Blog Post #12: "Five Flights Up" and "Five AM"

Paired Poetry Essay: “Five Flights Up” and “Five AM”

While Elizabeth Bishop and William Stafford both personify the harbingers of morning in their poems “Five Flights Up” and “Five AM,” the two poets discuss the morning from very different perspectives. Bishop’s use of antithesis, which ironically plays on her envious attitude towards morning, and personification contrasts Stafford’s pairing of personification with enjambment, which illustrates his beloved unfamiliarity with his surroundings. Stafford discusses the rejuvenating properties of morning, while Bishop’s frustrated attitude towards the morning marks the persistence of her troubles through the morning's dew.

Bishop creates a quietly distant interplay with the morning in “Five Flights Up.” In discussing the morning as an uninvolved, removed observer, a clear distance is created between her and what lay outside her window, perhaps from “five flights up.” Bishop’s distinct use of personification creates this “distance,” allowing everything that she sees outside to act in an understandable, human way. After recognizing the distant question of the bird and of the dog, Bishop personifies the coming day which possibly answers these questions, “simply/by day itself.” (ll. 8-9) In allowing the day , not herself, to take action in answering the questions of the morning, Bishop further removes herself from the events unfolding before her, from the events she has difficulty relating to; she is almost jealous of the simple beauty of morning, a simplicity she doesn't feel in her own life, self-sufficient and sure of itself. The bird that Bishop watches from afar, and “unknown” bird, “sits on his usual branch.” (L. 2) Bishop’s use of antithesis here reinforces her removal from the morning. Bishop recognizes that this spot is frequented by a bird, but it isn’t until this moment that she questions “who” the bird is; although she sees him time and time again in his “usual” spot, Bishop observes this bird from afar, and all it ever can be to her is a discernible stranger. Just as she knows the morning is answering the questions of the bird and dog, but fails to understand the answer, Bishop’s unfamiliar familiarity with this bird further removes her from her observations. Though the morning is so simple, so honest, so rejuvenating for the bird, Bishop can’t escape the troubles of yesterday from five flights up.

In “Five AM,” William Stafford takes a clearly different attitude towards the morning. His use of personification is limited to the opening and closing of his poem where he describes the rain touching his face and “the early morning breath[ing].” (L. 1) Between these distant, removed observations, though, Stafford contrasts Bishop by stepping back from his observations and generally discussing humanity. His observations of the morning are more concrete, more significant than Bishop’s distanced encapsulation in her observations; this allows Bishop to divert from his immediate surroundings and contemplate their relevance, their significant in the world beyond his scope, the world beyond Five AM. Staffords use of enjambment adds to this contemplative attitude towards morning; by stopping mid-line in the middle of his poem with lines like, “People in every country who never…” allows for breaks in his pacing (L. 9). This pacing, which like Bishop’s is slow, includes breaks, pauses, which suggest a turn in Stafford’s thought from the immediate to the worldly. Clearly, Stafford’s attitude towards the morning is more interested, involved, and contemplative.

While Bishop envies the simple, routine morning from her place of grief, Stafford contemplates the overarching significance of morning, Bishop looks at what morning is while Stafford considers what it means.