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Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Though Elizabeth Bishop was considered for many years to be a "poet's poet," her stature as a major force in contemporary literature continues to grow through the high regard of the poets and critics who have followed her ...
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FURTHER READING
Related Prose
Elizabeth Bishop's 'New' Poems
by Lloyd Schwartz
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Suicide of a Moderate Dictator  
by Elizabeth Bishop

This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;
leak from the dangling telephone earphones
sapping the festooned switchboards' strength;
fall from the windows, blow from off the sills,
—the vague, slight unremarkable contents
of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers
like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers,
crocking the way the unfocused photographs
of crooked faces do that soil our coats,
our tropical-wight coats, like slapped-at moths.

Today's a day when those who work
are idling. Those who played must work
and hurry, too, to get it downe,
with little dignity or none.
The newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters
crash down. But anyway, in the night
the headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets
and sidewalks everywhere; a sediment's splashed
even to the first floors of apartment houses.

This is a day that's beautiful as well,
warm and clear. At seven o'clock I saw
the dogs being walked along the famous beach
as usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn,
leaving their paw prints draining in the wet.
The line of breakers was steady and the pinkish,
segmented rainbow steadily hung above it.
At eight, two little boys were flying kites.




"Suicide of a Moderate Dictator" from Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2006 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
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