Benton 59. Bishop inscribed the painting in the upper left-hand corner with the greeting “Happy Birthday”, but whose birthday she intended to celebrate is unstated, perhaps her own. “Bishop’s eye was drawn to anything on a table – an oil lamp, a candelabra, tea laid for one, a scraggly bouquet of daisies in a paint bucket. This attention to proximate objects is hardly surprising in a poet who values useless concentration, and the emphasis on domestic interiors reflects her long meditation on ‘home.’” – Bonnie Costello, Planets On Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 84. On the subject of home, Bishop said, “I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s a pretty good description of a poet’s sense of home.” – Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Edited by George Monteiro. (Jackson, MS.: University of Mississippi Press, 1996), p. 102.