The Map - Elizabeth Bishop

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
-the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves' own conformation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
-What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors


commentary

 the journey with images of sea and earth, sand and sky, each colored or shadowed blues and greens. Despite the clear mapping, there are questions as to whether these charted lands are lifting, leaning, pulling, or pushing at each other to keep them in these positions that we have so “perfectly” recorded. The journeyer notes an ABBADDC rhyme scheme present and moves on. Now in the body paragraph, said reader is bombarded with images of lands “l[aying] still,” and bodies of water “expected to blossom, as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.” One cannot help, however, but to notice the derivation from reality here. These lands are not truly meant to be so still and oiled onto a piece of paper; they are packed with the buzz of life, constantly in motion and flux. These seas are bubbling with marine life and unseen mystery which could never be portrayed in an ink replication. Next the reader experiences the obvious lack of accuracy in this guide. Words and names flow between geographic features, labels for cities overlap onto mountains and towns out to sea.The reader begins to see that along with these rhyme schemes limiting the word choice of the poet, these sections of the poem describe restrictions, boundaries, and borders present in the creation of the map. The printer was victim to his own emotion and bias in the coloring and certain aspects of the creation of the map which steered the replica even further from reality. Just as words are arbitrary signals that we assign meaning to, map keys and colors are choice symbols that really have no relation to the thing they are supposed to represent. Just like a word has no meaning without context, it takes context to understand locations and positioning on a map. Similarly, as language can be better understood through the exploration of binary opposites, land and sky, water and earth, mountains and valleys, and North and South all need to exist to understand the meaning of the other. If all land was elevated there would be no meaning or purpose to elevation maps, these guides all rely on this opposition or else there would be nothing to chart, everything would be analogous.

As the reader completes his venture through “The Map,” he sees that the printer is the poet, fruitlessly attempting to create a real-to-life experience that will never be more than a medium on which a reader can project his own internalizations. The map is a frivolous attempt at recreating life and earth that is too changing and inconsistent to ever be committed to paper in any real sense

In The Waiting Room - Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic 
(I could read) and carefully 
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson 
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was 
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't.  What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth 
of February, 1918.

commentary 

The speaker starts simple, setting the scene and telling us where she is. She's at the dentist's office with her aunt, in Worcester, Massachusetts, a small city west of Boston.
The poem starts with a wide lens. The speaker talks about where she is in the country. Then she zooms in to her location in the dentist's waiting room. She seems a bit on the young side because of the way she talks about "Aunt Consuelo." The speaker talks about the "grown-up people" who are with her in the waiting room, so it's clear now that she's young. Grown-ups don't usually call other adults "grown-ups." Everyone is dressed in their heavy New England winter gear, and the office is filled with regular dentist's office stuff – lamps, magazines. We find out that the speaker is a little bored and a little restless. Our speaker seems pretty proud of the fact that she can read: she announces this in her parenthetical remark. This makes us think that she's actually very young.
Our speaker catalogs the photographs that she "studies" in the National Geographic.
The first photograph is of a volcano that's filled with ashes. Her description of the volcano "spilling over," which is in the present tense, makes it sound like it's happening in her real life, and not just in the magazine. It's like the photo has come alive. 
The next photograph is of Osa and Martin Johnson, a famous husband and wife explorer team who traveled all over the world in the early 20th century. They were known for documenting the people and wildlife of the Eastern hemisphere, and sharing what they learned with the Western world through magazines, photographs, and documentary films.
The third photograph is even creepier than the first. There's a dead man on a pole, and the caption refers to him as a "pig." Our speaker keeps cataloguing what she sees, and she's overwhelmed by the photos of people who seem strange to her: the babies with pointed heads, the naked women with wires around their necks. The women of certain African and Asian cultures wear neck coils in order to elongate their necks; that's probably who the women in the pictures are.
The speaker repeats the rhyming phrase "wound round and round," as if to express her shock at what she sees.
In an attempt to understand these women, our speaker uses a simile, and compares the wire rings to something that she finds familiar: the light bulb.
But she's still overwhelmed. She is horrified by the photos of the naked women. 
Even though she's afraid, the speaker can't put the magazine down. For her, it's like looking at a train wreck: it's horrible, but she can't stop looking.
Finally, she stops looking at the photographs, and checks out the cover of the magazine. She notices the date and the magazine's yellow margins. It seems like she's trying to convince herself that everything she's seen exists only in the magazine, and that it's not real. It's like she's trying to contain her confused feelings within the magazine's covers.Suddenly, she hears a cry of pain from her aunt in the dentist's office, and says that she realizes that "it was me" – that the cry was coming from her aunt, but also from herself. She imagines that she and her aunt are the same person, and that they are falling.In an attempt to calm down, Elizabeth says to herself that she is just about to turn seven years old. She compares herself to the adults in the waiting room, and wonders if she is one of "them." She seems to realize that she is, and looking around, says that "nothing / stranger could ever happen." Elizabeth then questions her basic humanity, and asks about the similarities between herself and others. What are the similarities between herself and her aunt? Between herself and the naked women in the magazine? How did she get where she is? What kind of connections does she have with the rest of the world? Elizabeth is overwhelmed. The waiting room is bright and hot, and she feels like she's sliding beneath a black wave.Finally, she snaps out of it. She remembers that World War I is still going on, that she's still in Massachusetts, and that it's still a cold and slushy night in February, 1918.

Insomnia- Elizabeth Bishop

The moon in the bureau mirror

looks out a million miles

(and perhaps with pride, at herself,

but she never, never smiles)

far and away beyond sleep, or

perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,

she'd tell it to go to hell,

and she'd find a body of water,

or a mirror, on which to dwell.

So wrap up care in a cobweb

and drop it down the well

into that world inverted

where left is always right,

where the shadows are really the body,

where we stay awake all night,

where the heavens are shallow as the sea

is now deep, and you love me. 

commentary 

The reader is taken to another world, much like a dream it elicits a feeling that one does not have to understand on an intellectual level to be affected by. In this world time is also suspended, mimicking the feeling of being in limbo that often occurs with a bout of insomnia. The second stanza closes with, “and drop it down the well” (line 12). Here we are taken down a rabbit hole of sorts, and in this strange place everything is “inverted.” I found it interest to learn that at the time Bishop wrote the poem it was quite common for people to refer to lesbians as “inverts.”” The first stanza speaks of the inability to sleep, hence the title. It seems as though something is keeping her awake, and the second stanza speaks of seeking refuge, which makes me think that perhaps it is something sinister preventing sleep. The refuges mentioned in lines 9 and 10 are a body of water and a mirror. In line 15 Bishop writes, “where the shadows are really the body,” which has an interesting connection to the moon. The moon reflects the shadow of the sun’s light, so one could interpret the moon as an inversion itself. The poem up until this point talks about the moon looking at herself (in the bureau mirror in line 1 and dwelling on the mirror or water in lines 9-10). If you follow this line of thinking then the moon is a reflection of the sun, and reflections are always a distorted image of what is “real.

The Fish - Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end

commentary

The speaker catches a huge fish while fishing in a little rented boat. She studies her catch for a while as, holding it up half out of water beside the boat. The fish is pretty old and gnarly-looking, with barnacles and algae growing on it, and it also has five fishing hooks with the lines still partially attached hanging from its jaw.The speaker considered how tough this fish must be and how much he probably had to fight. She begins to respect the fish. The poem takes its final turn when the oil spillage in the boat makes a rainbow and the speaker, overcome with emotion by the fish and the scene, lets the fish go.Three sentences really stick out in the way that they are different from the rest of the poem. The sentences in lines 5 and 6 ("He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all.") recognize the change in the fish's behavior. The rusted hooks in his lip showed how he had fought before, but this time, he had given up and not even put up a fight. Another sentence, near the end, is so concise, yet has so much meaning. In the last line of the poem, the narrator says, "And I let the fish go." Here, the narrator is showing compassion and demonstrating respect for the fish and his efforts. Throughout the poem, the narrator describes the fish's appearance. Phrases like "battered and venerable," "his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper," "his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw," and "grim, wet, and weapon-like" The theme would be that we can learn lessons in life through small things .