20 pages • 40 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopThe Mountain
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Bishop’s Relationship with the Confessional Movement
Bishop began writing early in life and maintained several well-documented friendships with other writers of her time, including Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Lowell became famous as the father of the Confessional movement in poetry—writing about personal matters that had hitherto been considered taboo. Writers in this movement include Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, and Anne Sexton. Their work explored themes of sexuality, drug use, alcoholism, abuse, and dissatisfaction with traditional social roles.
Though Bishop encouraged Lowell in his writing, she did not belong to his school of confessional poets. While poets like Lowell and Plath wrote openly about their lives, Bishop distinguished herself by remaining more aloof socially and stylistically. Unlike her contemporaries, Bishop wrote more about the objective world and how it influences one’s mental and emotional state in the moment. Her poems tend to eschew the pronoun “I,” or references to her personal history. Many of her pieces are written from an outside persona. Poems such as “The Mountain” explore feelings around aging, isolation, and the mystery of nature through the voice of an inanimate object.
Bishop’s persona poems allowed her to explore personal feelings in a less-personalized way, some arguing that this is what makes her poetry compelling and universal. It dwells on universal themes that affect everyone, rather than exploring issues rooted overtly in her biography. Her poems take their strength from craft and philosophical exploration.
Another aspect of Bishop’s poetry that set her apart from her contemporaries was her adeptness at using form. Bishop published poems utilizing the sestina and the ballad, and one of her most famous poems, “One Art,” is a villanelle. Though “The Mountain” does not technically fit into any formal structure, it exemplifies a tightly organized and well-considered format. Each stanza ends with one of the two repeated lines, “I do not know my age” (Lines 4, 12, 20, 28) and “Tell me how old I am” (Lines 8, 16, 24, 32, 36). This mimics the repetition of alternating lines that characterize the villanelle.
Each stanza is the same length of four lines. This helps create rhythm and structure in the poem, which contain the energy of the lines and direct the reader’s attention through the speaker’s evolving emotions. It makes the second to final line, “I want to know my age” (Line 35) stand out as a variation on the previously established pattern.
Confessional poets often employ free verse, a style of writing that mimics more typical speech patterns and makes the reader feel they are having a conversation with the writer. By contrast, Bishop’s formalism is more traditional but also more elevated. Others argue that her poetry concealed some of her personality and history, making her less accessible to her readers.
In her public life as an artist, she was somewhat reclusive from her fans. Though she traveled often, she stayed out of the spotlight. She rarely gave public readings, and when she did people noted that she was stiff and did not do her own poems justice in reading them.
Authorial Context: Themes of Isolation in Bishop’s Work
Bishop lost both her parents at a young age. Her father died when she was only eight months old, and her mother was put into a psychiatric hospital, where she remained for the rest of her life. Bishop was raised at first by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, but in her teens her paternal grandparents demanded she come to live with them in Massachusetts.
Bishop felt like an outcast and an orphan. In Massachusetts, especially, she felt she did not fit in, and her health suffered while living with her paternal grandparents. She was a Canadian living among Americans and a girl from rural Nova Scotia suddenly thrust into a modern city. Compounding these feelings of being different, Bishop was also a lesbian at a time when being a lesbian was not accepted.
Throughout her life, Bishop traveled extensively, living in Europe, Florida, and Brazil to name a few places. She was often a transplant in countries and places where others were native. In many of her poems, Bishop explores the physical geography of her changing landscapes alongside the isolation that must have been brought on by her unique placement in the world.
Bishop’s work contains detailed descriptions of different landscapes and her encounters with the natural world. Some of her most famous of these are “The Fish,” “The Moose,” “The Armadillo,” and others in which she describes meeting different animals and the insight she gains from those encounters.
“The Mountain” is an example of the way Bishop’s work uses natural elements to explore themes more relevant to people than they are to the elements themselves. As with many of Bishop’s poems, “The Mountain” explores feelings of isolation and alienation. It dwells on a question both philosophical and personal, demanding the listener to “[t]ell me how old I am” (Lines 8, 16, 24, 32, 36), yet the question goes unanswered. Choosing to speak from the persona of the mountain is itself a way for the poet to remain isolated, rather than revealing her feelings about aging.
Another Bishop poem that explores the aging theme is “In the Waiting Room.” It addresses the self-awareness that comes from realizing that we are mortal, separate from others, and bound to change over the passage of time. In stark contrast to “The Mountain,” “In the Waiting Room” appears overtly autobiographical, recounting her experience waiting for her aunt at the dentist’s office at the age of six. She reads National Geographic and has a sudden awareness that she is human, like her aunt, like the bare-breasted women she sees in the magazine. This makes her feel untethered, and she speaks to herself to ground herself. She calls herself “an Elizabeth” and lists the date as 1918. By the end of the poem she has calmed herself, but the philosophical awareness of her mortality remains, leaving her deeply shaken.
The poem ends with questions articulated that have no direct answers. These two poems give a reader an understanding of the breadth of Bishop’s work, the different styles she uses to explore similar topics, and the way such philosophical questions manifested themselves throughout her writing career.
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