The descriptive, vibrant language of Elizabeth Bishop transcends through time to appeal to every reader in all of her poems. What I admire the most about Elizabeth’s poetry is its combination of detailed, imaginative description and intriguing insight. Bishop has a keen eye for detail and she transforms the visual images she observes into poetic language. She deals with a number of themes including death, loss, childhood, domesticity and the resilience of the human spirit. Bishop’s poems are rooted in personal experience, but have a genuine universal appeal.
The poem “Sestina” focuses on a child’s experience of tragedy and loss and reveals how children are extremely sensitive to the world around them, without fully understanding what is actually happening. The poem is seen through the eyes of a child which makes the reader connect to the poem more.Unfortunately Bishop, herself, has experienced loss as a child and in the poem she captures the terrible absence of her parents. The title “Sestina” refers to a form of writing poetry, it is an old formal type of poem. “Sestina” is one of my favourite poems I have read so far.There are many aspects of the poem that I enjoyed. I admire the main feature of the poetic form, the six repeating end words, “grandmother”, “child”, “house”, “stove”, “almanac” and “tears”. The poem opens with an autumnal theme, “September rain…in the failing light” setting the scene and mood for the rest of the poem. It is set in a kitchen and described as an ordinary domestic scene. As the poem progresses, we realise that something is wrong and the “grandmother is laughing and talking to hide her tears”. The sense of grief seeps through the child’s innocence, the child thinks that her grandmother’s tears are fo...
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...his mind up to go home.” This may convey that for some people home is not their first place of refuge, but rather, their last. This poem also relates to Bishop as she didn’t have much connection with home loved how the poem conveys an inspiring message for humans, that is, they can get through difficult situation and find comfort, even if it takes them a long time to do so.
To conclude enjoyed Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry because of her unique style of asking questions about human and life, her ability to discover universal truths is very impressive.I particularly liked how she can change something really plain into the extraordinary. Her famous eye for detail and extremely vivid descriptions give her poetry a powerful visual quality, drawing the reader into the world she describes.I strongly recommend that everyone should read at least one poem by Elizabeth Bishop.
The components of marriage, family and loss has played a big role in Anne Bradstreet’s writing of “Before the birth of One of Her Children”, “In Memory of Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet”, and Edward Taylor’s “Upon Wedlock and the Death of Children.” In, these writings both authors Puritan culture and their faith plays a big role. In these poems one author starts questioning their God and the other to take honor in their God throughout their grieving process, while both showing different aspects of their everlasting union with their spouse, and the love for their children.
Any interpretation of this story is due to the reader’s personal emotions and feelings toward his or her own Papa. This story can be either a dance between him and his father, thus bringing them closer together. However, there is a darker side of this poem, on this side it is an unsettling fight between a boy and his drunken father and all the intimacy of the dance does not make an impression on the reader and is overshadowed by the anger they feel.
The poems “Sea Rose” by H.D and “Vague Poem” by Elizabeth Bishop were both written by two women who took over the Victorian era. H.D’s works of writing were best known as experimental reflecting the themes of feminism and modernism from 1911-1961. While Bishop’s works possessed themes of longing to belong and grief. Both poems use imagery, which helps to make the poem more concrete for the reader. Using imagery helps to paint a picture with specific images, so we can understand it better and analyze it more. The poems “Sea Rose” and “Vague Poem” both use the metaphor of a rose to represent something that can harm you, even though it has beauty.
Often, the reader cannot help but feel a bit disheartened after reading a collection of Anne Sexton’s poems. Sexton herself was disheartened with the prospect of life, killing herself at the age of 45 after years in and out of mental facilities. Her poems certainly take cynicism to an extreme, but they remain the type of extreme valuable to the literary canon. Her poetry leaves the reader questioning the world around him, now able to see stories and past experiences in a new light. And although in the case of Sexton this light may be a shadow, the new depth it adds highlights to us that which we hold truly pure.
The poem begins with a childlike tone, misleading the reader on the upcoming subject matter. The first line echoes a nursery rhyme, feeling like a charm against some brooding curse. “You do not do, you do not do/ anymore black shoe” (lines 1-2). Metaphorically, the shoe is a trap, smothering the foot. The adjective “black” suggests the idea of death, thus it can relate to a coffin. The speaker feels a submissiveness and entrapment by her father. In an attempt to rid herself of the restriction in her own life, she must destroy the memory of her father. “Daddy, I have to kill you” (line 3). However, the description of the father as “marble-heavy” and “ghastly statue” reveals the ambivalence of her attitude, for he is also associated with the beauty of the sea. The speaker reacts with hate to her father who had made her suffer by dying at such a point in her development.
Using form, Wislawa Syzmborska conveys the message through a serious of parallelism, stanzas, and lines in her unconventional poem. Examples of parallelism are found in the 2nd and 3rd stanza where the poet is emphasizing “because” and “luckily” to show the reader that because of these situations the victim survived and that the victim was extremely lucky to have all these materials provided to hide and protect the victim which adds to the message. The poem begins with a breathless response to some disaster, as if the speaker is processing as we listen. Therefore, the mood is rushed and fast paced. The parallelism keeps the poem moving and at a quicker pace while sustaining the mood. The poem itself is in an unconventional form. With the different lined stanzas and different line lengths, she uses them to represent different situations and with the different situations and circumstances, it comes out to be successful, into a meaningful poem, which correlates to the whole message. With the different turns the victim took by chance, that person survived. Form is used, in this poem, to gather together ideas and unify the poem.
Elizabeth Bishop's use of imagery and diction in "The Fish" is meant to support the themes of observation and the deceptive nature of surface appearance. Throughout the course of the poem these themes lead the narrator to the important realization that aging (as represented by the fish) is not a negative process, and allows for a reverie for all life. Imagery and diction are the cornerstone methods implemented by Bishop in the symbolic nature of this poem.
Katherine Philips gained a lot of attention as a poet after writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”. This poem was written in a way to give readers an emotional account of a mother mourning the experience of losing her child. Philips expressed deep emotions from a maternal standpoint in the elegy. Unlike Jonson, Philips had the unspoken right of claiming a deep maternal connection with her son through pregnancy and childbirth. Philips’ approach to writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child” illustrates that the pain of losing her son, Hector, was enough for her to never write another verse again.
This poem is a firsthand account of how Anne Bradstreet was feeling when she experienced the loss of her granddaughter, Elizabeth. Although Bradstreet's attitude on Elizabeth's death seems to reflect her belief in God's plan, the diction suggests otherwise.
In the poem “Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall, a mother attempted to protect her daughter by sending her to church. However, in the end, the child has her entire life stolen from her. The dramatic situation in the poem is portrayed and developed through Randall’s use of descriptive imagery, dialogue, irony, and a tonal shift.
While other writers use their poetry to decipher the meaning of life, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea was busy writing about how to live it. Five of her poems, “Jupiter and the Farmer,” “The Tree,” “The Shepherd Piping to the Fishes,” “Love, Death, and Reputation,” and “There’s No To-Morrow,” convey strong messages to the reader about how to live their lives. In her poetry, Anne Finch uses anecdotes to help illustrate the validity of her statements, thereby providing the reader with a strong, meaningful, and important message about how life should be lived.
At a glance, the poem seems simplistic – a detailed observance of nature followed by an invitation to wash a “dear friend’s” hair. Yet this short poem highlights Bishop’s best poetic qualities, including her deliberate choice in diction, and her emotional restraint. Bishop progresses along with the reader to unfold the feelings of both sadness and joy involved in loving a person that will eventually age and pass away. The poem focuses on the intersection of love and death, an intersection that goes beyond gender and sexuality to make a far-reaching statement about the nature of being
Now the reader will be ready to tackle the poem again in order to notice and drink in its subtle nuances. Bishop's artistry will lie plain, particularly her capacity to impart life to a rather unnerving redundancy of objects and to project a lofty poetic vision from a humble, prosaic incident.
I found that throughout this poem there was much symbolism within it. Identifying that it was written in first person form showed that this poem relates to the author on a personal basis, and that it was probably written to symbolize his life. But when talking about people’s lives, you can conclude that people’s lives are generally and individually very diffe...
It is clear that Bishop’s “The Unbeliever” is heavily influenced by her poetic idol Moore because it contains elements are inconsistent with Bishop’s work as a whole. History shows that Elizabeth Bishop was not a strict modernist poet, yet in this sample of her early work you can see her imploring strategies more consistent with Moore’s own unique style. The habit of following a strict structure and the habit of carefully sculpting her poems are two of Moore’s distinctive mannerisms. While the shape of “The Unbeliever” does serve a specific purpose, it is interesting to note that this is an uncommon tactic for Bishop. Not only does Moore heavily influence Bishop’s work “The Unbeliever”, but it is clear that the poem is also specifically impacted by Moore’s poem “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing”. Beyond following a strict rigid structure and rhyme scheme, Elizabeth Bishop goes one step further and borrows an image from Moore’s poem. While it could be mere coincidence that both poems use the image of a bird, the way that Bishop writes the gull to “blindly [seat] himself astride” (Bishop, 24), represents a direct allusion to the way Moore’s kiwi walks along the ground as if it was “blind” (Moore, 124).