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English Writing I
Text Analysis (draft 1)
Name: Sara Sun
Student Number: 493206122
An analysis on Elizabeth Bishop’s Pink Dog
The poet speaker expresses her physical and mental anxiety about the flux of society and human life by presenting the metaphor of naked dog which is forced to join the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. The imagery of carnival, in addition to being a token of luxury, possesses with ambiguous and dialectical meaning. The Carnival is a time or a place where original rules are reversed. People celebrate with extravagant behaviors while social hierarchy and principle are abandoned or even playfully inversed. The word “carnival” means ambiguously “forsaking flesh” or, on the contrary, “ getting solace by taking flesh” in the Etymology. It also presents as the last celebration day right before the serious and restrained Lent. Moreover, its turning from an unofficial activity to an official celebration gives the possibility to take it as a practice of Hegel’s dialectical theory. With meanings circulating around ending and beginning and dialectical changes, the Carnival here can be compared to human life, in which these changes never stop. As one of the last poems of Elizabeth Bishop, the “Pink Dog” surely obtains the poet speaker’s anxiety of facing the crazy changing world and turning points in human life.
Contrasts are important elements in Hegel’s dialectical theory. In this poem, tons of contradictions are suggested. The dog’s bare skin and the carnival costume compose the main contrast between pure nature and artificiality. “Umbrellas”, “ebbing sewage”, “sidewalk”, “cafés”, “life preservers”, “radios”, and “fantasia” are all artificial and unnecessary to natural human life. With these attractive things, a twisted sense of value has been deeply planted in the ideology. These imageries suggest a commercial life in a social system where high technology is strongly depended and luxurious appearances are blindly admired. Marginal figures, such as beggars, drug-abusers, drunk-people, idiots, paralytics, and parasites are all expelled to dark marginal area. “Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites/ go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights/ out in the suburbs, where there are no lights.”(16-18) They are “bobbing in the ebbing sewage” while waiting chances to return to the city by getting these fake and unnecessary materials, while the naked dog even can never float. The pink dog is real the social outsider. It would never float with others in tides of fashion or “in the tidal rivers”. In sympathetic tone, the poet speaker starts as a watcher and gives her compassion to the naked dog’s isolating from population and celebrates its mental fertility with the comparison between its physical illness and true intelligence. Being naked and having scabies, the dog’s appearance suggests the distance between it and populations indulging in material life. It’s living by wits suggests its dignity and at the same time emphasize its isolation from the social system with the contrast between its bright mind and others’ blindness. The poet speaker uses contrasts between the pink dog and decorative carnival festival to imply the “blindness” of populations who live in the bright side of the social system and the “bright wits” of naked dog, which show up as a caster and originally presents as the dark side of modern society. This comparison ironically present the dialectical changes between nature and artificiality, brightness and darkness, and the position out or in the mainstream.
The imagery of Carnival in this poem presents the endless conversion between two contraries. In the Etymology, the word “carnival” is analyzed in two extremely different meanings. The one from Latin can be read as “leaving or forsaking flesh”. The other one is interpreted into “flesh-taking”, which associated with another similar word used to for Shrove Tuesday, the day right before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is named for the official ritual, the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of worshipers to symbolize death and sorrow for sin. It is also the beginning of Lent, the forth-days prayer and fasting preceding Easter. Saying good-bye to flash, extravagant, and joyful enjoyment in Shrove Tuesday, people celebrate the resurrection of Jesus in Ash Wednesday with memorial ceremony shrouded in the pale death image. However, the Carnival displaces the official ceremony as the new irresistible focus. “Ash Wednesday’ll come but Carnival is here.” (32) The reversed rules are gradually become authorized. Challenges of time never ease. One authority will be inversed by another one. Even the Carnival now is converted. “They say that Carnival’s degenerating/ ─radios, Americans, or something,/ have ruined it completely.”(34-36)
As an imagery oscillating either between meanings of “forsaking” and “taking” or images of “ending” and “starting”, the Carnival is expanded in this poem as a the poet’s awareness that both society and human life are always involved into Hegel’s dialectical theory. In the last two stanzas, readers may discover that the poet speaker seems have integrated herself into her weak animal character, which is urged to join the Carnival. There are several imageries imply the possible link between the speaker and the pink dog. The dog is described as a “poor bitch” with “hanging teats” and a mother with “babies” in some ways. With these female characters, the pink dog may be the metaphor suggesting the woman poet herself. Before being aware of the flexuous essence of the world and her life, the poet speaker expresses the flex situation and her anxiety with floating tide imageries, such as “bobbing in the ebbing sewage” and “the tidal rivers”. Living in the floating world, the poet understands her inability to escape or to involve. Like an old naked dog, she can do nothing but persuades herself to tried to accept the crazy world by “dress up” the carnival costume, which means to pretend to involve. In the end of the poem, her tone changes from disappointed and sympathetic one to the intricate one mingled with panic and hope. She treats the Carnival with its original meaning as a celebration of the coming of rebirth after death and tries to consulate herself with this unwilling but necessary thought.
With the isolation and strangeness of the pink dog, the poet speaker presents numbers of contrasts existing in the world and her life. Through the ambiguous and dialectical meaning of the Carnival, she expresses her observation of the unstopped changing world and her anxiety. “ Carnival is always wonderful! / A depilated dog would not look well. / Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” (37-39) In the final stanza, the poet mentions her unwilling choice with a joyful tone hunting by panic feelings. The ambiguous tone not only suggests the stirring dilemma in the poet’s mind, but also presents her main idea that human life is as ambiguous and unsteady as the Carnival. No matter we are like the chaotic world or not, dressing-up for dance may be the most practical and sensible solution since we are all live in the Carnival.
Work Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, 1984.
Pictures:
the Cobacabana Beach in Rio de Janerio
“Umbrellas clothe the beach in ever hue.”
a sexy dancing queen in the Carnival
“ Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!”