Summary
Like the previous stanza, this one begins with an “I” statement. The speaker tells us that they’ve lost something even bigger than houses, even more emotionally complex than a mother’s watch, and even more indefinable than memories: two cities. Not just any two cities, but “lovely ones.” They warn us, with the phrase “and vaster,” that the losses are about to get even bigger. They’re detailed in the stanza’s second line: a few realms, two rivers, and finally, a continent. The last line is a repetition of the second refrain, this time modified to include the phrase “I miss them,” followed by the now-familiar reassurance that, in spite of missing them, their loss isn't a disaster.
Analysis
Here, the lost items enter the realm of the hyperbolic. They’re so huge, and so loaded, that they’re no longer possible to misplace or lose ownership of. Instead, the loss here clearly refers to emotional loss or nostalgia. But, even though we understand that the loss here is an emotional rather than a physical one, the sheer enormity of the objects being described is overwhelming. It’s easy to imagine a watch, a house, even a city—but a continent is so big and detached from everyday experience that most people can’t form a mental image of it. As a result of this hyperbolic, outsized imagery, this stanza actually feels almost comical. The speaker is pushing their central argument—that loss is an everyday, easy-to-handle experience—to its furthest conclusion.
The sensation of great speed and physical movement accents this comical, almost cartoonish quality. The first sentence of the stanza is slow and even, with a comma splitting it right down the middle, slowing it down further. After this sentence, things begin to speed up. The first line ends with the phrase “And, vaster.” The word “vaster” very quickly expands the scope of the poem, as if the speaker is using a camera to zoom out. This has a dizzying effect. Moreover, the word carries echoes of the more-common homonym, “faster,” so that without directly referring to speed, Bishop references it. Finally, the phrase “And, vaster,” is a kind of cliffhanger: the line ends without us finding out exactly what “vaster” refers to. This makes us hurry on to the next line to find out. The second line of the stanza lists three lost items in quick succession, squeezing them in more densely than anywhere else in the poem.
This sudden speeding-up, zooming-out, and squeezing-in, like the poem as a whole, simultaneously gives the impression of great loss and a kind of (possibly forced) nonchalance. On the one hand, the speaker’s wording indicates that they aren’t terribly preoccupied with these losses. The phrase “some realms I owned” implies that they aren’t even bothered enough to make a careful count of the losses they’ve suffered, and the phrase “lovely ones” is an impersonal, almost perfunctory-sounding assessment of the two lost cities. At the same time, the sheer speed with which these losses pile up makes the speaker sound overcome, even panicky. The final line of this stanza perfectly captures its push and pull between nonchalance and grief. It begins with the words “I miss them,” a direct expression of emotion about the losses listed in the stanza. But a comma splits the line right in half. The second half reads “but it wasn’t a disaster,” repeating the same insistence we’ve seen so many times by now. It’s as if that comma dividing the sentence is an echo of a split down the middle of the speaker’s mind: half their mind wants to grieve their losses, while the other half wants to dismiss them.
