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| The Amardillo |
| 作者Author / Elizabeth Bishop 依莉莎白•碧沙普 |
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Study Questions
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| 1. “The Armadillo” is crucially about the beauty and danger of the “illegal fire balloons.” The “fire balloons” are beautiful but at the same time dangerous. They are to celebrate St. John's Day, but they cause great danger to animals living on the ground. How does Elizabeth Bishop arrange this poem, especially the first five stanzas, to present her impressions of fire balloons? |
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Bishop presents the constant shifting of the fireballoons by first altering long and short sounds almost on every other line. In the first quatrain, Bishop changes the rhyme from the long sound “year” to the short to the slight sound “night” and back to “appear,” and finally changes back to “height.” Penelope Laurans, in his article, “‘Old Correspondences': Prosodic Transformations,” mentions that Bishop “keeps the reader constantly readjusting the rhyme (meter)” in “The Armadillo” (Laurans 77). Bishop turns to use more long sounds to describe the dragging and shifting fireballoons after the second quatrain. In the third quatrain, she even uses dashes and commas to create pauses and to slow down the temple: “once up against the sky it's hard / to tell them from the starts— / planets, that is – the tinted ones” (Bishop 103). The fireballoons is flying above and leaving the crowds in the continuing, lasting, and slow motions. As she presents in the fifth stanza, the fire balloons were “receding, dwindling, solemnly / and steadily forsaking us” (Bishop 103). |
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| 2. From the sixth stanza, the tone of Bishop's speaker seems to change. How does Elizabeth Bishop show the panic and fear of the animals threatened the falling fire balloons? |
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Comparing with the long sentences in the previous five stanzas, sentences in the sixth stanza are concise and powerful. “The flame ran down.” Bishop uses the simple but threatening sentence to show the coming disaster. She breaks sentences with short pauses to build up the tense. For example, in the seventh quatrain, Bishop presents the scene when two terrified owls flight up:
We saw the pair
of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up our of sight.
As the poem develops stanza by stanza, the tense and anxiety grow. Animals and citizens can both feel threatened. The summated tense and anxiety explode like the fired fireballoon in the italicized final stanza. |
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