Five Flights Up

“Five Flights Up” is a lyrical, narrative poem by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop. The poem is a lyric because it’s short and slender and features hints of personal emotion, and it’s a narrative because it tells the story of a dog and a bird. “Five Flights Up” is a part of Bishop’s poetry collection Geography III (1976)—the last book Bishop published before her death in 1979. Although the poem isn’t as famous as some of her other poems, like “The Fish” (1946) or “One Art” (1976), “Five Flights Up” reflects Bishop’s signature messages and ideas; it presents a nuanced portrayal of the world and a speaker subsumed by what they’re witnessing. As with Bishop’s other work, the poem demonstrates how subtle or ordinary sights and sounds—in this case, a dog and a bird—can lead to intoxicating observations and thoughts. In his book-length study on Bishop, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton University Press, 2015), the distinguished Irish writer Colm Tóibín says Bishop wrote with a “hushed, solitary concentration.” That quiet, singular focus is on display in “Five Flights Up,” and the intense absorption could be why Bishop famously published only around 100 poems in her lifetime. Besides poetry, Bishop published essays, short stories, translations, and a travel book about Brazil.

Poet Biography

Elizabeth Bishop was born February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her dad, William, came from a prominent family. His dad was a wealthy contractor and supervised the construction of notable buildings like the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. William, who had Bright’s disease, died when Elizabeth was eight months old. Her mom, Gertrude, was an ice skater and trained to be a nurse. She had mental health conditions and, while at Boston’s Deaconess Hospital for treatment, she jumped out a second-story window. It fell on family members to raise Bishop. She didn’t have a pleasant childhood. She dealt with asthma and other ailments, but she enjoyed reading and school.

In 1930, Bishop enrolled in the prestigious women’s college Vassar where she, along with other students—like the famous novelist Mary McCarthy—started a literary journal, Con Spirito. While at Vassar, Bishop met the established American Modernist poet, Marianne Moore. A critical influence on Bishop, Moore helped Bishop publish and gain crucial recognition. Later, Bishop became close friends with the Confessional poet Robert Lowell. Although Bishop had some income due to her wealthy family, Lowell helped Bishop supplement her income by getting her grants and teaching appointments.

Bishop and Lowell had much in common. They both experienced alcoholism, mental health conditions, and stormy love lives. In her biography of Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Megan Marshall writes, “Elizabeth was never one to join the cause of sexual liberation or to identify herself publicly as a lesbian.” Yet Elizabeth was attracted to women and maintained loving, romantic relationships with women throughout her life.

In 1946, Bishop published her book North & South. From 1949 to 1950, Bishop was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—an august position now known as Poet Laureate. The post required Bishop to live in Washington, DC, which she didn’t enjoy. What Bishop liked was travel. She visited Mexico, Africa, and Europe. In 1951, she traveled to Brazil. After a debilitating allergic reaction to cashews. Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares (Lota), a member of an influential Brazilian family, helped Bishop recover. The two women fell in love, and they lived together in Brazil for almost 15 years.

In 1955, Bishoped published Poems. The book combined her first book, North & South, out of print at the time, and her new poems, collected as A Cold Spring. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. In 1961, Lota started to oversee the construction of a large public park and entertainment project in Rio. Lota’s new job and the political turmoil in Brazil strained their relationship.

In 1965, Bishop published her third collection of poetry, Questions of Travel. A year later, Bishop took a teaching position at the University of Washington and began a romantic relationship with a 23-year-old pregnant, married woman, Roxanne Cumming. Meanwhile, the demands of the public project put Lota’s physical and mental health in jeopardy. In 1967, Lota visited Bishop in New York, where she died after overdosing on Valium.

Bishop and Cumming continued their relationship, living in San Francisco and Brazil. In 1969, Bishop published The Complete Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1970. Reviewing The Complete Poems for The New York Times Book Review in June 1969, the distinguished American poet John Ashbery called Bishop “a poet of strange, even mysterious, but undeniable and great gifts.”

In 1970, The New Yorker hired Bishop to review poetry, but Bishop never published a review. With help from Lowell, Bishop earned a teaching position at Harvard, becoming the first woman to teach creative writing at the eminent university. At Harvard, Bishop met Alice Methfessel, a woman in her late twenties who worked as a secretary at Kirkland House—a residential complex at the university. The two women fell in love, and Megan Marshall says Bishop “slept with Alice’s letters” and “carried her photo buttoned into her shirt pocket” when they were apart.

With Alice, Bishop continued to experience mental health issues, physical ailments, and alcoholism. In 1971, after three years of not publishing a new poem, The New Yorker published “In the Waiting Room.” Bishop published a collection of prose and poetry, Geography III, which features “Five Flights Up,” in 1976. Bishop dedicated the book to Alice, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. One year later, Bishop revised her will and appointed Alice as her single literary executor. On October 6, 1979, while getting ready to go out for dinner, Bishop experienced a cerebral aneurysm and died.

Poem Text

Bishop, Elizabeth. “Five Flights Up.” 1976. FSG Work in Progress.

Summary

The poem starts at night, which is why it’s “[s]till dark” (Line 1). There’s a bird on the branch. This bird doesn’t belong to the speaker, nor has the speaker bothered to name the bird, so it’s “unknown” (Line 2). Yet the bird isn’t a total stranger to the speaker since it “sits on his usual branch” (Line 2), suggesting the speaker has seen the bird on the branch before.

There’s also a “little dog next door” (Line 3). As it’s night, the dog is asleep, and he “barks in his sleep / inquiringly, just once” (Lines 3-4), as if his bark was a question about something. The bird “inquires” (Line 5) in his sleep, but the bird manifests his interest by “quavering” (Line 6). The speaker doesn’t say what the dog and bird inquired about, but whatever it was, they were “answered directly, simply, / by day itself” (Lines 8-9).

Stanza 1 ends with day, and Stanza 2 starts with morning, which the speaker describes as “[e]normous,” “ponderous,” and “meticulous” (Line 10). The speaker then focuses on the “gray light” of the morning and the branches on the tree where the “bird still sits” (Line 14). Since it’s morning, the bird wakes up and yawns, or “seems to yawn” (Line 14).

The little dog is awake too. He “runs in his yard” (Line 15) and encounters his owner, who yells at him, “You ought to be ashamed!” (Line 17). The speaker doesn’t know what the dog did to make his owner scream at him, so they wonder, “What has he done?” (Line 18). Meanwhile, the rebuke doesn’t bother the dog because he “bounces cheerfully up and down” (Line 19) and then “rushes in circles in the fallen leaves” (Line 20).

In Stanza 4, the speaker returns to the dog owner’s remark. They declare, “Obviously, he has no sense of shame” (Line 21). The blatant absence of shame also links to the bird, and it’s because they “know everything is answered, / all taken care of” (Lines 22-23). The bird and the dog understand that life will work itself out on its own, so they don’t feel shame. “Yesterday brought to today so light!” exclaims the speaker (Line 25), reinforcing the effortlessness of life, which might be why the speaker finds yesterday “impossible to lift” (Line 26). There’s no need to make an effort to go back to yesterday because it’s morning and a new day.