Having returned a week ago from a week exploring Nova Scotia, this was perfectly timed. I’m transported back to brief experiences that left an indelible impression in my life. The Bay of Fundy’s 58 ft tide change is a life moment that begs poetry for expression. And the people — pure, undaunted, warm without coddling. There are occasional caution signs but they read very differently than those in the US — “Site seers have been rewarded here with death. Due to conditions, rescue is unlikely.”
Nothing else — no “be safe” or “be cautious.” Just the facts and we’re left to draw our own adult conclusions. There is something wonderful about that.
Wow! What a fortuitous coincidence. That sign sounds like the end of "Over 2000 Illustrations": like, here be "the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame."
Thanks for this report from Nova Scotia! Elizabeth Bishop would have loved that 'caution sign.' That's so much in her spirit somehow. Humor in gloom.
Fun to discover hints of Keatsian language (death as a reward as in Ode to a Nightingale "easeful death"?), in roadside signage is right up her alley. As for this your (April Bernard) account of three Bishop poems, thanks so much, can't wait for more. I find it challenging. I tend to read Bishop more as a skeptic. She often calls attention to discrepancies, between the world and our faculties of knowing, between say map and reality, or between our (weirdly Biblical) expectations as travelers and what we actually then see. The ending of "At the Fishouses" I personally read more as a warning not to go in too deep, or you will freeze and be burned, and the wonderful old man, scraping scales off of fish, "their principal beauty," seems the corollary of that negative epistemology. But perhaps you and Toibin are correct to see more, so much is revealed, we are given so much positive assertion, however elusive, that it does feel like a baptism and homecoming to read those magnificent final lines.
What I heard in the end of “At the Fishouses” is a kind of pull in the poet between attraction/attention to the sensual reality of the physical world (connected with her family through the smoking fisherman, and through shared curiosity with the seal) and the inhuman transformations of art, which seem proximate to the countervailing surrounding nothingness: the coating of silveriness (transluscence, iridescence, the bright sprinkle, sequins, the “absolutely clear”) on the smelly, rusty, worn dockside: the silverness, iciness in the sea becoming the mirror of the stars and emptiness beyond. This kind of mirroring partnership between elements (the sea and the shore, the sea and the sky) struck me also in “Map.”
Yes, I think you've got some great insights here, Ann. The poem brings art (understood to include all human activity such as weaving a net or scaling fish) and inhospitable nature into a close contrast. One is opaque (the sea) the other translucent (the objects on shore) silver. So they differ but also share the element of silveriness. Meanwhile, I have to say I am more and more won over by this positive reading of the ending. The knowledge simply is the ache, the bitter taste, the burning produced by the sea, "the cold, hard mouth/of the world." It's as Pater says, proved on the pulses, but here the hand and tongue, though such knowledge is also transitory.
Thanks for these lovely reflections. Looking forward to reading Bishop for the next few weeks!
One of my favorite moments in "The Map" comes when the speaker observes "the printer here experiencing the same excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause." The printer, like Bishop, aspires to absolute exactitude, but sometimes excitement gets in the way.
The instances of self-correction you mention--here, in "The Fish" next week, in "Sandpiper" and "The Armadillo" and elsewhere--are complicatedly related to excitement and (another word you mention) interest. The speaker is so excited to be seeing the map before her that she jots down "shadows." But she's so interested that she keeps looking, and this dilated looking leads to greater exactness--or, at least, to the admission that she can't be confident in the absolute exactness of her perception/description.
I'm struck by how, in both "The Map" and "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," visual objects seem to give tactile pleasure: the pollination of the fingertips and the loving stroking of the bays.
Have you read Colm Tóibín's short book on Bishop? It's very good, especially his reading of the end of "At the Fishhouses": "A sort of homecoming is enacted by allowing the image to transform itself, free itself from the shackles of the concrete, the positive, the world of things, and move like a boat sent to rescue someone, into an uneasy, shimmering, almost philosophical, almost religious space, using words with both freedom and restraint, suggesting something that has not been formulated or imagined by anyone before."
He says "formulated or imagined" at the end, and I think that's what makes Bishop (and Herbert, and Hopkins, and maybe any strong poet) so wonderful: the formulation is the imagining.
I am of course aware of Toibin's book, but have not read it--He's amazing, of course, but apart from the excellent insights/readings by James Merrill (ghosting for David Kalstone) in Becoming a Poet, I have --for whatever reasons--mostly gone my own way with thinking about Bishop's poems, which I have been living inside of since I was 13 and read "The Fish." Thanks for the wonderful note on "excitement"--whiich resonates through the poems as something both deisred and dangerous.
I was thinking with "shadows" / "shallows" how in that opening stanza the descriptors move between the map and the geographic reality and the language describing it—shadows on the map, shallows in the sea, language navigating between them through sound (“shallow/shadow”). Like the poem pulls between the map and the waterfront it describes the way the tide pulls between the sea and the land—does the land lean down to lift the sea, or tug the sea from under the land? The sea hangs under the shelf like the lines hang over each other. And the lines invoke the idea of a profile that is both a presence and an absence, like the women’s face that is also a vase: is the shape we are looking at the shape of the land or the shape of the sea? The poem and the map are both. The reader (“we”) and the language strokes the bays and take the water between thumb and finger like the peninsula taking the waves; the names overtake the shore, the emotion overtakes its cause.
To me the endings to "2,000 Illustrations" and "Fishhouses" are remarkably similar beyond the "unbreathing flame" that "freely fed on straw" and the "fire that feeds of stones" and burns with a "dark gray flame." Both endings come after an exhaustion with sequence: "and" and "and"; "I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, / slightly, indifferently swinging about the stones, / icily free above the stones,". The speakers (who I love thinking about as guides or teacherly friends) are paging through the book of travel memories and quotidien sights to find illumination, the image that catches fire. She is the source of the fire, or, maybe it's her intensity of attention that is all about desire for immersion in the present moment which she says she believes in but perhaps has not quite achieved. "Why couldn't we have seen / this old Nativity while we were at it?" This line for me is an admission of somehow not being able to feel the sacredness of ordinary things. She achieves this (for me) in her late poem, "The Moose" (my all time favorite), which she said she worked on for 40 years.
This is such a nice feature of the progress of the three poems April picked for us! In the first two we are looking into words, a thing on paper (like the poem), which transforms into the natural, lived world, and in the third we walk straight into the scene, but it has the same feeling of guided, imaginative entry, then opening the door on something unearthly: flame and darkness, iciness and fieriness. In "2000 Illustrations" the dark itself is "ajar." In "The Map" the opening is just hinted with the historians' colors.
I'm very moved by something Mary Jo Kietzman wrote in her comment: "This line for me is an admission of somehow not being able to feel the sacredness of ordinary things." (Mary Jo was referring to the ending of "2,000 Illustrations" and, tangentially, also "Fishhouses.")
I have loved Bishop for decades; she was my gateway into writing poems. And the first thing I loved --that so MANY people love-- was her ability to capture the places and people she encountered. With her signature perfection and quirkiness. However, I don't think I every fully considered the distance she may have felt, not just from the idea of home and love, but from the very illumination and significance of the objects (or places) she describes.
Bishop created a quasi-holiness in the world for me. Mary Jo, with one simple sentence you made me feel how often Bishop may have yearned for that experience herself, but instead felt distance or dislocation. It make me think of what Dickinson says in #348: "Had I the Art to stun myself / with Bolts -- of Melody!".
What a lovely observation, thank you! I remember reading somewhere that Jamaica Kincaid read “Geography III" and realized she knew how to write. Maybe there is something about finding a relationship of observant dislocation from a past that is both painful but understood to be a source of awareness.
Thank you for these observations about the three poems. I find "The Map" rather odd - I can't help it! I don't know what to think about the voice, which as you say about Bishop's poems is "confiding" and I think that is true, however, it is not a very close or intimate confiding, at least it doesn't feel that way to me. Her use of "we" instead of "I" seems to emphasize that. And if generally speaking we can touch a map without touching what it represents we are again removed somehow. All in all this quiet poem retains a reticent, dream-like quality for me, as if the speaker were describing a vision of her own in a voice borrowed from light, or the weather.
In contrast "At the Fishhouses" has a more immediate feel, even if it does go very large and wide again at the end.
I asked April if it were possible that the places in "2000 Illustrations" were imagined, and she said they were all experiences that Elizabeth Bishop really had. It is funny or maybe revealing that I read them as imaginatively conjured by looking at the book. Like, even using the map and the book as ways of talking about place introduces an element of mediation, a veil she pulls away in "At the Fishouses," though in "At the Fishouses" she still does seem a character a little out of place, on a journey into a different way of being—not a natural confidante of the fisherman.
Also, thought I'd mention, Baudelaire's poem, "The Voyage," famously mentions maps in the very first line (there is also that famous painting by Chardin of the child with a globe). In these male artists' work, the map is treated as a spur to make the child want to explore, even go out and conquer the world and return with an imperialistic hangover. By contrast, Bishop treats the map as an end in itself, something to contemplate, and the poem is in that sense more truly child-like, you might say. I had one of those bumpy globes as a kid, loved to touch those bumpy mountain ranges, as well as maps of the ocean floor, and I used to love to stare at them and the different countries and continents seemed to be semi-alive and related to each other as faces at a party or at a dinner table or something.
Here is the opening stanza of the Baudelaire poem:
To a child who is fond of maps and engravings
The universe is the size of his immense hunger.
Ah! how vast is the world in the light of a lamp!
In memory's eyes how small the world is!
There is also a paragraph in Bishop's essay "Primer Class" in which she describes as kindergartener her funny confusions about the maps third and fourth graders got to use.
"Only the third and fourth grades studied geography. On their side of the room, over the blackboard, were two rolled-up maps, one of Canada and one of the whole world. When they had a geography lesson, Miss Morash pulled down one or both of these maps, like window shades. They were on cloth, very limp, with a shiny surface and in pale colors-tan, pink, yellow, and green-surrounded by the blue that was the ocean. The light coming in from their windows, falling on the glazed crackly surface, made it hard for me to see them properly from where I sat. On the world map, all of Canada was pink; on the Canadian, the provinces were different colors. I was so taken with the pull-down maps that I wanted to snap them up, and pull them down again, and touch all the countries and provinces with my own hands. Only dimly did i hear the pupils' recitations of capital cities and islands and bays. But I got the general impression that Canada was the same size as the world, which somehow or other fitted into it, or the other way around, and that in the world and Canada the sun was always shining and everything was dry and glittering. At the same time, I knew perfectly well that this was not true." Collected Prose, p. 10 or the newer Prose, p. 84
About the Week 2 poems. They are wonderful to read together. Thank you. I suppose what most struck me was the way Bishop seems to be trying to put war, aggression, betrayal into larger contexts that leave room for other kinds of endings. The key line in "Roosters" for me is "Old holy sculpture / could set it all together / in one small scene, past and future": two men (Christ and Peter) amazed and surprised, but in between them is the "little cock." I can't help but think of Shakespeare's decription of the same as, "the bird of dawning [that] singeth all night long" (in the month of December). Could Bishop be thinking of the rooster as a voice from the borderland between night and day, accusation and forgiveness? Gallus canit; flet Petrus is Englished as "rooster sings; Peter cries," and Peter's tears are more powerful than the bird's repeated assertions: they "run down our chanticleer's sides and gem his spurs." Feeling (Peter's and the poet's?) make the medieval relic "a tear-encrusted artifact." The holy sculpture like the nativity illustration in "2,000 Illustrations" helps Bishop see the potency of tears and helps her pivot to hope that "deny deny deny"/ is not all the roosters cry. But it is the poet's own articulation of daylight coming to gild the undersides of things, to make a preamble "like wandering lines in marble" that resolves the tension of binary endings. "The sun climbs in, following "to see the end," faithful as enemy, or friend." She leaves room for hope without asserting one thing with certainty over another. This same attempt at wholeness of vision is present in "Little Exercise" and "The Fish" I think. Someone in a boat slept through the storm; and letting go creates a double victory for fish and fisherman. I'm curious if others pick up on all the religious symbols in all three poems this week.
Agreeing with Mary Jo, these are quite remarkable to read together. What an amazing difference in perspective - intensely personal with The Fish, omniscient for Roosters, intimately instructive with Little Exercise. In terms of the Biblical themes, there's the story of Jesus calming the storm, his instructions that the disciples should be "fishers of people" as well as Noah's rainbow, and then the mention of the sparrow - "God cares even for the sparrow," which leads me to think (optimistically) that there's some degree of hope for redemption in Roosters.
It is so helpful for me as an aspiring poet to look at Bishop's repetition: that gun-metal blue twice in the first five lines vibrates like a gong rather than sounding weak and unimaginative, and how the full and slant and internal rhymes sound intense and jittery rather than self-indulgent and forced. The words are chosen precisely for their sound and meaning, rather than as a cheap thrill.
Having returned a week ago from a week exploring Nova Scotia, this was perfectly timed. I’m transported back to brief experiences that left an indelible impression in my life. The Bay of Fundy’s 58 ft tide change is a life moment that begs poetry for expression. And the people — pure, undaunted, warm without coddling. There are occasional caution signs but they read very differently than those in the US — “Site seers have been rewarded here with death. Due to conditions, rescue is unlikely.”
Nothing else — no “be safe” or “be cautious.” Just the facts and we’re left to draw our own adult conclusions. There is something wonderful about that.
Wow! What a fortuitous coincidence. That sign sounds like the end of "Over 2000 Illustrations": like, here be "the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame."
Thanks for this report from Nova Scotia! Elizabeth Bishop would have loved that 'caution sign.' That's so much in her spirit somehow. Humor in gloom.
Fun to discover hints of Keatsian language (death as a reward as in Ode to a Nightingale "easeful death"?), in roadside signage is right up her alley. As for this your (April Bernard) account of three Bishop poems, thanks so much, can't wait for more. I find it challenging. I tend to read Bishop more as a skeptic. She often calls attention to discrepancies, between the world and our faculties of knowing, between say map and reality, or between our (weirdly Biblical) expectations as travelers and what we actually then see. The ending of "At the Fishouses" I personally read more as a warning not to go in too deep, or you will freeze and be burned, and the wonderful old man, scraping scales off of fish, "their principal beauty," seems the corollary of that negative epistemology. But perhaps you and Toibin are correct to see more, so much is revealed, we are given so much positive assertion, however elusive, that it does feel like a baptism and homecoming to read those magnificent final lines.
What I heard in the end of “At the Fishouses” is a kind of pull in the poet between attraction/attention to the sensual reality of the physical world (connected with her family through the smoking fisherman, and through shared curiosity with the seal) and the inhuman transformations of art, which seem proximate to the countervailing surrounding nothingness: the coating of silveriness (transluscence, iridescence, the bright sprinkle, sequins, the “absolutely clear”) on the smelly, rusty, worn dockside: the silverness, iciness in the sea becoming the mirror of the stars and emptiness beyond. This kind of mirroring partnership between elements (the sea and the shore, the sea and the sky) struck me also in “Map.”
Yes, I think you've got some great insights here, Ann. The poem brings art (understood to include all human activity such as weaving a net or scaling fish) and inhospitable nature into a close contrast. One is opaque (the sea) the other translucent (the objects on shore) silver. So they differ but also share the element of silveriness. Meanwhile, I have to say I am more and more won over by this positive reading of the ending. The knowledge simply is the ache, the bitter taste, the burning produced by the sea, "the cold, hard mouth/of the world." It's as Pater says, proved on the pulses, but here the hand and tongue, though such knowledge is also transitory.
Thanks for these lovely reflections. Looking forward to reading Bishop for the next few weeks!
One of my favorite moments in "The Map" comes when the speaker observes "the printer here experiencing the same excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause." The printer, like Bishop, aspires to absolute exactitude, but sometimes excitement gets in the way.
The instances of self-correction you mention--here, in "The Fish" next week, in "Sandpiper" and "The Armadillo" and elsewhere--are complicatedly related to excitement and (another word you mention) interest. The speaker is so excited to be seeing the map before her that she jots down "shadows." But she's so interested that she keeps looking, and this dilated looking leads to greater exactness--or, at least, to the admission that she can't be confident in the absolute exactness of her perception/description.
I'm struck by how, in both "The Map" and "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," visual objects seem to give tactile pleasure: the pollination of the fingertips and the loving stroking of the bays.
Have you read Colm Tóibín's short book on Bishop? It's very good, especially his reading of the end of "At the Fishhouses": "A sort of homecoming is enacted by allowing the image to transform itself, free itself from the shackles of the concrete, the positive, the world of things, and move like a boat sent to rescue someone, into an uneasy, shimmering, almost philosophical, almost religious space, using words with both freedom and restraint, suggesting something that has not been formulated or imagined by anyone before."
He says "formulated or imagined" at the end, and I think that's what makes Bishop (and Herbert, and Hopkins, and maybe any strong poet) so wonderful: the formulation is the imagining.
I am of course aware of Toibin's book, but have not read it--He's amazing, of course, but apart from the excellent insights/readings by James Merrill (ghosting for David Kalstone) in Becoming a Poet, I have --for whatever reasons--mostly gone my own way with thinking about Bishop's poems, which I have been living inside of since I was 13 and read "The Fish." Thanks for the wonderful note on "excitement"--whiich resonates through the poems as something both deisred and dangerous.
Thank you for the Colm Toibin recommendation! I'll add it to our reading list (https://books.substack.com/p/my-antonia-readingwatching-list).
I was thinking with "shadows" / "shallows" how in that opening stanza the descriptors move between the map and the geographic reality and the language describing it—shadows on the map, shallows in the sea, language navigating between them through sound (“shallow/shadow”). Like the poem pulls between the map and the waterfront it describes the way the tide pulls between the sea and the land—does the land lean down to lift the sea, or tug the sea from under the land? The sea hangs under the shelf like the lines hang over each other. And the lines invoke the idea of a profile that is both a presence and an absence, like the women’s face that is also a vase: is the shape we are looking at the shape of the land or the shape of the sea? The poem and the map are both. The reader (“we”) and the language strokes the bays and take the water between thumb and finger like the peninsula taking the waves; the names overtake the shore, the emotion overtakes its cause.
Love this reading of shallow/shadow, and more generally of language navigating the abstract/real through sound!
To me the endings to "2,000 Illustrations" and "Fishhouses" are remarkably similar beyond the "unbreathing flame" that "freely fed on straw" and the "fire that feeds of stones" and burns with a "dark gray flame." Both endings come after an exhaustion with sequence: "and" and "and"; "I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, / slightly, indifferently swinging about the stones, / icily free above the stones,". The speakers (who I love thinking about as guides or teacherly friends) are paging through the book of travel memories and quotidien sights to find illumination, the image that catches fire. She is the source of the fire, or, maybe it's her intensity of attention that is all about desire for immersion in the present moment which she says she believes in but perhaps has not quite achieved. "Why couldn't we have seen / this old Nativity while we were at it?" This line for me is an admission of somehow not being able to feel the sacredness of ordinary things. She achieves this (for me) in her late poem, "The Moose" (my all time favorite), which she said she worked on for 40 years.
lovely observations...And yes, I love The Moose too. I am planning to talk about it when we all "gather" on zoom at the end.
I was telling our writer Joy Williams last night that we were doing this and she got very excited about "The Moose."
This is such a nice feature of the progress of the three poems April picked for us! In the first two we are looking into words, a thing on paper (like the poem), which transforms into the natural, lived world, and in the third we walk straight into the scene, but it has the same feeling of guided, imaginative entry, then opening the door on something unearthly: flame and darkness, iciness and fieriness. In "2000 Illustrations" the dark itself is "ajar." In "The Map" the opening is just hinted with the historians' colors.
Yes! together they do seem to all be about opening the world for contemplation. Thank you for these insights. It's wonderful to have a guide!
Thank you for joining us!
I'm very moved by something Mary Jo Kietzman wrote in her comment: "This line for me is an admission of somehow not being able to feel the sacredness of ordinary things." (Mary Jo was referring to the ending of "2,000 Illustrations" and, tangentially, also "Fishhouses.")
I have loved Bishop for decades; she was my gateway into writing poems. And the first thing I loved --that so MANY people love-- was her ability to capture the places and people she encountered. With her signature perfection and quirkiness. However, I don't think I every fully considered the distance she may have felt, not just from the idea of home and love, but from the very illumination and significance of the objects (or places) she describes.
Bishop created a quasi-holiness in the world for me. Mary Jo, with one simple sentence you made me feel how often Bishop may have yearned for that experience herself, but instead felt distance or dislocation. It make me think of what Dickinson says in #348: "Had I the Art to stun myself / with Bolts -- of Melody!".
What a lovely observation, thank you! I remember reading somewhere that Jamaica Kincaid read “Geography III" and realized she knew how to write. Maybe there is something about finding a relationship of observant dislocation from a past that is both painful but understood to be a source of awareness.
Thank you for these observations about the three poems. I find "The Map" rather odd - I can't help it! I don't know what to think about the voice, which as you say about Bishop's poems is "confiding" and I think that is true, however, it is not a very close or intimate confiding, at least it doesn't feel that way to me. Her use of "we" instead of "I" seems to emphasize that. And if generally speaking we can touch a map without touching what it represents we are again removed somehow. All in all this quiet poem retains a reticent, dream-like quality for me, as if the speaker were describing a vision of her own in a voice borrowed from light, or the weather.
In contrast "At the Fishhouses" has a more immediate feel, even if it does go very large and wide again at the end.
I asked April if it were possible that the places in "2000 Illustrations" were imagined, and she said they were all experiences that Elizabeth Bishop really had. It is funny or maybe revealing that I read them as imaginatively conjured by looking at the book. Like, even using the map and the book as ways of talking about place introduces an element of mediation, a veil she pulls away in "At the Fishouses," though in "At the Fishouses" she still does seem a character a little out of place, on a journey into a different way of being—not a natural confidante of the fisherman.
If anyone's interested, Travisano gives a rundown of which places and friends on p.202 of his Bishop bio, Love Unknown.
Also, thought I'd mention, Baudelaire's poem, "The Voyage," famously mentions maps in the very first line (there is also that famous painting by Chardin of the child with a globe). In these male artists' work, the map is treated as a spur to make the child want to explore, even go out and conquer the world and return with an imperialistic hangover. By contrast, Bishop treats the map as an end in itself, something to contemplate, and the poem is in that sense more truly child-like, you might say. I had one of those bumpy globes as a kid, loved to touch those bumpy mountain ranges, as well as maps of the ocean floor, and I used to love to stare at them and the different countries and continents seemed to be semi-alive and related to each other as faces at a party or at a dinner table or something.
Here is the opening stanza of the Baudelaire poem:
To a child who is fond of maps and engravings
The universe is the size of his immense hunger.
Ah! how vast is the world in the light of a lamp!
In memory's eyes how small the world is!
There is also a paragraph in Bishop's essay "Primer Class" in which she describes as kindergartener her funny confusions about the maps third and fourth graders got to use.
"Only the third and fourth grades studied geography. On their side of the room, over the blackboard, were two rolled-up maps, one of Canada and one of the whole world. When they had a geography lesson, Miss Morash pulled down one or both of these maps, like window shades. They were on cloth, very limp, with a shiny surface and in pale colors-tan, pink, yellow, and green-surrounded by the blue that was the ocean. The light coming in from their windows, falling on the glazed crackly surface, made it hard for me to see them properly from where I sat. On the world map, all of Canada was pink; on the Canadian, the provinces were different colors. I was so taken with the pull-down maps that I wanted to snap them up, and pull them down again, and touch all the countries and provinces with my own hands. Only dimly did i hear the pupils' recitations of capital cities and islands and bays. But I got the general impression that Canada was the same size as the world, which somehow or other fitted into it, or the other way around, and that in the world and Canada the sun was always shining and everything was dry and glittering. At the same time, I knew perfectly well that this was not true." Collected Prose, p. 10 or the newer Prose, p. 84
I'd forgotten the bumpy globes!
Very Bishop!
About the Week 2 poems. They are wonderful to read together. Thank you. I suppose what most struck me was the way Bishop seems to be trying to put war, aggression, betrayal into larger contexts that leave room for other kinds of endings. The key line in "Roosters" for me is "Old holy sculpture / could set it all together / in one small scene, past and future": two men (Christ and Peter) amazed and surprised, but in between them is the "little cock." I can't help but think of Shakespeare's decription of the same as, "the bird of dawning [that] singeth all night long" (in the month of December). Could Bishop be thinking of the rooster as a voice from the borderland between night and day, accusation and forgiveness? Gallus canit; flet Petrus is Englished as "rooster sings; Peter cries," and Peter's tears are more powerful than the bird's repeated assertions: they "run down our chanticleer's sides and gem his spurs." Feeling (Peter's and the poet's?) make the medieval relic "a tear-encrusted artifact." The holy sculpture like the nativity illustration in "2,000 Illustrations" helps Bishop see the potency of tears and helps her pivot to hope that "deny deny deny"/ is not all the roosters cry. But it is the poet's own articulation of daylight coming to gild the undersides of things, to make a preamble "like wandering lines in marble" that resolves the tension of binary endings. "The sun climbs in, following "to see the end," faithful as enemy, or friend." She leaves room for hope without asserting one thing with certainty over another. This same attempt at wholeness of vision is present in "Little Exercise" and "The Fish" I think. Someone in a boat slept through the storm; and letting go creates a double victory for fish and fisherman. I'm curious if others pick up on all the religious symbols in all three poems this week.
Just pointing out to readers that we took this comment up over here: https://books.substack.com/p/elizabeth-bishop-2-key-west/comment/65211085
Agreeing with Mary Jo, these are quite remarkable to read together. What an amazing difference in perspective - intensely personal with The Fish, omniscient for Roosters, intimately instructive with Little Exercise. In terms of the Biblical themes, there's the story of Jesus calming the storm, his instructions that the disciples should be "fishers of people" as well as Noah's rainbow, and then the mention of the sparrow - "God cares even for the sparrow," which leads me to think (optimistically) that there's some degree of hope for redemption in Roosters.
It is so helpful for me as an aspiring poet to look at Bishop's repetition: that gun-metal blue twice in the first five lines vibrates like a gong rather than sounding weak and unimaginative, and how the full and slant and internal rhymes sound intense and jittery rather than self-indulgent and forced. The words are chosen precisely for their sound and meaning, rather than as a cheap thrill.
Ann, thank you! I'm going to move this comment over to the discussion of the Key West poems, here https://books.substack.com/p/elizabeth-bishop-2-key-west/comments#comment-65211085