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Casabianca Poem Analysis

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Although it is a short poem, “Casabianca” has no shortage of meaning and criticisms. Zhou Xiaojing provided a quick backstory for the poem that put much of it in perspective and allowed me to dig deeper into Bishop’s potential meaning.
At first, I was not aware that this poem has a dialogue with another poem with the same name written by Felicia Hemans. That poem, much like Bishop, discusses love. Unlike Bishop, Hemans’s poem focuses on one particular form of love which she highly praises: the love of a “young faithful heart” (Hemans). Heman’s poem focuses on a captain, whose last name is Casabianca, who was mortally wounded in a battle in 1798. The boy in the poem his Casabianca’s son and refuses to leave his side, thus both of them die. Xiaojing, in their discussion of the two poems, points out that Heman’s notion of love is one-sided. Heman builds up the boy so much that the other sailor, who have fled the wreckage, are mentioned briefly and without care. Bishop’s poem, however, turns the notion of love on its head when she converses with Heman.
However, all of the aforementioned information comes directly from Xiaojing, and while it is all perfectly valid, I believe there is more to explore with this poem. First, I find it curious that Bishop has the boy standing on the burning deck repeating the “Casabianca” poem. Heman’s picture of the boy is generous. She calls him brave and applauds all of his decisions and even mourns him in the last line. To have this boy, perhaps the same boy, reciting the poem with a “stammering elocution” takes away Heman’s depiction of bravery while allotting that the boy is brave for staying “while the poor ship in flames went down” (PPL, 5). However, this juxtaposition to Heman’s poem allows Bishop’s next stanza to ring truer. The burning boy is not an all-encompassing figure full of love and bravery and little else, but rather a boy attempting to be brave, because of his love for his father, while being terrified; this helps the sailors who have swam away from the ship not seems so heartless and unimportant. They, too, were terrified of the burning ships and decided to swim to safety, but instead of denouncing them as Heman does Bishop understands that their cowardice does

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