Five Flights Up

Published in the 1970s, “Five Flights Up” has much in common with the literary movement known as Postmodernism. As with Modernists, Postmodernists emphasize fragmentation and question grand ideals. Postmodernists add an inclination toward playfulness and the incorporation of quirky details, which tend to make Postmodern poems seem like puzzles. In “Five Flights Up,” Bishop plays around with the dog and bird by giving them human traits. The morning, too, receives human characteristics. Bishop’s meticulous tone produces peculiarities, which, in turn, can feel puzzling. It’s a mystery why the dog “barks in his sleep / inquiringly, just once” (Lines 3-4) and how the dog and the bird “know everything is answered” (Line 22). As with a fair amount of Postmodern poetry, “Five Flights Up” gives the reader the power to put the pieces together and come up with answers.

The nuanced images in “Five Flights Up” link the poem to Imagism—an early 20th-century movement that (as the name implies) stressed imagery. For Imagists like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams, poetry worked best when it produced a clear picture for the reader. Bishop’s poem contains a few crisp images, with an ornate description of the morning in Stanza 2 and a direct depiction of the dog as he “bounces cheerfully up and down” (Line 19) and “rushes in circles in the fallen leaves” (Line 20).

In the 1820s and 1830s, American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne developed Transcendentalism. This literary movement pushed writers to surrender their individuality in favor of a deeper connection with the world around them. In a letter to the British poet and her biographer Anne Stevenson, Bishop claims she and Robert Lowell “are both descendants from the Transcendentalists” (Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, the Library of America, 2008). Bishop demonstrates her debt to Transcendentalism in “Five Flights Up” with a speaker that forms a close bond with their environment—the dog, the bird, and the morning—and draws attention to themselves only once in the last line. The final line is in a parenthesis—perhaps to remind the reader that the speaker’s “I” is an aside and not of foremost importance.