By Jane Scheiber

I first encountered Bishop’s “Five Flights Up” at a poetry retreat in the Catskills last summer. In the sun coming down fast on our shoulders and on the mountainsides, poet Matt Yeager read the poem from his tattered, salmon-pink edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s The Complete Poems, the same edition I bought myself for my first poetry workshop in my freshman year of college. I did not remember being so fond of Bishop as I had felt at the conclusion of Matt’s reading, and his remark that the final line is the only one within parentheticals. It would be a lie to tell you that I cannot articulate why the poem struck me; I do know. In the few weeks leading up to the retreat, I began considering how out of touch with my body I was, and had been, for my entire life; I began considering this as I would walk down the subway steps, feeling impossible and stuck, and try to imagine who I hoped I would be, might be, in ten years. I was plagued with shame. With a particular catalyst that I won’t discuss for an online publication, I decided to try to get over that, the shame that bore down on me. In that gilded warm day, hearing about that little dog with “no sense of shame,” I was struck by how suddenly I realized that, among other things, consciousness, when combined with an animal body, causes quite a few complications for human beings (or, at least, human beings such as myself). In an arguably un(or less)conscious animal, there can be no shame, no questioning or turmoil over the condition of being alive. In her poem, Bishop, from her window of observation, articulates the bird in a tree, the cold day, and the neighbor’s dog to explore a kind of distance between the lives of humans and other animals; how, wrought with the ability to consider one’s actions, one’s life, the human experience diverges from the experience of all other animals. 

“Still dark,” Bishop begins. In this quick, note-like remark, we understand that it is first, dark outside, and second, that the poet has been awake in the dark long enough to say that it is still dark. Later, Bishop will offer us more context on the time of day, so I will leave this here. In the next line, she continues her observations: 

The unknown bird sits on his usual branch. 

The little dog next door barks in his sleep 

inquiringly, just once. 

Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires 

once or twice, quavering. 

Questions–if that is what they are–

answered directly, simply, 

by day itself.

Her first remark in some ways disobeys faithful field notes; she does not make any attempt to identify the “unknown” bird with his species name, color, or arrangement of feathers. She says only that the bird is “unknown” and “sits on his usual branch.” Clearly, though she cannot identify the bird as an ecologist, she has observed the bird on occasion enough to know that he sits where he “usual[ly]” does. We understand that Bishop writes from a familiar position in her apartment (five flights up!) and has been attentive. In the next line, she offers another point of environmental description: “the little dog next door barks in his sleep/inquiringly, just once.” In reading this line again, I wonder how Bishop knows that the dog barks in his sleep, specifically; I think this points to, again, the time of night that she writes from (she can reasonably suspect that the dog is asleep), and perhaps the sound of the dog’s bark, which may sound more muffled, maybe with less effort or bubbling out between his closed, sleeping lips. In any case, the dog barking in his sleep, and also in inquiry, seems to be a move of imbuing the dog with some kind of consciousness: the dog can dream, and it can ask. At this, Bishop wonders if the bird  “in his sleep, too…inquires/once or twice, quavering.” If the dog can inquire in his sleep, can the bird? Is the bird, like the dog, conscious in this way? The word “quavering” achieves two things: firstly, the word suggests an undulation or apparent tremble in a voice that would be faithful to describe the wavering of a bird’s call; secondly, after this surface-level description, the word also gives the bird more personality and suggests that, in its inquiry, there is a tremble of nervousness, perhaps anticipation, at waiting for the question’s answer. In her initial observations, Bishop locates the bird and the dog that exist at different points in space around her and explores, through them, the possibilities of an animal mind. 

In the final lines of this stanza, Bishop breaks into more philosophical pondering. If the bird and the dog, making sounds in their sleep are, in fact, inquiring at something, their questions are ones that can be “answered directly, simply,/by day itself.” Whatever questions the animals have, the arrival of day, the “[simple]” and “[direct]” rise of the sun can answer them; the routine, expected, uncomplicated arrival of day is enough. Certainly, these questions themselves are simple and direct; the only kind of questions a dog or bird could possibly ask, and ones that are much simpler than, perhaps, the questions keeping a poet awake until “enormous morning.” As we move through the poem, Bishop will continue to make observations, imbued with the poet’s wondering, questioning, and her interest in the difference between humans and other animals. 

The next stanza of Bishop’s poem moves back into her observational mode. At the Catskills, Matt remarked that Bishop can be described as, perhaps reductively, a “window poet,” for her fixation on exterior observations, as if through a window. Now, she literally writes as she watches, through a window, 

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous;

gray light streaking each bare branch, 

each single twig, along one side, 

making another tree, of glassy veins…

The bird still sits there. Now he seems to yawn.

In this stanza, Bishop confirms that “Still dark” has meant she has stayed up all night (or, perhaps, woken in the middle of it and not gone back to sleep) as morning rises in the time of the poem. She describes the morning as “Enormous…ponderous, meticulous.” Before she addresses the light of morning, or the activity beginning to churn on the other side of the window, Bishop ascribes conceptual, even anthropomorphic adjectives to the time of day. First, the morning is “enormous”; as it rises, the morning imposes its size onto the poet, something impossible to capture, and understand the entirety of. Next, becoming more complicated, the morning is “ponderous”; a thinking, wondering thing; a thing capable of, no doubt if it is ponderous, making inquiry on the world. Lastly, the morning is “meticulous,” acting with specificity and exaction. In the three adjectives, Bishop ascribes more and more consciousness and agency into the morning; we move from the imposing but perhaps indifferent “enormous” size, and then end in not just an ascription of consciousness, as “ponderous” offers, but in “meticulous,” a word so exacted and clean in its sonic qualities that it effortlessly describes a unique kind of particularity and agency. These descriptors, as they describe morning, certainly describe Elizabeth as the poet, who published so little in her lifetime because of her, we could say, “meticulous” writing style. Perhaps as morning arrives, the demands of the world erect themselves in its light; whereas at night there may have been more freedom to wander in mind, to exist more fluidly and more emotionally, the morning brings structure, requirement, the presence of human social consciousness that separates us from the other animals. 

In the next three lines, Bishop executes a stunning delineation of the morning’s light over the world. In the first of these, she writes: “gray light streaking each bare branch.” In the sounds of this sentence, Bishop plays with opposing sounds to create an air of difficult-to-penetrate mystery, despite the apparent exactness of the description. “Gray” in its open-air, extended ending meets “light,” and its equal updraft in sound. Then, with the final, clean, glasslike “T” in “light,” we come to “streaking,” a much more grounded word that describes the way light itself creates, gesticulates as if by drawing, the branches of the tree. Then, we enter a triplet of words braided by sound: “each bare branch.” The plain, earthy word of “each” (which takes from the long E sound in “streaking”) comes to “bare,” which lifts the line into the air again, and then “branch,” which, in taking the earthly “ch” from “each” and B sound from “bare,” leaves us somewhere in between world and page/imagination/mind. The sounds of the line, though they apparently offer a simple worldly description, sonically place us in an in-between. The next two lines rearticulate the description, and how this description exists on the page and in the mind. 

The next two lines read: “each single twig, along one side,/making another tree, of glassy veins…” Here, by repeating and rephrasing “each bare branch” with “each single twig,” Bishop emphasizes the exactness of the morning’s light, which reaches each part of a scene; similarly, the poem, and the observer-poet, illuminates “each single twig” in its description. Both the light and the poet, however, see these twigs from “one side,” and are limited to their perspective, their place. Ultimately, the poem, in description of the world, can only offer one dimension; human perspective and consciousness are similarly bound to their place from which they observe as they interact with the world. In their perspective, the light and the conscious, observing poet “[make] another tree, of glassy veins…” The line expresses a magic in creation. The “glassy veins,” in the scene refer to the light, I am imagining, illuminating the icy exterior on the trees, or the way sometimes we get a second image on our window if the light refraction hits properly. In this world of recreations by light and morning, there also exists the recreations, the world created by the poet and her perspective of observation. Bishop trails off at the end of this line in ellipses, perhaps conveying her mind wandering. She comes back to the world: the uncomplicated “bird still sits there. Now he seems to yawn,” In these short, almost non-lyric sentences, Bishop returns to an apparently more faithful, field guide kind of observation in which the bird, an animal of routine and simplicity, remains. The magic of the second world, created by the poet’s ability to investigate the world and create another in investigation through consciousness, trails off; we end the stanza in a continued, but uncomplicated, exploration of the bird, seemingly in argument for the world itself, for the simplicity of the world and mind of animals, who cannot create a world but exist strongly within one, whereas the poet exists between. 

Bishop continues this mode of direct observation as she opens the third stanza. She writes: “The little black dog runs in his yard.” The diction of the line reads as simply as a nursery rhyme, or again, a field guide. Comprised entirely of “ten-cent” words, it reads almost as if, after the “glassy veins” of the second tree, Bishop erects a wall, or refuses fanciful imposition on the world as the morning imposes its “enormous…ponderous, meticulous” light. Regardless, I can still picture the dog, who we once knew as sleeping, perhaps dreaming and inquiring. Now, through the morning light, he runs. Then, 

His owner’s voice arises, stern,

“You ought to be ashamed!”

What has he done?

He bounces cheerfully up and down;

he rushes in circles in the fallen leaves.

The stakes of this stanza feel higher than any other point in the poem, and then deflate again. Interrupting the observation of the dog engaged in a playful, energetic scene, the owner enters–he, too, seems “enormous” in voice, which, like the morning, “arises”-- and shames his dog: “‘You ought to be ashamed!” It is almost funny, watching a human being try to impose shame onto an animal who, clearly, cannot experience it. I dwell often on this stanza, think of my own childhood, my life, and the instances in which I learned that certain things are shameful, not sources of joy, and these things were often animal, body-bound behaviors (e.g.: being loud; being attracted to someone; ferociously eating a favorite meal). The scolding owner sounds like something unanimously heard, literal or otherwise, by humans within society at large; and, because we can experience shame and embarrassment, this admonishment works on us, changes how we behave. After the owner scolds his little dog, the dog “bounces cheerfully up and down.” An animal in an animal body, with no language or consciousness capable of capturing shame, the words fall deafly on the dog. Who among us hasn’t scolded an animal, often to embarrassedly watch the animal look up at us with the same kind of joyful reverence, or, in the case of a cat, carelessly saunter away? The dog, “bounces cheerfully;” Bishop gives us a bit of an opinionated, perspective-specific view again by assigning the dog emotion; “bounce” itself jumps off the page, expresses a kind of joy, and then she drives it home with “cheerfully.” Another apparently cheerful action: the dog “rushes in circles in the fallen leaves.” Bishop, still, of course, generously gives us the world. “Rushes” conveys, sonically, the motion of the dog running through, shuffling fallen leaves; I myself am reminded of many autumns and even winters running through drifts of fallen leaves, making the same sound. Bishop, having been from Northeastern North America (primarily Nova Scotia), must also have similar associations. Even if not, the image takes on a sense of uninhibited joy, even in the face of a man trying to destroy it within the dog. 

Bishop uses the final stanza to return to her observations of the bird and dog in a more philosophical manner, as she entered with them in the beginning of the poem. She opens the final stanza with a conclusion on her observations of the dog: “Obviously, he has no sense of shame.” The line, like her other note-like observations of the bird and the dog, arrives in simple, direct language, but its so charged! “Obviously” brings in a more colloquial, dialogic tone. Then, “no sense of shame,” comes as a kind of psychological, observational conclusion, but continues the thread of emotionally-imbued images. In the poem, we return to the poetic world, the world created by Bishop’s perspective and interior looking out into the world, through this conclusion. At this, Bishop returns to the bird, along with the dog, and enters a more philosophical space: “He and the bird know everything is answered,/all taken care of,/no need to ask again.” It seems that, following Bishop’s thread, shame and the ability to inquire are facets of a conscious experience that the bird and dog are not burdened with; but, with the human owner trying to bear shame down on the dog, we understand that shame is something of human consciousness. With their animal faculties, and their existence in their animal bodies in a present world, the bird and dog can also ask no questions; or, they can only ask questions that are instantaneously answered, as they move from moment to moment: “all is taken care of,/no need to ask again.” These two lines even arrive in equal syllables (six each), conveying a sense of measure, balance, assuredness as the bird and dog would experience it. The bird and the dog, in the early morning, cannot experience shame, worry, longing inquiry. As Bishop finishes the poem, she reminds us of our division from the animal world. 

Bishop ends her poem by interrupting the philosophizing with a dash, and then another line in parentheticals. She writes: “--Yesterday brought to today so lightly!/(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)” Like many of her lines, we first read this initial line as an expression of landscape, yet the dash betrays an understanding that an interruption has occurred, a fissure. The morning brings time along by light; rather than “lightly” referring to a gentleness, the “lightly” refers to the way by which yesterday comes into today: by light. Just as the light of morning brings along the days before it, so too does the light, the consciousness of the poet brings yesterday into today. Throughout the poem, Bishop has created a space to enter in which we follow emotionally-imbued observations, made as the tired, awake-all-night mind of the poet looks out onto the world. In this, the past inevitably exists, one way or another; and so the action of the poem re-erects the yesterday in the today; memory in the present observation. The final line of the poems stands between two parentheses, as if Bishop wrote it and then tried to bury it, or indicate it as an appendix to the text you see before you. As she trailed off with her poetic observation of the tree in the second stanza, and then interrupted with another, apparently-uninterpreted observation of the world, here Bishop tries to tone down her emotional, interior insertion in the world. “A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift” cuts you right to the bone, or maybe more accurately, hits you in the gut, and she buries it. The essential action of the line, the impossibility of “lift[ing]” yesterday, stands as a testament to the undercurrents of human shame and emotion that Bishop refuses, except in this line, to bring to the surface. The line, the poem at large was born out of a kind of questioning of the world, a desire to make sense of it through observation, close attention, and this line in particular comes out of a uniquely human sense of regret, and Bishop buries it out of the shame that the dog and bird have “no sense” of. 

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Five Flights Up,” explores the division between the human animal and other animals, particularly addressing the burdens of consciousness as it creates shame and despondency in the human experience. The human experience is, ultimately, bound to two places at once: the world in which we live and experience with our bodies, and the world within our minds, undeniably influenced by the world as much as it interprets it. Utilizing two animals– the grounded, little black dog and the lofted bird outside her window– Bishop creates an architecture of animals and explores the ways in which other animals experience a groundedness and a freedom not quite present in the human experience, affected as it is by the perpetual owner yelling “You ought to be ashamed!” from his doorstep. Like most poems, this one doesn’t seem to offer any answers; shame exists in the human being and Bishop does not excuse herself from shame as she buries her final, emotionally-striking line that articulates the entire project of the poem, and her poetic experience at large. The poem does, though, by illuminating the scenes of animals in the world, observing patterns, creating a patterned place of the second, “glassy tree,” encourage us to look out into the world, understand our distances from it, our divisions and removals from the animal, plant, earth world present, as it always is, on the other side of our mind. I take many lessons; I observe; I watch a squirrel bury something with its remarkably dexterous hands; and the line “Obviously, he has no sense of shame,” echoes and echoes and echoes.