Facing the Blight

In “The Blight,” Elizabeth Bishop establishes a sense of specific place through her endless lines of description.  Just from the first line, “At low tide like this how sheer the water it,” it can be deduced that she is observing serine seashore. The low tide indicates that the water is not turbulent, but calm and almost empty. This explains why the water seems so sheer. However, many of her descriptions have some violent connotations, implying that the blight is not as peaceful as the opening lines lends itself to be. She speaks of Pelicans crashing into the gas that surrounds the blight “unnecessarily hard, it seems to me like pickaxes” (11-13). Her usage of the word “pickaxes” is interesting because pelicans and pickaxes are not usually corresponding. When she describes them as “pickaxes,” she is describing the way that the birds penetrate the gas. Like a pickaxe, the pry through the air with sudden force, instead of gliding in a more natural manner.

            In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “Facing It,” He uses the place that he is currently standing it to transport himself to his past. He standing at a Vietnam War memorial, and as he sees the names etched upon the stone, his emotions about the war rekindle themselves in contrasting blows. Through alternating lines of end-stop and enjambment, the text reflects his conflicting emotions. When he says, “I said I wouldn’t, / dammit: No tears” (4-5), the short, detached sentences show how even through he is no longer at war, he is still fighting a lifelong battle. The memories that the memorial brings up causes him to try and fight back tears of remorse because he knows that a war like Vietnam should make him stronger than the tears he cries.