22 pages • 44 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopArrival at Santos
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Arrival at Santos” is written in ten stanzas of four lines each, or quatrains. While the poem has no strict metering scheme, it does contain a rhyme scheme of ABCB. In fact, the poem reveals an interior monologue written in ballad form. Ballads are traditionally short stories that depict heroic events, but they can also depict humorous events of characters who are held up for ridicule. The ballad usually contains quatrains, stanzas that are four lines each, that have an ABCB rhyme scheme. Although it depicts the mundanity of travel, putting “Arrival at Santos” in a ballad form elevates the story to something of greater significance. Read another way, using the ballad form may be a way for Bishop to subtly mock the unrealistically grandiose expectations of the speaker, as if the speaker is trying to make out of this simple, logistical aspect of their journey something heroic. That attempt is doomed to fail and lead to disappointment.
The interior monologue mimics what a speaker might say to themselves while going through an experience, narrating what is happening in the moment. It allows the reader to accompany the speaker on their journey in real-time. As with any true traveling companion, the reader does not know what will happen next.
Objective Correlative/Diction
Objective correlative is a term poet Ezra Pound used to explain how a narrator can suggest their emotional state by the way they describe an object. In the first three stanzas of “Arrival at Santos”, Bishop employs the objective correlative, calling the hills “sad and harsh”, (Line 4) the color of the warehouses a “feeble pink, or blue” (Line 6) and the palms “uncertain” (Line 7), all of which reflect the speaker's state of mind. The author's description of the palm tree demonstrates this technique, which links the tree to the tourist themselves, saying: “and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist” (Line 7). By juxtaposition, Bishop subtly suggests that the uncertain palms are stand-ins for the tourist, or projections of the speaker's feelings about themselves as a tourist.
Enjambment
The speaker uses enjambment, or the continuation of a sentence across a line-break or stanza, to useful effect throughout the poem. One of the most notable and unusual is in this instance: “Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall // s, New York. There. We are settled” (Lines 28-29). The speaker breaks the word “Falls” into two parts across two consecutive stanzas—“Fall” and “s.” Logistically, this helps the poem maintain the strict ABCB rhyme scheme of the ballad. This also has a layered effect. It mimics the way a waterfall works, forcing the reader to look at the white space and move their eye across the page downward before landing on the “s.” It follows Miss Breen's downward movement on the ladder, the excitement of the hook, the dangerous possibility of her falling, the movement from rung to rung (and stanza to stanza), and ends calmly with a matter-of-fact "There. We are settled" (Line 29) on the first line of the next stanza. It also suggests displacement, the way a person might feel when they are separated from their home. Without the “s,” the name of the town becomes “Glens Fall,” which is more sinister by putting the emphasis not on the falling water, which continues to move, but on something that is now fallen. It connotes a fall from grace or a fall from a high place to a harsh, shattering landing. It suggests that being “settled” (Line 29), as the passengers are in the tender, is the same as having fallen, unable to rise again.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
