“Bishop's ‘The Colder the Air,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 46, No. 4, Summer, 1988, pp. 35-37.

In the following essay, Avery examines the significance of the image of the thermometer in “The Colder the Air.”

In Elizabeth Bishop's “The Colder the Air,” the protagonist's femininity is mentioned twelve times: nine times as “her,” twice as “she,” but only once does she receive a specific title. In the second line, she is referred to as “this huntress” Before concluding she is an Annie Oakley protégée in boots and a fringed hunting coat, we should consider the significance of the abundant ambiguous references. Bishop seems to be devising a riddle here, a poem of the “What am I?” genre. Upon close examination of the poem's subject, it appears that the huntress of the poem is not even a human, but a thermometer.

Inside a thermometer, there are only two directions to...