elizabeth bishop's poetry
...itional masculine figure, the poet of "Questions of Travel" cannot remain comfortably aloof from the madding crowd, the woman who dares to travel alone is in a far different position than the male adventurer. The female flaneuse, or pedestrian, may be mistaken for a common streetwalker/ Even though Bishop’s sexual preference alienated her from the mariage market, she nevertheless knew as a woman what it felt like to be on exhibition. For this reason, she might be expected to question the ethics of tourism with a greater urgency than her male counterparts. The familiar poem "The Fish" can be reread as a configuration of simple parallels and more complex subordinations, culminating in the paratactic connection reminiscent of biblical syntax: "And I let the fish go." The careful avoidance of subordination, as in "so I let the fish go," reveals the speaker’s reluctance, even refusal, to impose a more obvious moral closure on her narrative. Instead, Bishop reserves subordination for the shift from the speaker’s simple narration of her fish story to an imaginative identification with the fish she catches. Through the first 21 lines the only conjunction is ‘and" and several statements are linked without conjunctions at all. Then, as the first-person speaker shifts from "I caught" to "I thought," comes hypotaxis: While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen -- the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly – I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers. In this poem, with its paratactic skeleton of "I caught," "I thought," "I looked," "I admired," "I stared and stared," "And I let the fish go," hypotaxis signals the journey to the interior, as the mere recounting of events yields to personal reflection on, and appreciation of, those events. As in "the Map," in which hypotaxis accompanies the printer’s excitement "as when emotion too far exceeds its cause," parataxis in "the Fish" governs emotion, whereas hypotaxis releases it, even in the vision of a "pool of bilge / where oil had spread rainbow". A single line of perfectly regular iambic pentameter divides Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" neatly in half, separating a detailed and restrained description of an old fisherman, the Nova Scotia shoreline, and the tools of the fishing trade from an equally detailed but more passionate description of the ocean itself. In the opening lines, the speaker's voice is calm, her tone impersonal. An acute observer, she carefully maintains her distance from the static scene she describes. Throughout this section, Bishop uses long, free verse lines of three to six strong streses. The restraint of these first 40 lines culminates in a line of pure iambic pentameter that describes the old fisherman's knife, "the blade of which is almost worn away." In the second half of the poem, the voice changes markedly. The formal pronoun "one" gives way first to "I" and then to the conversational "you." The speaker puts herself directly into the scene, imagining the sea's cold in her bones. The ocean, which was heavy and almost still in the opening, becomes a "transmutation of fire / that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame." No longer contained, it is, like the knowledge Bishop compares it to, "flowing, and flown". Bishop's use of a perfectly regular iambic pentameter line to present the old fisherman's knife, an essential tool of the fishing trade, merges one of the poet's tools - meter - with the fisherman's. The line's placement at the center of the poem calls attention to the poem's underling argument, that the poet, like the fisherman, exercises a difficult craft. Images of work dominate the first half of the poem. The old man sits by the shore weaving a fish net, his shuttle worn smooth by use. He is surrounded by the trapings of the fishing trade, which the speaker describes in detail, moving from the old man's shuttle to the fishhouses and their "steeply peaked roofs," the "narrow, cleated gangplanks," the lobster pots and masts, the fish tubs which are "completely lined / with layers of beautiful herring scales," and the wheelbarrows, "similarly plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail." The scene is static, as though painted. The ocean swells but does not break; only the flies move, minute bits of iridescence crawling over the tube. The carefully detailed description of the scene and its radiance suggests, even this early in the poem, that Bishop wanted readers to see that work makes things beautiful. Twenty-five lines later the speaker turns back to the old man, a friend of her grandfather's. For the first time in the poem she uses a first person pronoun: "we talk of the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring / while he waits for a herring boat to come in." Through the pronoun "we," the speaker inserts herself into the scene, becoming a participant instead of an observer. "We" also identifies her with the old man, not only through family connections, but through their common interest and shared conversation. As soon as the old man's knife enters the poem, the poem moves into its first line of pure iambic pentameter. The work of the fisherman scaling his fish becomes an analogy for the work of the poet who shapes a perfectly regular line. This lin...