(855) 4-ESSAYS

Type a new keyword(s) and press Enter to search

Elizabeth Bishop


The poem uses great imagery in "the little palm trees all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed as fistfuls of limp fish skeletons", when the reader gets to this line one cannot help but to envision the lighting flashing and with each flash the trees violently whip in the wind only illuminated for seconds at a time. The poem's main purpose is to put the reader in the middle of this furious storm but to do so with such great language that the storm in the readers mind is much more shocking than the one on the page. .
             The next poem of interest in the context of the rain theme is "Questions of Travel" on page 93. In this poem Bishop questions the legitimacy of travel and wonders if merely thinking of a place is just as well as physically being there. She opens the poem with a waterfall and describes it as being under "the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion turning to waterfalls under our very eyes." This line describes the rain cycle of the waterfall from the clouds to the streams to the waterfall to the sea. Also the last phrase "waterfalls under our very eyes" can be interpreted as describing tears falling from a sorrowful eye. In this sense the water Bishop describes may serve to heal, mend, or grieve. In the next stanza Bishop poses the idea of traveling for happiness and never finding it when she says "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?" In the next stanza she goes on to say that the journey must be made not for the destination but for the beautiful scenery on the way. When she describes the beauty of the trip she uses mainly the sense of hearing to paint the picture, for example "And never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians" speeches: two hours of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence". Here the rain serves as a teacher in which after the rain is done, the student absorbs and ponders the road traveled by the rain and its necessity.


Essays Related to Elizabeth Bishop


Got a writing question? Ask our professional writer!
Submit My Question