Poetry Study Notes: Elizabeth Bishop

Poetry Study Notes

Understanding the poems of Elizabeth Bishop

Copyright 2013 Siobhan Holland

Published at smashwords.com

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Acknowledgements

Excerpts from At the Fishhouses, First Death in Nova Scotia, The Prodigal, The Fish, Sestina, Filling Station and The Bight from THE COMPLETE POEMS 1927-1929 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1979,1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, LLC.

CAUTION: Users are warned that the excerpts from the poems are protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited.

The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Table Of Contents

Chapter 1 : Introduction

Chapter 2 : At the Fishhouses

Chapter 3 : First Death in Nova Scotia

Chapter 4 : The Prodigal

Chapter 5 : The Fish

Chapter 6 : Sestina

Chapter 7 : Filling Station

Chapter 8 : The Bight

Introduction

Elizabeth Bishop is a truly extraordinary and original poet. She is famous for her mastery of the casual speaking voice and for painterly descriptions that literally shimmer on the page. In Bishop’s poetry, you will find that the effort to catch what is specific and essential about a thing or place is both conscious and rigorous. She is an absolute perfectionist. Her images are vivid, sharp and memorable, but they are also suggestive and rich. As you get to know the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, you will come to feel that no Bishop image could have come from anybody else.

At first glance, Bishop appears to be totally outward looking. She asks us to focus not on her but with her. She is certainly never confessional, autobiographical or inward looking and she is never sentimental. However, because Bishop truly responds to the world around her, and responds in an intense way, the experiences she writes about are personal because they are hers. Bishop said:

I think myself that my best poems seem rather distant ... I don't think I'm successful when I get personal – rather, sound personal, one is always personal, of course, one way or another.

Bishop makes a clear distinction here between sounding personal and being personal. Self-restraint and reticence is crucial to the power of Bishop's work, not because she avoids or represses what is personal or even painful, but because it informs how she sees the world. She is present in her poems as an unobtrusive and quite self-forgetful figure, fascinated by what she sees, determined to capture it, but the pain and dislocations of her childhood, the loss of her parents and her home, lurk at the edge of her poems. Place is very important to Bishop and often, when she describes a place, she allows emotion and memory to percolate through the images. This makes her imagery rich and layered.

Another interesting thing about Bishop is her humility. She is not an egotistical poet. She acknowledges that the things she describes are sometimes impenetrable and unknowable. She does not try to pin them down because she had innate respect for the mystery and otherness of things. She is therefore not just an incredibly observant poet; she is a poet who explores the whole process of observation itself. She gives us her thought processes as they unfold; rather than tidy finished thoughts and observations.

Bishop is a restless, searching poet. She is fascinated with seeing the world, with change, the sea, the specificity of place, work, death, childhood, travel and brief enriching encounters with others.

Repeated close reading of an Elizabeth Bishop poem is like taking a master class in poetry. If you really pay attention to the words; to the form, the poetic technique and music of Bishop’s poetry, you will learn a great deal about the craft of poetry and the power of language. Bishop is after all one of our most masterful poets.

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At The Fishhouses

The title of 'At the Fishhouses' illustrates Bishop's preoccupation with place. That it tells us 'where', rather than 'who', 'why' or 'when' is significant. It soon emerges that the place is connected with the speaker's personal history. It is a very atmospheric poem.

The poem opens with an atmospheric description of a solitary old man, mending his nets in the gloaming, almost invisible. Although almost invisible refers to the nets, it seems also to refer to the old man. He seems to be fading out of existence, a visual memory, with his shuttle worn and polished, a quiet and understated image of a life's work coming to an end. Although it soon emerges that the old man is connected with the speaker's personal history: he was a friend of my grandfather, she does not give him a name. He therefore, becomes an archetypal figure, an old man and a fisherman.

Although he is fading into the evening light, his solitariness (echoing her own), his silence and his ancient work, make him a remarkably vivid figure. The suggestion that he is an image of death, evaporating into the twilight is one she returns to later when she says: he has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that old black knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away.

He is not a friend of the speaker's grandfather – he was his friend. That is gone now, the grandfather and the friendship and the old man seems about to follow. He waits for the herring boat to come in, suggests that he is waiting for death. Her conversation with him concerns the decline in the population suggesting that the young are leaving this place. The old man's way of life will die with him and with it Bishop's, final connection with the place of her childhood. In view of all the melancholy music that opens the poem, this makes perfect sense.

The long 'o' sound of although is echoed in the word gloaming, cold and old. The words brown, worn, strong, worn and run contribute to the slowing down of the movement