The Moose Figurative Language

Before “The Moose” by Elizabeth Bishop begins, there is an epigraph that reads “For Grace Bulmer Bowers”. Bishop once wrote a letter to her favorite aunt, Grace Bulmer Bowers, to tell her that she was writing a new poem and was planning to dedicate it to her. Bowers was somewhat of a foster mother for Bishop growing up, but Bowers had unfortunately died by the time the poem was finished. “The Moose” is a narrative poem of 168 lines. Its twenty-eight stanzas of six lines each are not rigidly structured. The lines of the poem vary in length from four to eight syllables, but those of five or six syllables are most common. The pattern of stresses is lax enough almost to blur the distinction between verse and prose; the rhythm is that of a slow,

narrating speaking voice hovering over the descriptive details.
“The Moose” draws attention to the incomparable power of nature and its often uncommon intersections of it into our modern lives. The first four stanzas of the poem map the physical terrain of Canada – specifically Nova Scotia, because that’s where Bishop lived at a young age with her grandparents after her father’s unexpected passing and her mother’s institutionalization due to mental illness. The use of the phrase “narrow provinces” in the opening line not only helps begin describing the landscape of Canada but it also says something about the people that live there. The native diet “of fish and bread and tea,” with its repetitive use of the word “and” invokes a simple and equally repetitive life. What people consume as a part of their local diet doesn’t change much and they eat the same thing frequently. The monotony of life is reflected in the predictable ebb and flow of the water, “the long tides / where the bay leaves the sea / twice a day...,” which also manifests itself in the somewhat consistent rhyme scheme that sounds like of the tides of the ocean coming in and out.
There is something notable about Bishop’s use of fog in the poem. She is so meticulous in the quality of the image of the landscape she paints for her readers. She worked on this poem for almost twenty years; every word serves a purpose and therefore nothing should be overlooked. The focus of the poem snaps to merely a “lone traveler” being seen off by “seven relatives / and a collie supervises.” She utilizes something as common as fog, although unfortunately it is a symbolic cliché, and the fog is used as a descriptor, instead of being used to obscure it:

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

The fog is used as a tool to catalyze a separation from the familiar home to the unfamiliar world outside of it; “Goodbye to the elms, / to the farm, to the dog,” The feeling of these two lines is bittersweet; she’s leaving home.

From that point on, the reader is aware that they are being separated from the landscape, moving through the outside world as it passes by the window. The fog, “shifting, salty, thin, / comes closing in,” at the end of the seventh stanza, completing the separation.
The long lines that open the poem represent the movement of the bus through the landscape. When it stops moving to pick up the “lone traveler” in the sixth stanza, it stops the long sentence that has been running since the start of the poem. As the bus resumes and picks up speed, the lines follow suit. It is night, and therefore dark as the bus enters the tree line of the thick woods of New Brunswick. Here, an important change occurs, when a drastic landscape shifts occurs;

hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a

pasture.

This stanza is meant to represent the woods being wild and untamed compared to the more familiar human-controlled world of the first half of the poem. The woods have a clinging and dense feel, as if they’re supposed to be very close. The atmosphere of unfamiliar uneasiness outside the bus is a stark contrast with the one inside, where the passengers feel safe behind the metal hull: “The passengers lie back. / Snores. Some long sighs.” The narrator herself starts to drift to sleep, and Bishop’s words becomes rhythmic and hypnotic. She can’t help but eavesdrop on an elderly couple in the back of the bus having a conversation about their lives.
The sleepy, dream-like haze is punctured suddenly when the bus driver stops suddenly and shuts the lights off:

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.

The moose investigates this intrusion into her own world, scanning the foreign hunk of metal. The large and foreign creature’s abrupt appearance reminds these “modern” humans of the other world they are constantly surrounded by and also alienated from. For a moment, they share the same space and are aware of each other’s presence, both wary, but curious, strangely excited by the abnormal. The spell is soon broken by the bus as it begins to move again. The narrator wants to spend more time looking at the moose, moving herself to be able to see it “on the moonlit macadam.” As the bus moves on, Bishop uses familiar mnemonic tools—the natural and the mechanical: “Then there’s a dim / smell of moose, an acrid / smell of gasoline.” The pivotal moment has passed. But for Bishop, those “dim” and “acrid” smells lingered powerfully enough to compel the commitment of the memory to paper, even two decades later.