Surely she would recognize that the speaker of this poem is as much a victim of a cruel age as the dog. Lacking the sting of political narrative, Bishop's critique appears naive, not shrewd. Perhaps a difficulty with this poem stems from its strange voice. Indeed, readers who aspire to more than just a superficial knowledge of Bishop's poetry must come to terms with her famed reticence. In this poem, reticence becomes the speaker's protective response to the realization that as soon as female subjectivity appears on the avenue of representation, it automatically becomes something profoundly ruinous, viscerally antiaesthetic.
Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.
In the second tercet referentiality is no longer suspended. But the title already announced this oscillation between two intersecting semantic clusters. The same observer who at poem's start had secretly recognized a signifier of femininity that otherwise exuded offense goes on to learn that it would be improper to say out loud what she realizes the minute her eye meets the pink dog and its horizon of meaning. The suspension of referentiality simultaneously speaks and represses this impropriety. The suspended referentiality that in Bishop's poem attempts to clothe in modesty an outrageous, ruinous insight into female subjectivity may also be read as a figure for the dispersal of the self.