....I added this contrary reading of the Bishop poem (quoted previously) to one of my comment boxes:

Another thing about the poem: it can be read (or heard) not as comedy, but something sadder. The "quarrel with oneself" that is poetry - the solipsistic quest to answer one's own questions - BECAUSE it's in the "same tone of voice" - turns into a sort of vortex.

Consider the final couplet, then : if we imagine that "a name" here implies a real name, of a real lover, perhaps - then the consequence of the poetic process is a reduction of the (absent) person to a mere name, a word, indistinguishable from all its other (verbal) connotations.

The poem wavers undecideably between two diametrically opposed implications.

(& maybe EB is singin' the blues here : testifying to the downside of "shyness" as a literary strategy. Being ironic about her own manner. Pure speculation on my part.)