A model of Bishop’s tendency toward singular or isolated figures, “The Man-Moth” (1946) opens on an incisive description that was her trademark. The image of a man standing in moonlight depicts him as “an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.” With a deft twist, she envisions him like toothpaste in a tube “forced through . . . in black scrolls on the light.” Unlike the man himself, the “man-moth” shadow attempts the unthinkable by climbing buildings and trailing along behind his source “like a photographer’s cloth.” The fourth and fifth stanzas imperil the shadow during a subway ride, where he “always seats himself facing the wrong way” and cowers from the dangers of the third rail. The poet merges the play of light on dark with fantasy in the sixth stanza, in which the shadow, like a mime, acquires humanity by squeezing out a tear, the pure substance of “underground springs.”
Critics have characterized Bishop’s detachment as the result of emotional inertia, the atmosphere of “The Fish” (1955). The vignette inventories physical parts, which she catalogs without dissection. The fish, sapped of fight, becomes an elder statesman who bears the marks of past challenges. The poet-speaker delights in his “medals with their ribbons/frayed and wavering”; then, in line 75, experiences an unforeseen surprise of “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.” Her victory over the fish gives place to admiration. In sympathy with the water world below, she exults, “I let the fish go.”
Similarly immersed in minutiae, “At the Fishhouses” (1955) notes a paradox: the inflexible rule of change. The poem moves through crisp air beyond the net-mender’s niche to seaside structures and equipment that wear has silvered with “creamy iridescent coats of mail.” Similar in color imagery to “The Fish,” the poem equates the shimmer of scales with a store of experience. Through a simple poet’s trick, Bishop compares coastal glamour to the old man’s “Lucky Strike,” a cigarette logo rich in implications of sensory wealth.
Beginning at line 41, Bishop speculates on the net-mender’s milieu. In an atmosphere “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,” the poet-speaker encounters a familiar companion, a seal “curious about me.” The semi-serious bombardment with Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” earns the seal’s disinterest, as though fundamentalist theology “were against his better judgment.” In place of sectarian assurance, the poet-speaker turns to experience—the swift plunge of hand and arm into icy depths. The burning pain of freezing water and the bitter, briny taste of the sea crystallizes an analogy: Knowledge is likewise “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.” Unlike philosophy, the experience with cold salt water is a paradox: a constant flux, “historical, flowing, and flown.”
“Filling Station” (1965), one of Bishop’s more whimsical poems, offers a snoopy inventory of elements in the life of a working-class family. Soiled with the grease inherent to their trade, they exist in “a disturbing, over-all / black translucency,” another example of illustrative paradox. In the third stanza, the poet-speaker moves into the private realm of family life, including the oil-stained family’s dog. The fourth stanza introduces evidence of sensibility in comic books, a doily atop a drum-shaped table, and a hairy begonia.
As though questioning the individual’s right to examine a life, the poet-speaker reaches a peak of interest with three parallel questions: “Why the extraneous plant? / Why the taboret? / Why, oh why, the doily?” The answer lies in the “somebody” who loves the father and sons. Bishop extends domesticity to an image of murmuring, a shelf of oil cans whispering “Esso-so-so-so,” a play on the original logo of the Eastern Standard Oil Company. With a teasing twist, the poet-speaker concludes with the reassurance, “Somebody loves us all.”
Another of Bishop’s poems is less assuring. Dedicated to Robert Lowell, her lifelong friend and fellow poet, “The Armadillo” (1965) is a naturalistic meditation on skepticism. The poem focuses on an unforeseen clash between fire balloons and frail beings on the ground below. Composed in a precise quatrain rhyming abab with abcb, the poem follows a pattern of iambic trimeter in lines 1, 2, and 4 with line 3 expanding to five beats. The masculine rhymes vary from exact patterns (year/appear, night/height) to approximate rhyme (alone/down) and conclude with aaxa in the union of mimicry/cry/fist/sky.
Early on, the poet introduces hints of instability with “frail, illegal fire balloons” and the flicker of light like a beating—or possibly inconstant—heart. She compacts the action as the wind carries shapes that “flare and falter, wobble and toss” toward the constellation known as the Southern Cross, a literal crux of the action. Repeated present participles (receding, dwindling, forsaking, turning) exaggerate the mobility of the image to a height in line 20, which concludes with a warning of danger.
In the final five stanzas, Bishop describes in detail the fall of a large balloon, which “splattered like an egg of fire,” an introduction to the destructive power that looms above living creatures. The first, a pair of owls, shriek as they flee the combustion in their ancient nest. The lone armadillo departs like an exile, “head down, tail down,” leaving the poet-speaker to marvel at an ashy-soft baby rabbit whose gaze carries the fire in “fixed, ignited eyes.” The final italicized stanza reproves a scene that is “too pretty,” turned hellish as “falling fire” injures and terrorizes unseen life-forms below. As the title directs, the poem focuses on the seemingly protected armadillo, an image of unsuspecting weakness. Like the armadillo, the poet implies that human beings make weak provisions for catastrophes that can fall from an unidentified source. Written at the height of the Cold War, when people built bomb shelters to protect them from atomic attack, the poem expresses a realistic doubt that any man-made shell can erase a pervasive unease.
One of Bishop’s autobiographical commentaries, “In the Waiting Room” (1976), returns to the end of her sixth year with a serendipitous coming-to-knowledge. Set precisely on February 5, 1918, while her Aunt Consuelo keeps a dental appointment in Worcester, Massachusetts, the young speaker must entertain herself with a copy of National Geographic. A precocious reader, she examines articles in a revealing order—the inside of a volcano, the explorations of Osa and Martin Johnson, and photos of bare-breasted native women. In line 36, the poem’s high point, an unsolicited burst of emotion, like a volcanic eruption, surprises the speaker, who at first believes the sound bursts from her “foolish, timid” aunt, who quails at dental treatment. Discovering that the cry came from her own mouth, the child experiences an emotional plunge.
At the climax of observation, Bishop notes that the child identifies with “them,” the other people in the waiting area. Personalized as an “I,” she wonders at the listing of human beings according to physical and cultural traits. The sensation of fainting “beneath a big black wave, / another, and another,” precedes a return to reality through the immediacy of the room, the cold outdoors, and World War I, which evidences the child’s awareness of current history. The simplistic child’s world picture exalts the flexibility of the imagination, which can catapult the mind into exotic locales, then reel it in to a fixed point. Like an aerial artist on a maiden leap, the speaker is surprised that she recovers so quickly from the first mental venture beyond self-imposed boundaries.
