20 pages • 40 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopFive Flights Up
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“A little Dog that wags his tail” by Emily Dickinson (1871-72)
Elizabeth Bishop read Emily Dickinson’s work, but in letters and interviews, she says Dickinson didn’t mean much to her. However, Bishop and Dickinson have many similarities. Their works feature keen observations and are often playful and puzzling. In “A little Dog that wags his tail,” Dickinson provides an image of a carefree dog who “gambols all the live Day.” Like the dog in Bishop’s poem, Dickinson’s dog represents an uncorrupted, joyous creature. As with the owner in “Five Flights Up,” Dickinson presents examples that counter the dog’s playful mood. These examples aren’t humans but creatures with human qualities, like the cat and mouse.
“The Mountain” by Elizabeth Bishop (1952)
In “The Mountain,” Bishop takes up the theme of time. Departing from the relaxed, casual mood of “Five Flights Up,” time is frustrating in “The Mountain.” The poem is in the mountain’s voice, and the mountain’s attitude is as disgruntled as the owner in “Five Flights Up.” The mountain doesn’t “mean to complain” (Line 13), yet that’s what they do. The mountain isn’t content to trust time and nature and not inquire further into its mysteries. The mountain wants to know specifics, repeating, “Tell me how old I am” (Lines 9, 17).
“The Shampoo” by Elizabeth Bishop (1955)
As in “Five Flights Up,” the speaker seems to disappear into their environment in “The Shampoo.” This time, what subsumes the speaker isn’t a dog, a bird, and the passage of time but washing the hair of their “dear friend” (Line 9). The process of shampooing leads to transcendence as the friend’s hair takes on the traits of nature. The poem also deals with time since the activity makes the speaker feel like time is “nothing if not amenable” (Line 12). Similar to “Five Flights Up,” Bishop creates a relaxed, wondrous mood in “The Shampoo” that mostly avoids sternness and imposition.
“Howl” by Eileen Myles (2020)
Like Elizabeth Bishop, Eileen Myles hails from Massachusetts. Unlike Bishop, Myles embraces the Confessional genre and writes openly about her sexuality. Yet the two poets each apply a keen eye to their environments even though Myles’s surroundings tend to be more urban than pastoral. In “Howl,” Myles uses a bird and dog not to represent a bond with nature but to show how human-made things and the human world can rub off on animals. The refrigerator “makes a lot / of sound” (Lines 2-3) and “so does a bird” (Line 4). Meanwhile, “the dogs” (Line 11) don’t bounce joyfully like the dog in “Five Flights Up”; they’re anxious and “are needing / some money” (Lines 12-13). In “Five Flights Up,” there’s a distinction between modern life and nature. In “Howl,” such boundaries collapse.
Further Literary Resources
“Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836)
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a critical member of the Transcendental movement in the United States during the first part of the 1800s. His essay, “Nature,” shows how Transcendentalism links to Bishop’s work and “Five Flights Up.” At one point in the essay, Emerson describes a moment in nature when “mean egotism vanishes,” and he turns into a “transparent eye-ball.” As with “Five Flights Up,” a concrete identity is far from a positive thing in Emerson’s essay. A self is “mean” or crude. What’s ideal is to do away with an individual and become a keen observer or a “transparent eye-ball.” For most of “Five Flights Up,” the speaker is like a “transparent eye-ball” as they document the bird and the dog. Conversely, the owner comes across as an example of “mean egotism.”
The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963)
Bishop attended Vassar with Mary McCarthy. They started a literary magazine together, and McCarthy went on to become a successful novelist. Her book, The Group, was a provocative success. It followed the intimate lives of women at Vassar. McCarthy based the characters on the women she went to school with and used Bishop as inspiration for the character Lakey, who lives in Europe with a “foreign woman”—an allusion to Lota. “This was why Lakey had stayed abroad so long,” quips the narrator. “Abroad people were more tolerant of Lesbians.” As the sidelined speaker in “Five Flights Up” indicates, Bishop didn’t care to emphasize herself or her private life, so she didn’t have kind things to say about McCarthy’s novel. Yet she refrained from publicly criticizing the work because she didn’t want to give McCarthy’s book additional notoriety.
“The Work: A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop” by George Starbuck (1977)
In 1977, the literary journal Ploughshares published a conversation between Bishop and the American poet George Starbuck. The conversation reveals Bishop’s thoughts on a range of topics—from Brazil to poets to her poetry, including “Five Flights Up.” She expresses her dislike for Emily Dickinson, her early admiration for W. H. Auden, and her thoughts on feminism. The dialogue showcases Bishop’s witty and somewhat whimsical, elusive personality.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetics of Identity” by Atar Hadari (2020)
A poet and translator, Atar Hadari explores the link between Bishop’s identity and her somewhat elusive poetry in his article. Hadari sees intolerance towards lesbians as reinforcing Bishop’s inclination to conceal her identity in her life and poetry. For Hadari, Bishop turns “any emotional life on the author’s part into a purportedly neutral string of images and rhetoric.” Put in conversation with “Five Flights Up,” it’s possible to see the theme of effortlessness and ease a reflection of the comfort Bishop felt around Alice and in her fifth-floor apartment.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
