Visits to St. Elizabeth's
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Visits to St Elizabeths is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop which is modelled on the English nursery rhyme This is the house that Jack built. The poem refers to the confinement of Ezra Pound to St. Elizabeths Hospital. The nursery rhyme style gives an unusual effect to the strange or unsettling descriptions of a psychiatric hospital in the poem. Likewise the poem treats Pound ambivalently describing him by turns as "honored", "brave", "cruel", and "wretched" among other things.