Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Monument” is not a difficult poem to understand based on its most element level of word choice. According to the good folks who create the engine for such things, the average readability rating for the poem is set pretty firmly at sixth grade. “Promontory” or “ecclesiastical” may be the most difficult word for readers beyond that level and those are hardly obscure words or the kind of stuff you see in poems that are the reason people hate poetry. The language is simple and the sentence construction efficient. Thematic understanding does not rely upon holding advanced degrees in classical allusion and the narrative is fairly straightforward rather than being one of those poems that seem to be about nothing. So why is this a difficult poem to understand?
Actually, readers today probably won’t have the difficulty with it than readers had with “The Monument” for its first sixty or so years of existence. This poem first began seeping into the American consciousness in the 1940’s and at that time to simply hint that “it’s meta” would have meant next to nothing to most of those who had today. Today, of course, everything has changed. Bishop was introducing Postmodern elements into her poetry before Modernism had even run its course. The subject of “The Monument” seems obvious, but that’s where readers over the decades have run into trouble. The subject of “The Monument” is not a monument, but “the monument.” It’s meta; it’s a poem about a work of art that is the monument, not a work of art that is a monument. It is very precise in that regard, but that is about the only regard where it is so precise.
Two keys lines to pay attention to in an attempt to analyze this poem are “The monument is one-third set against the sea; two-thirds against a sky” and “Why does that strange sea make no sound?” These quotes are important not because the second clarifies the objective state of the perceptual state of the first. In fact, it does just the opposite. If the speaker meant to assert with finality that what its being described actually is the representation of the monument in a work of art, then it is a strange to do it since the very question of why the sea isn’t making any sound seems like a pretty deranged thing to inquire. Why would a painting of a background that is one-third sea and two-thirds sky make any sound at all? Might as well ask the sky made no sound. Therefore, what is accomplished in these two lines which situated close together, but still separated by a dozen lines is not making the question of what is being discussed by the two parties clearer, but even more ambiguous.
From this can be extrapolated for the purposes of analysis that the monument is the subject beyond question. What is left unanswered is the shape that the monument takes. The final line of the poem very strongly suggests that it is this perception of form that is the true subject of the poem. That is, obviously, what makes it meta. It is not about the monument itself, but the perceptual state of the monument. The closing words of advice should not be taken lightly, but rather applied ferociously to arriving at one’s own subjective interpretation of this perceptual state of the monument: “Watch it closely.”
