Which eye's his eye?
Which limb lies
Next the mirror?
For neither is clearer
Nor a different colour
In a poem that incorporates flux, Bishop interrogates the idea of how one holds oneself together. She seems to ask: in a world in which things are always changing, as in this poem, how does one maintain one’s identity? 
 (Source:  Open Yale Courses.  ) 
 There’s a certain comedy to her inquiry, as the title itself is a play on the famous poem “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. This title is also a way of tweaking conventional gender dynamics during the modernist and pre-modernist periods.
The Gentleman of Shalott