The conversation By Elizabeth Bishop is about an internal dialogue, a conversation the self has with the self about the self and what the self or heart wants. The heart--the seat of emotions--is upset and tries to figure for itself what or whom it, the heart, desires. No one outside sees this turmoil. Possibly in its questing--for love?--the beleagured heart really knows what it wants but after having suffered so long in "tumult" it takes a while to admit its upset. When it does so, it accepts itself.
All along it's as though the speaker has known what it wants--"a name," the name of a person, the object of desire; and then all the feelings mentioned earlier are resolved when the name and the feelings are identified or incarnated in one individual.
The form of the poem abets this reading: stanzas one and two rhyme uneasily, line by line: heart/start; questions/senses/ [not the third line] voice/choice/ difference/sense. The final couplet resolves this resolution, aurally and ideationally, where the beloved comes into being. The last line spills over rhythmically, as though all the emotional blocked in the first ten or eleven lines is released.
I like the use of personification in this poem because, by using it to describe the heart or subconscious mind, Bishop makes the nature of one's subconscious easier to relate to from a conscious viewpoint. The purpose is to stimulate engagement between these sectors of human reality and create "conversation", or at least to express this interaction of the two parts of self that Bishop has felt. Eventually, two thoughts of these two parallel selves intermingle and become one, because after all they are of the same mind, but simply of a separate nature.
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