Insomnia

The traditional reading of this poem focuses on a more text-based interpretation without considering the context of Bishop’s life. The poem’s title informs readers that this poem will be about insomnia, and the imagery supports this as Bishop sets up the scene at night under a lively moon. The speaker in the poem, presumably an insomniac herself, gazes at the moon in wonder and almost speaks to it, admiring its strength and seemingly connecting with it through their shared insomnia. The foremost qualities the speaker gives the moon are independence, self-assurance, attitude—and femininity. Bishop personifies the moon as a “she.”

In the first stanza, the speaker describes the moon as a visionary that looks out millions of miles across the stars. The moon is prideful. She spends her days daydreaming in sleep and her nights dreaming while awake. This moon, then, is powerful, confident, and has ownership over herself.

While the speaker doesn’t provide any details about herself or her personality, the use of the reflection establishes a connection between speaker and object. What’s tricky to unpack is how the speaker feels about this mirror relationship. This could be a reflection of the speaker’s true spirit. It could also be that the reflection is an inversion of the speaker, suggesting the moon is everything the speaker isn’t.

Because this powerful image is seen through the mirror, the reader might think the speaker sees the moon as a reflection of herself, but really, the moon is a foil for the speaker, who is inert and consumed by loss and regret. In this way, the moon is an inversion or antithesis of the speaker.

One place to see the relationship between the speaker and the moon is the buildup to the final line of the poem. In fact, the entire purpose of the first two stanzas is to develop the poem’s main thematic concern that arrives in that final line. In the final stanza, Bishop returns to her original image of an inverted moon (inverted because it’s seen through a mirror) to drive home the abnormality of a few things in this scene, which she lists in the last stanza. However, the purpose of these inversions is to build up a series of images that will enhance the punch of the final image.

Up until the final line, the poem is entirely third person and detached, but the final line introduces the speaker’s true emotional preoccupation: In this inverted world where everything is opposite the way it is in real life, the person the speaker is writing to loves the speaker. This suggests the poem’s whole motivation is to explore the feeling of unrequited love. Therefore, insomnia serves as just another inversion from the regular world, helping to set up the poet’s ultimate longing, which is the love of the unnamed lover.

When stepping outside of the text, however, the poem can quickly adapt a few social dynamics based on Bishop’s life. It is possible, for example, to read this as a lesbian poem where Bishop explores the world of her own sexuality, or the world that most people at the time considered to be unnatural or inverted. In this interpretation, Bishop is revealing, exploring, and celebrating her sexuality and finding a connection between her identity and that of the moon.

From another perspective, this poem could serve to further bury Bishop’s sexuality from the public, as her love is never named and only exists beyond layers of symbolism. The use of mirrors and reflections could suggest internal strife: The speaker’s truest feelings clash with the image she must present in public. In this way, the speaker’s true nature as seen through the mirror could represent her id (primal desires), while the way she presents herself in the real world is a manifestation of her superego (influence of society), helping her navigate the complex demands of the world she lives in. This is a Freudian interpretation.

Regardless of the interpretation, though, the poem ends with a powerful yet simple statement about unrequited love. The context is unclear: The poem doesn’t indicate whether the speaker has been flat-out rejected or whether—as would often be the case for lesbians in this era—the speaker simply cannot voice her feelings and knows (or, more likely, automatically assumes) that her beloved doesn’t feel similarly. The ambiguity is not, however, key to the poem’s meaningfulness. Whether she has been rejected or is simply trapped in pained silence, the speaker wishes to turn the entire universe around just to feel the love of someone who, in the normal universe, does not love her in kind. The speaker’s romantic life thus mirrors her sleep life—what should be is no longer, for the world is inverted. Bishop is careful to build to this crescendo as she spends four lines in the last stanza repeating various inversions that all start with the word “where.” This repetition builds the stanza’s energy until, without notice, Bishop crashes the entire poem with a devastating shift that breaks the rhythm of the stanza and the entire poem. She breaks up the listed clauses with the conjunction “and” (Line 18), breaking the pattern and rhythm without warning, thus directing her readers’ attention to this final phrase that seems to just dangle off the side of this stanza’s cliff. The last statement, which expresses the speaker’s entire motivation for writing and the cause of her insomnia, has weight because of its brevity and disruption of the stanza’s pattern.

If a reader focuses on this message, the poem’s tone becomes incredibly melancholy and lonely, and the titular insomnia seems to be the result of the loss the speaker feels.

Because there are many possible interpretations, the reader is free to choose the one they connect with most. The poem could be a lament for unrequited love, it could be a vocal celebration of lesbian love and identity, or it could work to suppress the poet’s sexual identity through the use of reflections that create other selves for the speaker’s eyes to see. The abstract, figurative strength of this poem is common in Bishop’s work, as she often presented personal details and feelings through metaphor, thus creating deeply personal poetry without the poetry becoming too confessional.