Elizabeth Bishops Description The Narrator and the World of the Poem

What sets [Elizabeth Bishops] poetry apart from a great deal of the poetry of [] is that it is not lyric in the usual sense, but descriptive, said Nancy L. McNally from Hofstra University. For Elizabeth Bishops poetry, the use of luxuriant and truthful, almost paintinglike description of the physical world is indeed something typical and has been commented on many times. However, there have been a few contradictory studies trying to point out the method by which she achieves the appeal her description holds. When looking at many of Bishops poems, it is very easy to imagine their setting, for they are explained clearly and in many details. These descriptions differ from poem to poem though at first look they may all seem somewhat aloof and objective, they mainly depend on the speaker and the degree of infatuation with the world. This is because the speaker as a painter often does loses himself in the world in order to describe it truthfully and in all complexity. As McCabe argues
in Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Bishops apparent objectivity and naturalism really

represent an absorption of the self in the environment. Thus, the speaker is inevitably influenced by the world as a whole and can no longer be purely objective when it comes to single details and parts of it. By doing this, Bishop stays truthful to the real world as much as she can and at the same time shows the influence the setting has, which enabled the reader to better identify him/herself with the poem. The apparent feeling-absence in the descriptions then allows the reader to create, to a certain degree, his or her own feeling and impression of the world of Bishops poems the same way an exhibition visitor does of a painting.

In the poem based on an experience from Bishops life First Death in Nova Scotia, the poet realistically describes the feeling of a child when seeing a corpse and taking part on a

funeral of her cousin. While Bishop focuses on truthful albeit childlike description of the room with the coffin and the corpse, there are little to none emotions engaged. That is not to say that the description is purely objective, as James G. Southworth, asserts in The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. The child is clearly lost in the atmosphere of death and therefore describes everything else in connection to death. This phenomenon manifests itself from the very beginning, when the parlor is described as cold, cold, which is a feel related to death. While the parlor might well be literally cold, the speaker still chooses to point out this aspect and not another. This is further proven when, rather than describing the people in the room and we know there is at least the speakers mother the speaker decides to describe a stuffed loon / shot and stuffed by Uncle Arthur whose eyes [are] red glass and the table is compared to a frozen lake. The red color often symbolizes blood and death and furthermore, the death itself is sometimes depicted with red eyes. The frozen lake again evokes the feeling of cold so much associated with the end of life. As it is the child painting the poem and since it is typical for a child not to feel sorrow the way adult person does on such occasions, the description stays rather unemotional. This absence can be seen for example in the description of the cousins corpse. Arthur was very small. He was all white, like a doll that hadnt been painted yet. Jack Frost had started to paint him the way he always painted the Maple Leaf (Forever). In here, the looks of the corpse evokes a link to a fairytale character symbolizing winter, end of life and hence even death itself. Even the world Forever carries definiteness typical for death. In the final stanza, the color read appears again when describing the appearance of royal couples that invited Arthur to their court, but Arthur cannot go because the roads [are] deep in snow, which once again brings up the notion of winter and omnipresent cold.

One of Bishops most famous poems In the Waiting Room begins once again with a description of the setting a waiting room in Worcester, Massachusetts, that is full of full of grown-up people, / arctics and overcoats, / lamps and magazines. The vocabulary is simple and includes all the things one can expect in a waiting room of a dentist. The description flourishes further as the narrator looks at pictures in National Geographic and creates another picture within the picture of the setting. The narrator Elizabeth sees a Volcano, black, and full of ashes, and photos of people: Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. Here, the poem manages to draw the reader who has been already sitting in the waiting room in even further, describing the images when going through the magazine and preparing him for the psychological reaction these pictures invoke in the little girl. Shocked by the images of people, who are like her, yet different she loses herself within the world of the magazine. This time the absorption is even more visible and literal as she discovers she is a part of the world, the world of the grown people. Elizabeth realizes that she could be one of those women with awful hanging breasts, that here is something making them very much alike, yet she is an individual. Dizzy from this journey into the deep of her psyche, the waiting room [is] bright / and too hot, before everything comes back to normal as the speaker emerges from her thoughts and the world of the magazine, the world of all people, the world she now knows she is a part of.

In The Fish the narrator caught a tremendous fish and as s/he holds him on a hook / fast in a corner of his mouth and describes him at first in rather normal terms, appropriate for animals. Here and there / his brown skin hung in strips is a fairly adequate

description for a fish and although we can see the narrator is somewhat emotionally invested ever since we read the first line and the world tremendous, the used words stay true to the world of nature and do not exaggerate. The absorption comes into play gradually, possibly starting as s/he look[s] into [the fishs] eyes. The narrator then comments on the fish not returning his/her stare in a way that may evoke an image of a person avoiding someones look. From this point further, the speaker gradually starts to feel with the fish and recognizes him in terms of human qualities. The five hooks grown into the mouth of the fish are commented on thusly: Like medals with their ribbons flayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. In this part, the hooks lead the narrator to acknowledging the fish as some kind of war hero, having won battles with many who tried to catch him, outwitting them and the hooks are decorating him as medals or beard of wisdom would a human being. As the speaker realizes this fact and that s/he was the one who managed to catch him, the world around him/her seems to change as well, is brighter, more colorful and sunny until it is rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! This is enough for the speaker and s/he releases the fish. Zachariah Pickard claims in his study that this poem denies McCabes statement, saying [t]he fish is a truly excellent fish, and Bishops speaker is clearly impressed with him, but he is nonetheless a fish and a separate entity. While this might be true, it does not necessarily mean the speaker cannot be abs orbed by the environment, in this case the much admired fish, for the absorption is rarely as explicit as Pickard claims it to be. In this case, the narrator must, for a brief moment, lose him/herself in the fishs appearance to find the connection between the fish and human.