LSU English 4071 Class Project

     Contemporary poetry includes, in my opinion, two of the best female poets of our Century, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. Both of these women have so very much in common including similar writing styles and the ability in each of them to strike a deep chord within the typical reader using metaphors to describe personal events and feelings. There is a two-decade age difference between the two women that offers the reader different cultural points of view. Both are generally admired as talented poets and to show my personal respect I am going to compare two works by each of these women authors. I will make comparisons of their writing styles, how through creative writing both describe one idea and the reader can interpret another idea, and how each one uses metaphors to convey a personal tale or belief using their own personal life experiences.

The two poems by Elizabeth Bishop I will discuss are "Roosters" and "Sandpiper." The two works by Sylvia Plath I will use are titled "Sow" and "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor."    A sow and a rooster are both farm animals. Sandpipers and mussels are aquatic animals.   Both women had difficult childhoods. Bishop lost her parents and was an orphan. This feeling of being left alone, I believe, made her feel powerless. Plath on the other hand had a very dominant mother, but it was her father's death that had the greatest impact on her life. Both women give the impression that men are harsh and provactive.

   Elizabeth Bishop wrote many of her poems using animals and nature. Bishop lost her parents and was an orphan. This feeling of being left alone, I believe, made her feel powerless. Plath, on the other hand, had a very dominant mother, but it was her father’s death that had the greatest impact on her life. Both women give the impression that men are is harsh and provocativeShe often writes in a free verse style using nature and animals as her main subjects. This holds true for one of her most popular poems, “Roosters.” This work is written in 3-line stanzas ,called tercetts, that rhyme throughout the poem.

     The overall story is told about roosters on a farm, but the message may be interpreted as one of a sexual nature, expressing loathing toward men. Each rooster is interpreted as using his crow as a voice to say, "this is my farm, this is where I live and this is my wife," referring of course to the hens. The word wife is used to describe the hens and “who lead hens’ lives” is another creative use of metaphors referencing some sort of domination of the male over the female. According to Jerome Mazzero ,a writer of modern critical views of Elizabeth Bishop, “There is a sense of revelation on Roosters and this involves an anthropomorphizing of the adversary and as a result of camaraderie, an aesthetic epiphany which pre-empts and therefore obliterates the military antagonism hinted in the poem.”1 The end of “Roosters” uses a pitch of extreme lyricism or sensuality of expression to describe death. Bishop metaphorically uses the word “climb”,to describe the sun's movement. The sun can’t climb, but Bishop makes the reader see this vision of the sun rising in the morning.

                                                                The sun climbs in,
                                                                Following “to see the end,”
                                                                Faithful as enemy, or friend.2

      In a very striking passage of “Roosters”, Elizabeth Bishop addresses the shiny, gloating, and definitly male creatures whose cries disturb her sleep. She has taken in enough of the rooster's admonitions to concede that many things about this place are dubious. The force of her rhetorical question,“What are you projecting?”2 suggests a reserve of personal strength. She writes mysteriously in reference and effect. Her work offers resistance to any surmise about her personal life, but the key word is resistance. Look closely enough in her works and you can understand inner personal issues that she struggles with such as lesbianism, art and sexuality. Bishop uses her poetry as personal armor.   She projects warnings about her life and uses dreams rather than awakenings to portray issues. Bishop using tricks in writing style. The phrase “how could the night have come to grief?”2 allows this lne in the poem to open up an ambiguity in the cliché. The suggestion is that before the first rooster crowed to welcome the new day, there was some grieving inthe evening, the loss of peaceful of sleep. The defiance and defeat of the roosters are illustrated during the cockfight. Are the rooster's fighting over a hen or are they fighting over their own vanity?

     “Sandpiper” is the second poem by Elizabeth Bishop and is another free verse poem about animals. The style is slightly different from “Roosters” in that this poem is written in 4 line stanzas called quatrains, that rhyme. This poem is also much shorter than “Roosters.” Sandpiper is another bird, but different from the rooster. The rooster is the adult, male of the domestic fowl, a barnyard animal. The sandpiper is a small wading bird with a long straight beak, andlives near the seashore. The poem"Sandpiper" explains survival, sanity and hints toward the difference of upper and middle social classes.

     The bird is pictured as subject to the water’s roar, the earth’s shaking and is imagined in “ a state of controlled panic.”3 The bird watches the sand, no detail being too small.

     The world is a mist. AndThen the world is
     minute and vast and clear. The tide
      higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.
     His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

      Looking for something, something, something.
      Poor bird, he is obsessed!
      The millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray,
      Mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.3

     Innocence is displayed in the sandpipers seeing the world as a grain of sand. The sandpiper obviously does not struggle with the complex questions, of what is and what is not within our control. All the sandpiper knows of the world is the relentless sea and the beautifully designed grains of sand that the sea produces. If life was so simple for us! There are so many layers of observation that may be made from the bird’s examination of the sand.

     The second author that is being discussed is the younger Sylvia Plath. The two poets share many of the same qualities of writing and subject matter. Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Otto was a German who came to study ministry at Northwestern University, but wound up as a biology professor at Boston University.

     Sylvia Plath is typically a confessional poet that writes in a prose style. “Confessional” means to resolve some sort of guilt and the use of extreme personality to explain life experiences in dramatic ways. The two poems I have chosen are based on real experiences in the poet's life but are atypical of Plath’s style as they are not confessional in nature. The poet's own psychology is not an issue in these two poems. Poet Sylvia Plath wrote “Sow.” According to Webster’s Dictionary is “an adult female hog.”5 The overall plot summary is how some local children’s desire to view their neighbor’s sow and how they go about doing it.   Plath uses describtions such as "piggy banks"6 and "parslied sucklings"6 to describe the sow's piglets and constantly shifts metric style. Plath also uses long sentences rather than short as her writing style.

     Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,
     Fat-rutted eyes
     Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood must

     Thus wholly engross
     The great grandam! – our marvel blazoned a knight,
     Helmed, in cuirass, 6

     The reader must analyze the presentation of the sow. The reader must consider how the language of the poem reflects both the neighbor's and the narrator's perceptions of the sow and how the language determines the reader's perceptions.   Such features as diction, devices of sound, images, and verbal allusions to enhance the portrayal of the sow. The “Fat-rutted eyes”6, is so descriptive the reader, can imagine that the sow's eyse can barely be seen due to the many layers of fat surrounding the eye sockets.

     This story of the sow is just what you probably think it is,a description of a very big pig! Plath explains all the things that this sow is not; a cute little piggy bank, a cooked pig with a "parsley halo,"6 or a typical barnyard mama pig with piglets all around. The sow, prompted by the farmer, rises to its feet, hungrier than ever. Plath fancifully imagines it could devour the entire world. This wild exaggeration is clever enough to catch the reader's attention.

     The second poem by Sylvia Plath is “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor.” A mussel is a marine bivalve mollusk. It is edible and has a blue black shell. Shells of these mussels provide mother of pearl, a beautiful gemlike material. This poem does not describe that beauty, instead uses the mussels as bait.

       This scene envisions some deathly emblem and panic.

          Of sea retracing its tide-
          Way up the river-basin.
          Or to avoid me. They moved
          Obliquely with a dry-wet
          Sound, with a glittery wisp
          And trickle. Could they feel mud
          Pleasurable under claws
          As I could between bare toes?
          That question ended it--I
          Stood shut out, for once, for all,
           Puzzling the passage of their
          Absolutely alien
          Order as I might puzzle
          At the clear tail of Halley's7

Plath’s use of adjectives creates vivid imagery and she uses clever word play to create other effects for the reader.

     "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" is another descriptive poem. The reader sees the speaker going to the beach in the early morning to collect mussels for fishing bait, but finds herself startled and fascinated by a horde of crabs. These crabs seem strange, sliding along the beach and clicking. Being a crab, they are rather sluggish. The speaker contemplates their "alien order."7 The speaker finds the husk of a dead crab in the grasses and wonders how it got there.   The speaker examines the crab husk closely. The poem ends with a description of its skull-like face gaping up at the sun.

     As you can see the two women already share quite a bit together. Now I am going to examine their similarities a bit closer. Three factors that I want to use in comparing these authors are the similarities of writing style, interpretation, and personal feelings depicted in the poems.

     The first similarities is their writing style and choices of subjects. “Roosters” and “Sow” are both about barnyard animals, each giving lush descriptions of the subjects. Both poems meditate on the animals in question and make great imaginative leaps, and both are written in a kind of terza rima. Tera rima is a verse form consisting of a series of triplets having 10 syllable or 11 syllable lines of which the middle line of one triplet rhymes with the first and third line of the following triplet. The rhyming words that Plath uses in “Sow” are: sow/way/show, lit/it/slot and milk/hulk/bulk. In “Roosters”, Bishop uses dark/below/echo, door/blue/glare and rise/chest/rest. “Sow” and “Roosters” are both written in the tercet format.

     The second point of comparison is how both poets describe one idea and the reader can interpret another idea. Plath’s “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” is a densely written poem, its diction so jam-packed that multiple readings are necessary before one "gets" even the thread of the narrative. It's about crabs, their otherness, and death. The reader must focus their attention on the sensual imagery, the cast of the light, the sounds the crabs make, their colors, the feel of the mud under toes and the weird scooped-out skull described at the end of the poem. Imagery creates a tone in all 4 poems, illustrating authentic interest and the creative intuitiveness of both writers.     Plath's "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" and Bishop's "Sandpiper" are both contemplative poems about creatures found on the beach.

      In the poem “Roosters” there is a reference to the biblical story when Jesus is betrayed and one of his followers will betray him by the time the cock has crowed three times. Bishop makes the reader believe that the subject in the “Roosters” poem will also be betrayed by the time the rooster has crowed, but it isn’t really clear how or why the betrayal will take place. The same type of interpretation can be made while reading “Sandpiper.” Color becomes a point of concern. Grains of sand are black, white, tan, and gray, these are the same colors we use to describe other humans, but birds don’t recognize prejudice based on the color of a birds feathers. The life of this sandpiper is simple and far less complex that a human.

     The third comparison is that both poets use metaphors and symbols to represent a personal tale or belief that includes some personal life experience. Bishop uses sexuality in “Roosters” with the metaphorical use of words such as “projecting”, “cries galore”, “protruding chests” and “little cock.” Plath uses the same type of symbolism of sex in “Sow” when she describes the female dreaming about a “knight.” She imagines that the sow may be daydreaming about an ideal mate, a great boar brought in by a knight in days of yore.

          Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
           By a grisly-bristled
           Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow’s heat7

      In Plath’s poem “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor”, the reader is told that a mussel has a blue black shell. Bishop also uses blue black in “Roosters” to describe the darkness. Transcendentalism is a philosophy that emphasizes the a prior conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality and the emphasis on intuitive and emotional views of life rather than a rational one. The use of transcendentalism is a characteristic of both poets.

     To conclude, I want to express how much I respect each of these women and their writings. The quality of each of their writings is profoundly stirring and acutely observant of each of the women. Their capacity for imagination is remarkably profound. Each poet captures so many qualities of the item they are describing and captivates the reader into the world they describe. Plath and Bishop have both passed on a legacy of poetry that will be enjoyed, and in my opinion, appreciated for years to come.