Elizabeth Bishop's ‘Pink Dog’ and other non-human animals

Abstract

‘Elizabeth Bishop's “Pink Dog” and other non-human animals' examines Bishop's late poem ‘Pink Dog’ which features a female street dog in Rio de Janeiro. I argue that although scholarship to date on this poem has focused solely on the dog as a metaphor for human conditions, human beings are not necessarily central to the poem's grammatical structure. Human-centred assumptions concerning man's dominance over animals is not honoured in Bishop's poems in general, and this animal ethics partially accounts for the enigmatic, other-worldly quality so often noted of her poems featuring animals. The article responds to current topics in post-humanist animal ethics while offering close readings of other animal poems including the more well-known ‘The Moose' and ‘The Fish'.