Analysis of The Moose Essay -- Elizabeth Bishop The Moose Essays

Analysis of The MooseElizabeth Bishops The Moose is a narrative poem of 168 lines. Its twenty-eight six-line stanzas are not rigidly structured. Lines change in length from four to eight syllables, but those of five or six syllables predominate. The pattern of stresses is lax enough almost to blur the promissory note between verse and prose the rhythm is that of a low-keyed speaking vocalization h everywhereing over the descriptive details. The eyewitness account is meticulous and restrained. The poem concerns a bus traveling to capital of Massachusetts through the landscape and towns of New Brunswick. turn driving through the woods, the bus stops because a moose has wandered onto the highroad. The carriage of the animal interrupts the peaceful hum of elderly passengers voices. Their talkresignedly revolving itself orotund such topics as recurrent human failure, sickness, and deathis silenced by the unexpected advent of the beast, which redirects their thoughts and imparts a sw eet sensation of joy to their quite a ordinary, provincial lives. The poem is launched by a protracted introduction during which the vocaliser indulges in descriptions of landscape and local color, deferring until the fifth stanza the substantive statement regarding what is occurrent to whom a bus journeys west. This initial postponement and the leisurely accumulation of obviously trivial but realistic detail contribute to the atmospheric build-up heralding the curious occurrence of the journey. That event pass on take place as tardy as the middle of the twenty-second stanza, in the work third of the text. It is solely in retrospect that one realizes the full import of that happening, and it is only with the last line of the final stanza that the reader gains the necessary distance to grasp on the whole the functional role of the ear lie downr descriptive parts. Now the reader will be ready to tackle the poem again in determine to notice and drink in its subtle nuances. Bis hops artistry will lie plain, particularly her capacity to impart life to a rather discomfit redundancy of objects and to project a lofty poetic vision from a humble, prosaic incident. Forms and Devices Description and narrative are the chief modes of this poem. Nevertheless, at tiny moments the actual utterance of the anonymous characters is invited in (Yes, sir,/ all(prenominal) the way to Boston). The binder of these varied procedures is the speak... ...such a dialogue by mocking the hooting of owls. To his delight, the birds responded in kind. In between the mystic silences, natures deeper secret motions inundate the boys heart and soul. For the British Romantic, such a communion with nature could even so be available to a few elected spirits whose whiteness and innocence had already marked them for intense experiences and an early death. Hollander also noteworthy a connection between Robert Frosts poem The Most of It and The Moose. Frost had his anthropoid protagonist p roudly call out to nature for something more than the imitate speech that the Winander Boy had elicited from his owls. His wish for counter-love, original response was at last granted by the sheer chance appearance of a sizeable buck that, lordlike, tore his way through tarn and wilderness without bothering at all to acknowledge the presence of the human intruder. By contrast, Bishops female moose has the oddment to approach the trespassing bus in order to look it over and assess it in her mute, nonaggressive way. Finally, it is the bus that, pressed for time, leaves the spother dominionwhile the moose remains on the moonlit macadam road without budging.