At a glance:
- First Published: 1938
- Type of Poem: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Ships, Sailing or sailors, Sea or seafaring life, Birds, Paranoia, Clouds, Sleep
The Poem
“The Unbeliever” is a highly condensed poem of five five-line stanzas. It begins with an enigmatic quotation from Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), the seventeenth century moral tale by John Bunyan: “He sleeps on the top of a mast.” These words are repeated in the first line of the poem, signaling that Bunyan’s “he” is the strange sleeper in the poem. While the top of the mast is a strange place for sleeping in any circumstance, in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem it comes to mean that sleeping anywhere is uncanny and strange. Sleeping, for...
(The entire page is 1687 words.)
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