The stanzas are …show more content…
Bishop seems to ignore a few of the seemingly critical grammar rules, while making some of her own. In most of her poems she uses either parentheses or em dashes, but rarely both in the same poem. In grammar, there is almost not difference between a parenthetical marked with parentheses, commas (as long as there are no intervening commas), and one marked with an em dash (or en dash, but Bishop seems to avoid them). These, combined with her profuse use of apostrophes, gives her a sort of meandering feel, sometimes side tracking for entire stanzas (Stanza 5, line 2 to end stanza 6, and stanza 7 to mid-way through stanza 8, line 1). Both parentheticals in this poem are a just sentences wrapped in parentheses, giving them an odd status of not quite sentence, but also not an aside. At least to me, it reads like a stage whisper, something that you were just barely supposed to hear. For comparison, an em dash would have had the effect of making it seem like an after thought, and commas would 've been awkward because there are too many commas in between. Her colon and semi-colon use is also strange, stanza two starting with a semi-colon, followed eight words later by a colon that introduces a list with two things in it. The sentence they are in is a full two and a half stanzas long, the longest in the poem. Despite the length, the sentence still feels relatively short, since the amount and variation of punctuation breaks the sentence up. Another result of the variation of punctuation is the subsequent ambiguity of interpretation (I personally love this feature, and have absolutely zero idea how to replicate it). One way of reading it is a friend, out of breath, is excitedly telling you something, too caught up in relating the experience to stop to breath, let alone for punctuation. Another, more cynical, view is to see it as a drunk rambling on about topic, throwing in a mark simply when it feels right.