“The Monument” is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop originally published in 1939 and then collected in her first book of poetry, North and South, in 1946. The poem is an example of what is known as ekphrastic verse which is just fancy literary terminology for a poem that is constructed as an analysis or commentary upon a work of visual art. It is really more complicated than that simplistic description of genre, however, because what makes the poem so worthy of analysis and anthology is ambiguity of its titular object.
Constructed as a dialogue between two speakers, the language of the discourse is such that it becomes increasingly clear that what is under discussion is increasingly less clear. At the center of the poem is a mystery left unresolved: is the visual work of art being commented upon an actual monument near an actual sea or itself a work of visual art representing a monument by the sea. Is the monument, then, really a monument or merely a painting of a monument?
The structure of the poem is much simpler than the complexity of its meaning. The verse is comprised of seventy-eight lines written in unrhymed free verse with breaks to indicate the shift between speakers. Thus is not a confusing poem in the sense of style or technique. It is not overloaded with an abundance of obscure references and allusions or weighed down with tricky symbolism requiring an advanced degree to parse and interpret. On its most basic level, “The Monument” is an easy poem to read and understand. Its difficulty really only becomes apparent upon closer analytical scrutiny or a heightened attentiveness to purposeful ambiguity of its language and the divergence in tone manifested by the two characters involved in its discourse.
Since its initial appearances in print, “The Monument” has become one of Bishop’s more frequently anthologized and studied poems. It has also gone to be placed alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” iconic examples of ekphrastic poetry at its highest level of achievement.
