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,
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