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Stylistic Analysis Of A Bishop's Poetry

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The first thing that struck me about Bishops poetry was her microscopic eye for detail and her gifted ability to zoom into images and details that I wouldn't have even been able to imagine. Her poetry is a reflection of her life a, depressing but interesting one that saw a troubled childhood, Alcoholism and the death of her lover. Her celebrations of the ordinary are an unusual, yet original quality, and her poetry has a unique style, with a fine combination of vivid imagery and concrete intense language.

The poems that I have had an honour to study are "The Fish", "Filling Station", The Prodigal", "First Death In Nova Scotia" and "Armadillo".

In the poem "The Fish" Bishop's microscopic eye for detail, complemented with precise use of language magnifies as the poem progresses and painted a vivid image for me. At first she begins to describes the huge and rugged fish from a distance, stating "His brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper".
Bishop then adjusts the lens of her microscopic eye and surveys the landscape of the fish with a painterly approach, saying "he was speckled with tiny fish, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny sea lice". The image that stood out most vividly to …show more content…

This poem is quiet a contrast to Bishop's other poems that have a moment of clarity and a positive tone, I personally found this more dark and fairy-tale like but equally as well written. The most impressive aspect of this poem is the child's narrative of a sinister event which further implemented the contrast. This is evident when Bishop's five year old self describes her cousins corpse of having " a few red strokes and then Jack Frost had dropped the brush and left him white forever". The image that resonated with me the most was the illustration of Arthur's coffin, stating "Arthur's coffin was a little frosted cup." This metaphor was spooky and encapsulated the child's mind trying to make sense of

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The imagery had much light and childishness to it. With images such as “it seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from her house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these”. As well as having lines such as “she felt light and good in the warm sun”, and “She struck out at random at chickens she liked” to create the feeling of child hood innocence, using all of this light to mean goodness and being unaffected by the harshness of reality. However she also uses the imagery later to show the loss of innocence when she describes everything as darker, when she starts using lines such as “it seemed gloomy in the little clove she found herself in” and “all his cloths had rotted away”. Alice walker is using this imagery to convey that the innocence has been lost at this point, taken by the harshness of reality and death.

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