At The Fishhouses comments and analysis on - A poem by Elizabeth Bishop

Comment 2 of 2, added on June 19th, 2006 at 12:05 PM.

This poem is so beautiful. I think Bishop tries to contrast the two realms of life on earth and in a great way she intertwines them in her poetry. Mankind and Mother Nature, how strange it is we must live together but have such contrasting rules and conventions! Well I think it's almost impossible to find one clear meaning to any of Bishop's poetry -or maybe I'm just not amateur- but her work is beautiful and takes the mind to wonderful places.

Rachel from United States

Comment 1 of 2, added on December 5th, 2004 at 1:23 PM.

Roger Gilbert writes, “Bishop famously says of the icy water off Nova Scotia that "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from the rocky breasts / forever, flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown" (66). "Historical" in this final line assumes a double meaning: Our knowledge is necessarily historical inasmuch as it occurs in time and is therefore subject to the transience of all temporal things, "flowing and flown"; but it is also knowledge of history, of the lives and events that precede our own and give it meaning. Thus the history of this particular Nova Scotia fishing village proves to be closely bound up with Bishop's own painful childhood and its formation of her present self. The old man the speaker meets near the water "was a friend of my grandfather," she tells us, and like the "ancient wooden capstan" with its "melancholy stains, like dried blood," his presence speaks of a past beyond recovery. "We talk of the decline in the population," she reports dryly, her euphemistic language failing to obscure that the real subject of their conversation is death—her grandfather's included, as the "was" in the preceding line poignantly attests.” The lines from 78 to the end are important to pay attention to here as is the whole idea of immersion and the things it symbolizes.

Ed from United States