role of nature

I’d like to spend a little time looking at the role of nature in Bishop’s poems.

In many ways the Brazilian environment is just as much a character in the poems as the speakers are. Almost all of the poems contain numerous descriptions of Nature, references to river spirits, and/or personification of nature itself. The environment plays an antagonistic role in the poem “Electrical Storm.”

Dawn an unsympathetic yellow.

Cra-aack!—dry and light.

The house was really struck.

Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler.

Tobias jumped in the window, got in bed—

silent, his eyes bleached white, his fur on end.

Personal and spiteful as a neighbor’s child,

thunder began to bang and bump the roof.

One pink flash;

then hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls.

Dead-white, wax-white, cold—

diplomats’ wives’ favors

from and old moon party—

they lay in melting windrows on the red ground until well after sunrise.

We got up to find the wiring fused,

No lights, a smell of saltpeter,

and the telephone dead.

The cat stayed in the warm sheets.

The Lent trees had shed all their petals:

wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls.

Because Nature plays an extremely prominent role in these poems, it is often personified to reinforce it as a character. This is a good example of personification found throughout the volume:

2^nd stanza of “Song for the Rainy Season”

In a dim age

of water

the brook sings loud

from a rib cage

of giant fern; the vapor

climbs up the thick growth

effortlessly, turns back,

holding them both,

house and rock,

in a private cloud.

At night on the roof,

blind drops crawl…(poem continues on)

Again, nature is a character in many of the poems and to reinforce this Bishop uses personification abundantly. In the poem “the Riverman,” the story revolves around the local river dolphin, which has supernatural powers. The speaker in the poem wishes to become a witch doctor that works with water, known as a sacaca. It is a seven page poem that incorporates the river dolphin, Luandinha the river spirit, serpents, and the pirarucú, an Amazonian fish weighing up to four-hundred pounds.