Place in Poetry

In the poem “The Bight” by Elizabeth Bishop, she portrays the recession of waves across the coastline that make the reader envision being across the waves or being in the water.  She sets the scene up as if one were traveling across the coastline.  She explains the “crumbling ribs” and the dry boats that come across the area as if one were experiencing it or viewing it from a movie screen.  Yet, the narrator notes that the “water in the bight doesn’t wet anything” (5).  At this point, one becomes curious as to what sort of water comes across the coastline that doesn’t “wet anything.”  It makes the water seem almost sacred or so completely tranquil that it barely comes up along the coast – it just barely dips at the shore tiptoeing its way across the sand.  This is until the narrator mentions the unsettling gas that “Pelicans crash into” and is “unnecessarily hard” (11, 12).  She continues with her depiction of birds as she also describes an extreme tense-like “tremble” to their open tails like the breaking of a wishbone.  The beautiful location masked with tense imagery makes the scene all the more interesting as she ends the poem by admitting that the entire area is an oxymoron in the making – it’s “awful but cheerful” (36). 

In the poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass he considers the etymology, or derivation of words, as subject to the “thinking” of the time, suggesting the differing and multiple meaning behind words.  The first line of the poem exemplifies just this, reading “all the new thinking is about loss” (1).  Hass insinuates that many concepts and ideas that people believe are “new” are ideas taken from previous concepts.  In this respect, Hass suggests that “thinking” is all derived from the thinkers before our time as people choose to shape those concepts.  One can also look at this line as Hass mocking the innovators of his time, suggesting that the newer ideas are actually older ones, admitting, “it resembles all the old thinking” (2).  These “new” thinkers are at a loss for their own ideas.  Since ideas are fabricated and “resemble” this “old thinking” then words, since they attempt to portray a person’s thoughts, are just as easily fabricated.  Hass further explains that these ideas are not only fabricated from previous ideas, but “that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea” (3,4).  As Hass suggests, people “erase” one aspect of an idea to formulate his or her own understanding of a concept. 

At this point, these “general ideas” are warped into multiple ideas from which Hass suggests, “erases” this “clarity of a general idea”.  Hass further exemplifies a person’s need to continuously probe at a word, through the symbolization of a woodpecker continuously pecking at a “dead sculpted trunk” (5).  Hass’ imagery depicts this “clown-faced woodpecker” not only as a type of bird, but purposely as the foolish person that continuously tries to pick away at the meaning of a word.  Hass suggests that this pecking away completely defiles the word as the woodpecker ceaselessly pecks at a trunk already “sculpted” through other meanings.  The woodpecker tries to sculpt more shape into the trunk, although it is already “dead” from over-defining a word.   Yet, it is “tragic” (7) since the clown-faced woodpecker will continuously peck at a “dead” concept as if it is trying to gain a new means.  This scene depicts a struggle between wanting to attribute so many different qualities to words, and being stuck in a place where, as the narrator states, “a word is elegy to what it signifies” (11).  Hass also recalls how a woman in this poem is able to remind him of his childhood memories, describing in vivid details his “childhood river” (20) to “muddy places where [they] caught the little orange-silver fish called “pumpkinseed” (22, 23).  Since Hass is able to retrieve memories from seeing her, he parallels the imagery to how words are able to provoke memories.  Furthermore, Hass creates a certain place where words grant qualities that are capable of resurrecting memories, thus creating so many different places and experiences for him and the reader.