“Bishop's ‘At the Fishhouses,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 53, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 114-17.

In the following essay, Graham examines the significance of Bishop's line of iambic pentameter in “At the Fishhouses.”

A single line of perfectly regular iambic pentameter divides Elizabeth Bishop's “At the Fishhouses” neatly in half, separating a detailed and restrained description of an old fisherman, the Nova Scotia shoreline, and the tools of the fishing trade from an equally detailed but more passionate description of the ocean itself. In the opening lines, the speaker's voice is calm, her tone impersonal. An acute observer, she carefully maintains her distance from the static scene she describes. Throughout this section, Bishop uses long, free verse lines of three to six strong stresses. The restraint of these first 40 lines culminates in a line of pure iambic pentameter that describes the old fisherman's knife, “the blade of which is almost worn...