SOURCE: Mitrano, Mena. Bishop's “Pink Dog.” Explicator 54, no. 1 (fall 1995): 33-36.

In the following essay, Mitrano explores Bishop's reticence using animal allegory in “Pink Dog.”

Scholarship on Elizabeth Bishop has traditionally praised her reticence, especially in matters of identity, the female body, and female sexuality.¹ Indeed, readers who aspire to more than just a superficial knowledge of Bishop's poetry must come to terms with her famed reticence. In one of her last poems, “Pink Dog” (1979), the rhetorical containment and modesty associated with her style border on self-censorship. In this poem, reticence becomes the speaker's protective response to the realization that as soon as female subjectivity appears on the avenue of representation, it automatically becomes something profoundly ruinous, viscerally antiaesthetic.

Accordingly, in “Pink Dog” animal allegory is chosen as a sort of rhetorical objective relative for a speaker caught in a bind. Unlike her mentor, Marianne Moore, Bishop does not...