Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry
ELIZABETH BISHOP’S POETRY.
The descriptive, vibrant language of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry appeals to every reader in all of her poems.
Disorder plays a large part in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and the descriptive insight of “Filling Station”. The “Filling Station” expands on her views of controlling the chaos. “Somebody waters the plant… Somebody arranges the rows of cans” indicates that there is someone behind the scenes cleaning and caring for the filling station, someone we don’t see in the poem. 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 poem begins with a sense of disarray – “Be careful with that match!”. The Filling station is unclean, untidy, “oil-soaked” and “oil-permeated’’. 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 epiphany 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 lack of a mother.
“The Fish” treads a different road than the other poems I’ve explored. In this poem, the themes still relate to life but the order and disarray come in the form of expectations versus outcomes. The poem begins with Bishop catching a fish she’d set out to do – “I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat”. She had expected to catch the fish but as the poem goes on she begins to explore the life of the fish more, scrutinise over its detail. The first suspicion arises from “he didn’t fight, he hadn’t fought at all”. She had expected resistance from the fish but it had never arrived. This drives her to look at the fish
The descriptive, vibrant language of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry appeals to every reader in all of her poems.
Disorder plays a large part in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and the descriptive insight of “Filling Station”. The “Filling Station” expands on her views of controlling the chaos. “Somebody waters the plant… Somebody arranges the rows of cans” indicates that there is someone behind the scenes cleaning and caring for the filling station, someone we don’t see in the poem. 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 poem begins with a sense of disarray – “Be careful with that match!”. The Filling station is unclean, untidy, “oil-soaked” and “oil-permeated’’. 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 epiphany 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 lack of a mother.
“The Fish” treads a different road than the other poems I’ve explored. In this poem, the themes still relate to life but the order and disarray come in the form of expectations versus outcomes. The poem begins with Bishop catching a fish she’d set out to do – “I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat”. She had expected to catch the fish but as the poem goes on she begins to explore the life of the fish more, scrutinise over its detail. The first suspicion arises from “he didn’t fight, he hadn’t fought at all”. She had expected resistance from the fish but it had never arrived. This drives her to look at the fish