A Cold Spring

On this autumn morning, I'll be discussing Elizabeth Bishop's "A Cold Spring" with the students in my course on Bishop's poetry. The epigraph to the poem is from Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring," but the poem also recalls T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and that recollection allows the "General Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to shimmer through. I hope all this doesn't distract us too much from looking carefully at Bishop's poem.