where the child tries to come to terms with loss, pain, death, growth and sudden loss of security. Sestina illustrates a child’s capacity to continue to have fun in the midst of dreadful sorrow. It explores a world where adults are unable to express their grief. This sorrow seeps everywhere –rain, tea, buttons, tears etc.

“In the Waiting Room” she recalls something that happens when she was six years old. It highlights isolation and alienation as the child grows up. It is a form of disconnectedness: “A big black wave”. “First Death in Nova Scotia” deals with the child’s first experience of death and the difficulty the child has dealing with this reality. It is another form of disconnectedness. Bishop expresses the child’s sense of confusion and strangeness in dreamlike imagery. Childhood

There is a sense of homelessness, of uprootedness and of not belonging in her poetry. Childhood

Yet in all the poems Bishop tries to bring everything and everybody back together again: In “Sestina” the child points to “a man with buttons like tears” – perhaps Bishop’s dead father. “In the Waiting Room” the details of the waiting room are blended in the child’s imagination to produce the effect of unity: “held together/or made us all just one”. Childhood

In “First Death in Nova Scotia” the bird, the photographs and the body of the dead boy are all joined in one fairytale. Bishop, whose life was so full of distances and separations of all kinds, may have been attempting in her work as an artist to try unify her life but in her poetry.

There is a strong tension between the need to return to childhood and the need to escape from that childhood. (In the Waiting Room and Sestina) Perhaps each of the poems is a search for self.

“The Fish” “The Armadillo” NATURE

Nature is central to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, either as an active element central to the experience of the poem or by making an intrusion into the domestic scene. Nature

An ecological world view is at the core of her philosophy An ecological world view is at the core of her philosophy. It is her religion. She sees us as interdependent. We see two extremes in the poems: humankind’s destructiveness (The Armadillo) but also our ability to live side by side with nature. (The Prodical) Nature

The experience of really looking at and encountering nature is central to her poetry: The Fish and The Prodical She is aware of the sheer beauty of nature. “the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red” Nature

She domesticates the strangeness of nature through great description and use of language. “his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper”. The Fish “like the necks of light bulbs” In the Waiting Room Nature

She invites us into the natural world through her great use of detail and the senses. We see, hear, taste, smell and feel the world she is describing. Nature

Bishop’s Philosophy

Bishop has a very much “here-and-now” philosophy: the experience is everything “In the Waiting Room” The domestic is very important: The Filling Station and Sestina Philosophy

Philosophy Her view of human life is as fractured and incomplete. “She sees the ideal and the real, permanence and decay, affirmation and denial in both man and nature: a sort of fractured but balanced view of humanity” Ann Newman Philosophy

A person was not always entirely free to choose her location yet she can make a choice about how her life is spent. Life is not totally determined. (The Prodical) The bleaker side of life is often stressed, the pain, the loss and the trauma, yet she is not without humour. (Filling Station) Philopsophy

There is a strange sort of heroism in her poetry There is a strange sort of heroism in her poetry. She faces conflict and crisis but she learns in the process and deals with it in a courageous way. (The Fish and In the Waiting Room) Philosophy

We are constantly aware that here are layers of meaning in her poems We are constantly aware that here are layers of meaning in her poems. She moves us from outer meaning to inner understanding. She makes us reflect on this process of meaning. This process can be seen in her outer detailed descriptions which then move to intense inner understanding: (The Fish)