A sense of ignorance and inability to enjoy the subtle things in life such as the what the speaker in Giovanni's poem refers to may be the cause of the fear of the unknown and confusion about what your place in life is that the speaker in Bishop's poem experiences. .
In "Swinging on a Rainbow", Nikki Giovanni is comparing life to literally swinging on a rainbow. Throughout the poem, the main message to me is that we have to enjoy the subtle things in life because it is essentially these subtle things , noises, images, and other things that are able to enhance our few on life itself and the experiences we have. In the poem, she states how she feels as if something is missing when she "can't hear the birds sing", hear the "rustle of the leaves in the fall" and the "almost quiet except for someone turning the newspaper pages". Now looking at the things she mentioned, the first thing that hit my mind was that these things are so obscure and seemingly unimportant that they shouldn't even be a worry for anyone, they are things that most of us wouldn't pay attention to regardless when we go through our daily routines, so for her to state them as things that she notices and finds such importance in, is amazing. She goes on in the poem to say that true reading is done not by seeing alone, but by "hearing, listening, and smelling". At first, this might seem confusing, I mean, what ever could she mean by this? What's there to listen to while reading? What should we be smelling? After a while, I realized that she was trying to say that when reading a book, we should also try and enjoy the obscure things. After all, a good writer should be able to make a reader become thoroughly engrossed in the work. We should feel totally "submerged" in the story, hear everything the characters hear, smell what they smell and even taste what they taste.