Summary
The speaker addresses children, comparing them to climbing, moving lights, and lamenting the fact that they never stay still or stay near. She asks how old she is. Next, she observes that stiff, stony wings have gathered, the feathers growing rigid. Again, she says, she doesn't know her age.
She announces that she's becoming deaf. The calls of birds seem to drip out, and waterfalls are left to flow unimpeded. She reiterates that she doesn't know how old she is and then asks to be told her age.
Finally, the speaker says to let the evening begin—to let the moon rise and the stars fly like kites. What she wants, she says, is to know her age. One final time, she demands that someone tell her how old she is.
Analysis
In these later stanzas, the metaphorical landscape of the poem becomes increasingly surreal and forbidding. The mountain of the poem's title is increasingly foregrounded, with imagery of nature becoming more prevalent. Moreover, Bishop emphasizes verticality and scale as the poem continues, with verbs such as "fall," "climb," "clamber," "hang," and "fly," as well as images of kites, birds, feathers, stars, and moons. As readers, we have a sense of immense movement, so that old age feels in some senses like a slowing-down—after all, the speaker notes her decreased mobility—and also like a period of dizzying change and sudden distance from others. Meanwhile, the poem's nature imagery is slightly off-kilter, partly because Bishop pairs nouns with unexpected adjectives and verbs. Disembodied wings "harden," birdsong "dribbles," waterfalls are "unwiped," and the moon "hangs." These can be understood as metaphors for specific conditions—stiff or arthritic hands, deafness, incontinence. But the strangeness of these images makes aging feel like an almost fantastical process, outside the realm of familiar human experience.
The mountain is the poem's central symbol, but its symbolism is far from straightforward. In one possible reading of the poem, the speaker herself is the mountain—old, immovable, and existing on a separate scale from the rest of humanity. Others may climb, clamber, and move, but the speaker remains still, at the mercy of others to stay near or respond to her. Furthermore, the speaker is still and immovable in the sense that she is obstinate, demanding over and over again to be told how old she is—but she is also immovable in the sense that she lacks the ability to navigate the world around her. At the same time, the mountain can also be understood as an alienating, threatening landscape external to the speaker. She describes the sifting, hardened wings falling around her, the dribble of birdsong and the rushing of waterfalls, as if navigating a confusing and foreign environment. This doubled reading, in which the speaker both is the mountain and is seeking to navigate the mountain, reflects the nature of her situation. She has been made foreign to herself, so that her own body and mind are a strange landscape to her.
