Love Lies Sleeping Figurative Language

Elizabeth Bishop is regarded as one of the best poets during the twentieth century. The techniques that she used were crucial in the success of her poetry. She often used imagery in her poetry to appeal to the reader. Imagery is figurative language that creates a description for the reader and was used by Bishop to emphasize a larger meaning. Elizabeth Bishop uses vivid images of her everyday experiences to emphasize to a great extent how people should interpret the conventional experiences in their lives. Bishop uses vivid imagery to add to the description of everyday objects. In her poem, “Love Lies Sleeping” Bishop writes, “from fused beads of iron and copper crystals, the little chemical “garden” in a jar trembles and stands again, pale blue, blue-green, and brick.” (21-24) This is an example of how Bishop transforms an ordinary image into an explicit image of a city. Another example is from Bishop’s poem “The Fish”. She writes, “Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full brown roses stained and lost through age” (9-15). In these lines she is describing a fish but, she describes this ordinary fish meticulously. Through Bishop’s detailed descriptions of normal,
everyday occurrences and sights she are transformed into deep images. Auditory imagery is also depicted in Bishop’s poetry to amplify her everyday experiences.
In her poem “Anaphora” she writes, “Each day with so much ceremony begins, with birds, with bells, with whistles from a factory” (1-3). An everyday image is described to create the in-depth sounds of bells and whistles from factories. This explanation of what she hears goes in detail to what the person in the poem experiences regularly. Bishop also uses auditory imagery in “Love Lies Sleeping”. She writes, “Then, in the West, “Boom!” and a cloud of smoke. “Boom!” and the exploding ball of blossom blooms again” (26-28). This is an example of onomatopoeia as well as imagery and creates the “Boom!” sound for the
readers. The use of tactile imagery is also used to provide precise descriptions. In “The Prodigal”, Bishop writes, “The floor was rotten; the sty was plastered halfway up the glass-smooth dung” (3-4). This detailed description of how the floor is “glass-smooth” demonstrates how Bishop goes into detail about how a floor feels. In “The Fish” Bishop writes, “Where oil had speared a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts” (69-72). This goes into detail to create an image of the rusted engine as well as appeal to the sense of touch by describing it as “sun-cracked thwarts”. The depth in which she explains the rusted grill speaks to how she turns an ordinary image into a graphic image. Bishop’s use of imagery also appeals to the sense of smell. In “A Miracle for Breakfast”, she uses olfactory imagery to go into detail about the smell of an ordinary day from the perspective of the person in the poem. “A beautiful villa stood in the sun and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee” (26-27). This is an example of how Bishop goes further to describe something beyond a normal description by including what the character in the poem smelled. The imagery that Bishop uses in her poetry is able to create vivid images for the reader. She makes normal objects and experiences into explicit images. Through visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory imagery, Bishop demonstrates that further interpretation can made of images and everyday occasions. Her words emphasize that vivid imagery can be created from generic situations.