Bishop And Roethke On The Contradictions Of Perception

Date Overwhelming Sensuousness: Bishop and Roethke on the Contradictions of Perception My Papa s Waltz by Theodore Roethke and The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop depict the seemingly disparate subjects of a rough, playful dance between a drunken father and his son and a fish just pulled from the sea. Different in this way, the poems share an intense desire to render the ambiguity of subjective experience. More specifically, they show how embracing this ambiguity produces rich, potentially ecstatic modes of perception. While My Papa s Waltz centers on the subjective oscillation between what John McKenna calls love and fright; excitement and concern, The Fish probes the dichotomy between life and death, the human and the inhuman (38). Roethke s speaker seems to remain caught within the binary aspects of his sensory perception, struck by its contradictory richness, but Bishop offers a glimpse of how the oscillation gives way to epiphany, to what C.K. Doreski calls a leap from perception to wisdom (112). By directing readers attention to the importance of engaging subjective experience in a way that does not smooth over its contradictory elements, both poems are able to powerfully render the heightened modes of being that can emerge from an immersion in the sensuality of daily existence. I will demonstrate this claim via a close examination of the poems imagery, diction, tone, and autobiographical contexts. In order to approach the poems on their own terms, to