The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop:
A Personal Response
In my answer I will be talking about my ideas on the themes, styles, and images in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop was born on the 8th of February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother, in shock, was sent to a mental hospital for five years. They were separated in 1916 until her mother finally died in 1934. She was raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia.
There are four main themes in the poetry of Bishop. These include nature, childhood, domesticity/motherhood, and the resilience of the human spirit. The two poems I will be discussing about in my answer related to the following themes are ‘Sestina’ and ‘The Filling Station’. The two themes I will be discussing about are domesticity and childhood.
The first poem I will be discussing on is ‘Sestina’. The theme in ‘Sestina’, which I will be discussing, is childhood and domesticity. In ‘Sestina’ Bishop is looking back at her childhood in a child’s perspective. The use of the third person voice in 'Sestina' blends the poet's adult perspective with the child's. A sestina is a seven stanza poem with 6 lines in every stanza except for the last one, where there are only three. If we look at the last word in every line of the first stanza we realize that house, almanac, stove, grandmother, child, and almanac are used over and over again as the last word of every line, except the last stanza where there are two words in every line. The reason why Elizabeth Bishop titled her poem after the form it was written in was because she wanted the reader to understand the way a child sees. A child rearranges things until it makes sense, the way the words are rearranged over and over again.
In stanza five of the child is drawing a picture. The picture is an outlet of the child’s emotion. I think this is a great way of doing so, after all a picture tells a thousand words. The picture the child draws
A Personal Response
In my answer I will be talking about my ideas on the themes, styles, and images in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop was born on the 8th of February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother, in shock, was sent to a mental hospital for five years. They were separated in 1916 until her mother finally died in 1934. She was raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia.
There are four main themes in the poetry of Bishop. These include nature, childhood, domesticity/motherhood, and the resilience of the human spirit. The two poems I will be discussing about in my answer related to the following themes are ‘Sestina’ and ‘The Filling Station’. The two themes I will be discussing about are domesticity and childhood.
The first poem I will be discussing on is ‘Sestina’. The theme in ‘Sestina’, which I will be discussing, is childhood and domesticity. In ‘Sestina’ Bishop is looking back at her childhood in a child’s perspective. The use of the third person voice in 'Sestina' blends the poet's adult perspective with the child's. A sestina is a seven stanza poem with 6 lines in every stanza except for the last one, where there are only three. If we look at the last word in every line of the first stanza we realize that house, almanac, stove, grandmother, child, and almanac are used over and over again as the last word of every line, except the last stanza where there are two words in every line. The reason why Elizabeth Bishop titled her poem after the form it was written in was because she wanted the reader to understand the way a child sees. A child rearranges things until it makes sense, the way the words are rearranged over and over again.
In stanza five of the child is drawing a picture. The picture is an outlet of the child’s emotion. I think this is a great way of doing so, after all a picture tells a thousand words. The picture the child draws