Elizabeth Bishop ends her famous poem “One Art” with the lines, “It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like… disaster.” Although “One Art” lists many literal and symbolic forms of loss, the one that becomes...

In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer argues that contemporary science, while evolving from magical and religious attempts to understand and control the natural world, eclipses these frameworks[1]. To Frazer “magic” in the 20th century “is...

Nature often horrifies and frightens us. Whether it is a snake that has the potential to kill with one bite or a raging flood that can destroy an entire town in a matter of minutes, the natural world often causes us to cower in sight of its...

In “Cape Breton,” Elizabeth Bishop describes a landscape for the rigid cliffs and water that compose it, but also for its representation on a grander scale. The landscape is a representation of the peaceful world and how it is inevitably...

Elizabeth Bishop

Pink Dog

(Rio de Janeiro)

The sun is blazing and the sky is blue.

Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.

Naked, you trot across the avenue.

Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare!

Naked and pink, without a single hair...

Startled,...

In her affectionate verse “The Shampoo”, Elizabeth Bishop addresses her lesbian partner Lota, whose great black tresses have begun to bear the signs of grey aging. Her tone is tender and her language contemplative—she marvels at the marks of age...

Elizabeth Bishop has often been linked to the poetical canon of the ‘confessional poets’ of the 1960’s and 70’s. Confessional poetry focused largely on the poet, exposing his/her insecurities and personal vulnerabilities. Bishop, however, was...

In his essay “Action and Repose—Gerard Manley Hopkins’s influence in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop,” Ben Howard notes the strong influence Hopkins had on poems like “The Prodigal” and “The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop. Another one of Bishop’s poems...

It is no secret that Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop were close friends. Although written decades apart, poems titled “The Fish” were created by both authors. Upon reading Bishop’s poem against Moore’s, we can see that both of the poems deal...

There are many things that children do not understand. Their lack of experience makes them ignorant to what is happening around them, and even oblivious to the presence of death. When someone a child knows dies, it is a really rough transition:...

In our modern American society, oppression is something that still exists and has been detrimental to people, hurting their lives. The process of fishing can symbolize how regular people fair versus the clutches of oppression they cannot...

Elizabeth Bishop ends her famous poem “One Art” with the lines, “It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like… disaster.” Although “One Art” lists many literal and symbolic forms of loss, the one that becomes...

“The Farmer’s Children” by Elizabeth Bishop reveals her outlook on the children’s actions through literary techniques such as characterization. Upon being sent out to guard the barn’s machinery on a winter night, Cato and Emerson did not question...