The Shampoo

Elizabeth Bishop is the author of the lyric poem “The Shampoo.” Bishop published the poem in 1955 as a part of her second collection of poems, A Cold Spring. “The Shampoo” qualifies as a lyric poem since it’s short and expresses personal moments and feelings. The poem sends the message that common activities—like washing someone’s hair—can possess extraordinary powers. The poem aptly reflects Bishop’s work because most of her poems involve closely looking at the things that make up the everyday world and describing their fantastic, captivating quality. For example, in her famous poem “The Fish” (1946), Bishop illustrates the intensity of catching a fish, and in “The Man-Moth” (1946), another well-known work, Bishop turns a typo that she observed in a New York Times article into an enigmatic creature. With “The Shampoo,” Bishop makes shampooing a close friend’s hair seem like a spiritual and natural phenomenon. Although her poems can come across as distant and dispassionate, many of them—“The Shampoo” included—are the result of private emotions. Bishop took her time with her poems, only publishing around 100 poems in her career. Her painstaking efforts paid off when she won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. In addition to poetry, Bishop published essays, short stories, translations, and a travel book about Brazil.

Poet Biography

Elizabeth Bishop was born February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her dad, William, came from a prominent family. His dad was a wealthy contractor and supervised the construction of notable buildings like the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Unfortunately, William, suffering from Bright’s disease, died when Elizabeth was eight months old. Her mom, Gertrude, was an ice skater and trained to be a nurse. She suffered from mental problems was committed to Boston’s Deaconess Hospital for treatment, where she ultimately jumped out of a second-story window. It then fell on family members to raise Bishop. She didn’t have a pleasant childhood. She dealt with asthma and other ailments, but she enjoyed reading and school.

In 1930, Bishop enrolled in the prestigious women’s college Vassar where she, along with other students—like the famous novelist Mary McCarthy—started a literary journal, Con Spirito. While at Vassar, Bishop’s mom died, and she met the famous American poet Marianne Moore, who helped publish Bishop and give her recognition. Later, Bishop became close friends with the confessional poet Robert Lowell. Although Bishop had some income due to her wealthy family, Lowell helped Bishop supplement her income by getting her grants and teaching appointments.

Bishop and Lowell had much in common. They struggled with alcoholism, mental illness, and stormy love lives. In her biography of Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Megan Marshall writes, “Elizabeth was never one to join the cause of sexual liberation or to identify herself publicly as a lesbian.” Yet Elizabeth was attracted to women and maintained loving, romantic relationships with women throughout her life.

In 1946, Bishop published her book North & South. From 1949 to 1950, Bishop was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—an august position now known as Poet Laureate. The post required Bishop to live in Washington, DC, which she didn’t enjoy; she preferred to travel. She visited Mexico, Africa, and Europe. In 1951, she traveled to Brazil. After a debilitating allergic reaction to cashew, Bishop recovered with the help of Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares (Lota), a part of an influential Brazilian family. The two women fell in love, and they lived together in Brazil for almost 15 years.

In 1955, Bishop published Poems. The book combined her first book, North & South, which was out of print at the time, and her new poems, collected as A Cold Spring, and featuring “The Shampoo.” The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. In 1961, Lota started to oversee the construction of a large public park and entertainment project in Rio de Janeiro. Lota’s new job and the political turmoil in Brazil strained their relationship.

In 1965, Bishop published her third collection of poetry, Questions of Travel. A year later, Bishop took a teaching position at the University of Washington and began a romantic relationship with a 23-year-old pregnant and married woman, Roxanne Cumming. Meanwhile, the demands of the public project put Lota’s physical and mental health in jeopardy. In 1967, Lota visited Bishop in New York and died after overdosing on Valium.

Bishop and Cumming continued their relationship, living in San Francisco and Ouro Preto, a town in Brazil. In 1969, Bishop published The Complete Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1970. Reviewing The Complete Poems for The New York Times Book Review in June 1969, the distinguished American poet John Ashbery called Bishop “a poet of strange, even mysterious, but undeniable and great gifts.”

In 1970, The New Yorker hired Bishop to review poetry, but Bishop never published a review. With help from Lowell, Bishop earned a teaching position at Harvard, becoming the first woman to teach a creative writing class at the eminent university. While at Harvard, Bishop became romantically involved with Alice Methfessel, a woman in her late 20s. In 1971, after three years of not publishing a new poem, The New Yorker published “In the Waiting Room.”

In the meantime, Bishop continued to battle mental health issues, physical ailments, and alcoholism. Nonetheless, in 1976 she published a collection of prose and poetry, Geography III, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. One year later, Bishop revised her will and appointed Methfessel as her single literary executor. On October 6, 1979, while getting ready to go out for dinner, Bishop experienced a cerebral aneurysm and died.

Poem Text

Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Shampoo.” 1955. Poem Hunter.

Summary

Although the poem is about one person shampooing another person’s hair, Bishop starts with “explosions on the rocks” (Line 1); something forceful and exciting happens right away. On these rocks, there are “lichens” (Line 2) or a crusty kind of plant composed partly of fungus. The lichens are “spreading” in circular “shocks,” and they’re “gray” (Line 3). The lichens are “arranged” (Line 4) in a way that makes the speaker think they’re preparing to “meet the rings around the moon” (Line 5). It’s unclear why the speaker thinks the lichens are organizing a get-together with the moon. Whatever the lichens are up to, “they have not changed” (Line 6) in the minds of the speaker and the person whose hair they’re shampooing.

The speaker and the person seem to have a pleasant life as “the heavens” look down or “attend” (7) to them. The speaker then directly addresses the other person in the poem. They call them a “dear friend” (Line 9) and describe them as “precipitate and pragmatical” (Line 10). In other words, the person provides a spark but is not hasty or unreasonable. The speaker circles back to their easy life. Time is “nothing if not amenable” (Line 12) to the speaker and their dear friend, so they’re not under pressure or rushed by the clock.

Finally, the speaker explicitly brings up shampooing and hair when they note the “shooting stars” in their dear friend’s “black hair” (Line 13). The stars are in a “bright formation” (Line 14). They’re going somewhere, but the speaker isn’t sure of their destination or why they’re leaving “so soon” (Line 16). Nevertheless, the speaker insists on washing their friend’s hair—where the shooting stars are— in a “big tin basin” (Line 17) that looks “battered and shiny like the moon” (Line 18).