Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet who won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring. She also won the National Book Award in 1970 and taught at Harvard University. She was awarded an Academy Fellowship in 1964 for her lifetime achievement. She greatly resisted the confessional forms of poetry that were becoming popular in the 1960s, preferring a more distant and abstracted poetic voice.
‘The Fish’ by Elizabeth Bishop is considered to be one of her best poems. In it, readers can find some clues about her personal life.
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
‘Filling Station’ by Elizabeth Bishop describes a speaker’s initial reaction, and later feelings, about the value of a dirty filling station.
Oh, but it is dirty!
–this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
Bishop’s poem, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, is the detailed description of a child’s first encounter with death and the emotions this discovery causes.
Below them on the table
stood a stuffed loon
shot and stuffed by Uncle
Arthur, Arthur's father.
‘I Am In Need of Music’ by Elizabeth Bishop describes the desire a speaker has to be held, calmed down and consumed by the music she loves.
I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog
the house we live in,
beneath the magnetic rock,
This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,
At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
‘The Map,’ written in 1934, is the signature poem of Elizabeth Bishop that transcends the boundaries of the real and imaginatively inspects the topographical features within a map.
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
‘The Mountain’ by Elizabeth Bishop is a poem portraying the transience of nature and life from the viewpoint of a personified mountain.
At evening, something behind me.
I start for a second, I blench,
or staggeringly halt and burn.
I do not know my age.
The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
‘Visits to St. Elizabeths’ by Elizabeth Bishop depicts the late Ezra Pound in a mental institution. The poet was inspired by the structure of children’s nursery rhymes in her composition of the text.
This is the time
of the tragic man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
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