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Elizabeth Bishop


             When reading Elizabeth Bishop one can get a better grasp of her technique by analyzing then comparing and contrasting each of her poems. I chose to expand on the poems "Little Exercise" on page 41, "Questions of Travel" on page 93, and "Song for the Rainy Season" on page 101. The poems all generally involve travel but the main thread between them all is the involvement of water, which is a subject that Bishop discusses in a number of her poems. She discusses the many forms of water throughout the book such as rain, snow, clouds, and rivers and uses them to describe her inner feelings. The self-reflection of surfaces with water can represent the same within a human being. These a only a few of the reasons Bishop uses water as a subject so frequently and if we dive in to each poem specifically we may see more reasons.
             The first poem to analyze is "Little Exercise" on page 101. In the poem Bishop describes a storm and various seaside scenes below it. The storm is compared by a simile to a dog looking for a place to sleep in. Bishop then describes the trees below the storm and how they are unresponsive to the lightning. Then under the trees she describes a heron responding to the falling rain that is shining and surrounding the bird. She then moves to a boulevard with palm trees lining the sides of the roads and describes the relief the scene gets from being wet. Then the storm leaves in a series of "badly lit battle-scenes" which describes the lightning and its departure, as it seems to move to another part of the field below with each strike. Then in the last stanza she places the only human in the poem in a boat tied to a tree on the shore. This human represents the reader which is absorbing the storm through all senses, kind of like the reader is absorbing the storm with each line. She explains the rain as refreshing and by doing so the reader can easily see the rain as cleansing, which is a common theme for rain.


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