Dec 28, 2009
“The Bight” is a lyric of thirty-six lines that provides a veritable showcase of Elizabeth Bishop’s aesthetic of observation and her metaphoric impulse. The bracketed subtitle—“On my birthday”—suggests both an occasion and, perhaps, a gift. Such an occasion usually implies the assessment that people are prone to on their birthdays, but, in this case, the poet seems to be tallying up the contents of a localized landscape.
A bight is a small bay between two points of land, and here the topography in question is Garrison Bight in Key West, Florida,...
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