Bishop constantly uses wires, electricity, and storms throughout her poems and especially ones that allude to her sexuality/love life. “Electrical Storm,” as the name suggests, has all three elements, but is different than how some of her other poems have used these elements. Altogether, “Electrical Storm” denotes electricity as a destructive force, a sharp contrast to most of her other work with electricity, but doing so actually expands her motif.
While it is true that many of her poems use these elements, the one most discussed is “It is marvelous to wake up together.” Anderson, whilst talking about recurrent lines in Bishop’s works, notes that the electrical wires in “It is marvelous to wake up together” “transmit the surge of sexual excitement” while also “carry[ing] a warning and are …show more content…
Dead-white, wax-white, cold” (PPL, 81). The storm even causes the wires to fuse and to kill the telephone. Even at the end of the poem the remains of the storm, the hail, is displayed as “dead-eye pearls” after the happy image of a cat still warm in bed and the beautiful Lent trees (PPL, 81). Cleghorn mentions the fact that there is no “personal electricity” in the poem and that, unlike another poem about desire in which the electricity is a transformative thing, “’Electrical Storm’ displays the reverse action” (Cleghorn, 75). He states that this is probably because she lives in a natural habitat, Brazil, and how “vulnerable to civilization” the country was (Cleghorn, 76). Later in his essay, Cleghorn compares “Electrical Storm” to “It is marvelous to wake up together” by relating the fact that they “speak of sex after it happened” but mentions that the storm in “Electrical Storm” is more “anxious and repressive” (Cleghorn, 81). Is Bishop’s view of technology in this poem a fluke? Why would this one poem appear to be so drastically different than poems with the same subject and
While it is true that many of her poems use these elements, the one most discussed is “It is marvelous to wake up together.” Anderson, whilst talking about recurrent lines in Bishop’s works, notes that the electrical wires in “It is marvelous to wake up together” “transmit the surge of sexual excitement” while also “carry[ing] a warning and are …show more content…
Dead-white, wax-white, cold” (PPL, 81). The storm even causes the wires to fuse and to kill the telephone. Even at the end of the poem the remains of the storm, the hail, is displayed as “dead-eye pearls” after the happy image of a cat still warm in bed and the beautiful Lent trees (PPL, 81). Cleghorn mentions the fact that there is no “personal electricity” in the poem and that, unlike another poem about desire in which the electricity is a transformative thing, “’Electrical Storm’ displays the reverse action” (Cleghorn, 75). He states that this is probably because she lives in a natural habitat, Brazil, and how “vulnerable to civilization” the country was (Cleghorn, 76). Later in his essay, Cleghorn compares “Electrical Storm” to “It is marvelous to wake up together” by relating the fact that they “speak of sex after it happened” but mentions that the storm in “Electrical Storm” is more “anxious and repressive” (Cleghorn, 81). Is Bishop’s view of technology in this poem a fluke? Why would this one poem appear to be so drastically different than poems with the same subject and