Rooster by Elizabeth Bishop

Katrina Jiao

P1 Junior Honors English

2017.3.8

“In the gun-metal blue dark… just below the gun-metal blue window”, comes the first crow of the first cock. Artistically depicted was a solemn dark-blue morning in Roosters. Such a picture paints Elizabeth Bishop, in her poem "Roosters." With a stroke of her brush, she paints a rich painting with colorful imagery of darkness and light.

With her unique sharpness toward colors, Bishop renders tints as well as temperature and texture to her painting “Roosters”. In the opening four stanzas, a solemn dawn was delineated by an intricate reference of color: “In a gun-metal blue dark”. Rather than describing the sky as “blue dark”, Bishop attaches an epithet to the words to accurately present the picture in her mind. While imbuing the scene with a darkened shades of blue, the phrase also depicts the cold ray reflected by the hardened metal, the metallic luster of a gun. Through a single phrase, Bishop paints a dawn clouded with blue dark shadows, shimmering ray piercing through the coldness. Though seeming exaggerated, the deliberate opening stroke was admitted by Bishop’s herself. “In a letter to Marianne Moore, Bishop wrote that she wanted the opening to represent the baseness of military warfare, and had in mind, too, Picasso’s Guernica.” (Hanley Vincent, “Roosters” by Elizabeth Bishop — a poem whose time has come again) Resembling Guernica, a painting that portrays the Bombing of Guernica, a village in Spain, she creates a grave and solemn atmosphere under Roosters’ ruling in the first few lines.

Other than the acuteness on hues, Bishop also masters on forming a tensions between colors while maintaining unity. Following the depiction of dawn, she makes a brilliant sketch on the turbulence in the “gun-metal blue” darkness. The first mixture of colors, “glass-headed pins, oil-golds and copper greens, anthracite blues, alizarins”, introduces the fierce contrast. Transparency, bright olivine, brown green, coal-like blue, and reddish-orange, patches of pigments contort to resemble the disharmonious scene of pins on a map. Bishop creates the chaos to emphasize the territory ambition and thus illustrates roosters’ aggression. Similar description appears in the cockfighting scene. As the Rooster of “iridescence” dropped a “bloodied-feather”, he lays on the “gray ash-heap” with “metallic feathers oxidizing”. The image presents one Rooster with “flame-feather” marching around, while on the humble ground a colorless lays rooster flattened. Comprising a sharp distinction between the vibrant radiance and frozen dreariness, Bishop further highlights the combative nature of Roosters. Though seeming chaotic, the twisting pigments all serves a single purpose, to impress readers with turmoil. By compressing divergent complexions onto canvas for contrast, she manages to heighten the Rooster’s belligerence, which accounts for the turbulence dominating the darkness.