CoPo

Kathleen Pacious

Bishop Writing Event

#2 “Song for the Rainy Season” (101)

Word Count: 482

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem Song for the Rainy Season makes use of many sound devices including alliteration and assonance to create detailed and specific images throughout the poem.

In the first stanza, Bishop bombards us with alliteration:

1 Hidden, oh hidden

2 in the high fog

3 the house we live in,

4 beneath the magnetic rock,

5 rain-, rainbow-ridden,

6 where blood-black

7 bromelias, lichens,

8 owls, and the lint

9 of the waterfalls cling,

10 familiar, unbidden.

Lines 1-3 repeat the “h” sound, 4-5 repeat the “r”, 6-7 repeat “b”. The alliteration of h in the words hidden, high, and house creates a dreamlike, almost nonphysical place. We are lost to our senses and can almost envision a misty state that doesn’t seem real. However, the succeeding alliteration of r: rain, rainbow, and b: blood-black, bromelias, brings us back to reality. They are harder sounds and help to turn our misty image into one that is locked in the physical. This first stanza also makes use of assonance, carrying the “i” sound throughout: hidden, live, in, ridden, lint, cling, unbidden. The assonance that Bishop uses here creates a sense of continuity and familiarity. Stanza 2 continues the assonance with the words “dim, sings, rib, thick”. However, stanza 3 changes the assonance to a different sound. She writes:

At night, on the roof,

blind drops crawl

and the ordinary brown

owl gives us proof

he can count:

The “ow” sound is found in crawl, brown, owl, and count. Slowly, as the poem progresses, the subject matter and the poem itself are becoming more alive. The sounds that she uses are progressing as well to aid in the enlivening of the poem. This third stanza also employs alliteration with the lines:

Five times—always five—

he stamps and takes off

after the fat frogs that,

The alliteration of the letter f helps to focus the image of this half stanza. The owl is insignificant to the poem as a whole, but the alliteration gives him greater importance as an image.

Stanza six finishes the poem with alliteration of the letter s:

and the several

waterfalls shrivel

in the steady sun.

Here, the sound reflects water moving which also ties it back into the title of the poem: “Song for the Rainy Season”. In case we forgot what the poem is about, the last stanza ties it up neatly. Even though the words are about the lack of water, the sound evokes images of water.

The rhyme of the poem is not consistent from stanza to stanza. Because each stanza has a very different rhyme scheme, the stanzas themselves appear as solid images, isolated from each other. Therefore we can jump from the image of rocks to a brook to an owl to the house itself, etc. Being able to hyperfocus on one image draws us in to the poem’s image as a whole.

Original post by kpacious

Found poetry, because couples once placed padlocks on various parts of a bridge in France.  These locks housed the initials or names of the two lovers.  But, the bridge became so laden with these locks that eventually it became illegal for couples to do so.  Some still cheat the system by sneaking locks in the corners of the wall near the peak of the bridge.

Original post by chelseanewnam

In the sky floats the sun of the harvest

Its last light trickling through the wind’s squeeze

Reaching apples through the trees in slivers

Emblazoning them a radiant golden

A fine suit coat for the juice

To be swallowed sometime later in the Fall

.

That is, unless they fall

Right before the harvest

Coddling every drop of juice

Inside their skin’s squeeze.

The value of every drop is golden

As it rejects the outer slivers

.

The apple tries to hide in shadow’s slivers

Nursing wounds taken on from the fall

Resting in the leaves painted golden

-or burgundy- by time. Then the harvest

Takes the grove with its squeeze

The stream drying up only to run with juice

.

The only thing the boy wants more than juice

Is something to remove the wooden slivers

That the tree repaid his hands for their squeeze

As they kept him from a fall,

Fears of the ground harvested

In his brain, behind eyes so wide and golden

.

Yet he spotted the nugget, golden

Blushing in dry leaves from its juice

-Or maybe embarrassed from dodging the harvest

Its skin just like the boy’s, with slivers.

The tears in his eyes ceased to fall

With gentle eyelid’s squeeze

.

His hands take the fruit and squeeze

Its skin, the leaves, his eyes all golden

The sun now a deep red in its fall

Pouring over the hills like cherry juice

And tugging the black of night- with all its shining slivers-

Like a tattered quilt to keep the boy from wind’s harvest

.

His fingers went to harvest, nails scratching slivers

Their squeeze intent upon getting the juice

Until a snap- his golden teeth finished their fall

Original post by willcopps

These are the signs that let our customers know what books live on the top floor.

(more…)

Original post by rmillard

In class, we discussed this poem in the context that the narrator was beginning to see the world as a much bigger place. However, after class, I wondered if the world may have become smaller, too. On page 160, the narrator hears Aunt Consuelo’s cry, and is suprised that it is actually her own yell. I wonder if we can read this another way: the narrator hears her Aunt’s yell, and realizes that it sounds like her own. This would explain why, on page 161, the narrator refers to the “family voice I felt in my throat.”

In this reading, when we observe the narrator remind herself, “you are an I, you are an Elizabeth,” we may see this as her attempt to separate herself from her aunt. When she hears the aunt’s cry, so like her own, the world becomes a small place where there exist families, but not individuals. When the narrator tries to snap out of it, she asks, “What similarities… held us all together or made us all just one?” Here, she is overwhelmed by the similarities between the voices, betweens the “hands” and other parts that the people both in the waiting room and in the National Geographic possess. In this reading that I am attempting, similarities that the narrator encounters between herself and other people make the world grow smaller to her.

-Lauren O.

Original post by lauren

“Sestina”
(or, “Young Woman Visits her Childhood Home, to Find that the Bradford Pear is Missing.”)

The music is live
from the bar, lit violet
and falling, through the hornbeam leaves
onto the window, onto you:
spread like porcelain
sand dunes under a black sky.

Turn up your eyes, variegated as the sky
and live,
as though you had never seen fissured porcelain.
Put on your violet
dress. It suits you,
the way that branches are suited by leaves.

“What if he walks out–leaves
like the others?” the falling sky
says to you.
You will live.
And maybe this time, you won’t be so violent
when it ends, my painted doll of porcelain.
(more…)

Original post by intertextuality

As we said in class, Bishop focuses a lot in her works on objects in nature and geography. In the section we read from Questions of Travel this is very obvious. As I was reading them I fell into them. I really like the poem, “Questions of Travel,” I love the fact that it was in free verse, so i didn’t fall into a robotic rhythm, it read more like a journal than a poem. I really enjoyed the lines at the end

“continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there…No. Should we have stayed home,

wherever that may be!”

I thought these lines really summed up the emotions Bishop was feeling, about whether or not she should be there staring and watching other people’s lives. Throughout the poem she questions her reasons for being there, but justifies it because she wouldn’t have seen all the beauties. She questions humans and their ability to use their imagination, instead they must travel to these exotice places to fill that void in their lives. Overall, the imagery and lack of strict form really stricts this poem with me.

Original post by sfinn2id

(Hanover st. in downtown Fredericksburg.)

…talk about an advantageous word choice for a sestina…

Original post by intertextuality

To understand the poetry in this picture you have to understand the location. The sign is on a dumpster outside of my gastroenterologist’s office here in Fredericksburg. Gastroenterology is the study of diseases and disorders dealing mainly with the intestines.

Emily Frank

Original post by efran5zq

Emily Frank

Original post by efran5zq