Elizabeth Bishop 2: Key West

Three poems

I am grateful to a reader who pointed out, after reading last week’s post, that Nova Scotia is not an island; it is actually a peninsula, connected to the mainland by an isthmus; its sister landmasses, Cape Breton Island and Prince Edward Island, are true islands.

This week, we travel with Bishop to Key West, Florida, and the poems “Little Exercise,” “The Fish,” and “Roosters.”

Having already spent most of a small inheritance on travel to Europe and North Africa, Elizabeth Bishop settled in Key West around 1938 and remained there, mostly, for a decade. Among the many poems from this period that interest me is the charming, and haunting, “Little Exercise.” Perhaps it so pleases me because I only really “got” it some years after my first reading; the process of rereading such poems has taught me a lot, and not just about Bishop. As I always tell students: Trust the poet.

The poem’s chief beauties are found in its exquisite descriptions of a storm in the subtropics of southern Florida, reminding us that no one can manage an image, or metaphor, like this poet. The storm is “roaming the sky uneasily / like a dog looking for a place to sleep in”; the boulevard’s “little palm trees” are “suddenly revealed / as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.” Although Bishop often tends to bring “homely” details like these to bear on natural wonders, wryly domesticating them, here the tendency is especially purposeful. And while in many other poems—including “Florida,” “The Bight,” and “12 O’Clock News”—the poet explicitly reveals vexation with the business of metaphor-making (yes, they are essential; but also, they are never fully adequate), here the metaphors function without irony, because they are central to the poem’s task. What becomes apparent on rereading is the insistent voice of the speaker, directing the reader: “Think of the storm,” and “Think how they must look now,” and “Think of the boulevard.” These images are not in this moment spread before the reader, but are being conjured up, imaginatively.

One looks again at the usefully clear title: “Little Exercise.” This, then, is a thought exercise, in which we are being invited to participate. Why? Well, it must be because—thunderstorms are scary. Now the speaker’s voice is more clearly revealed as “knowing,” in a pedagogical, friendly way, instructing us (and/or perhaps the dedicatee, and/or perhaps herself) how to calm ourselves through the terror of a violent electric storm.

I’ve lived in Florida through a stormy summer, and had my nerves shattered by those zaps of close lightning. I’m grateful for the guiding, parental voice that here makes a home for me in the poem itself; that, as the storm moves away, the battle taken to “another part of the field,” gives me permission to imagine the sleeping figure in a rowboat, “uninjured, barely disturbed.” Like the growling dog-storm, the figure in the rowboat has found its bed. Bishop’s thought experiment has been a bedtime story for frightened children, to lull us into safe sleep.

❧

When I was in seventh grade, our English class read a poetry anthology that happened to have “The Fish” in it. It is no exaggeration to say that this changed my life; because somehow, this poem gave me significant permission to write, with what to me was its implicit message: You can do anything in a poem.

I’m still not entirely sure what I mean by that, except that I was viscerally aware of the poet leading me along, hooking me, like a fish, through the poem, all the way to the end, and that what she was “saying,” if indeed a poem says any one thing among its thousand things, was odd, and not especially what I had been hitherto led to think of as “poetic.” (I had not yet read nearly enough poetry to know better; many other poets besides Bishop have since confirmed for me the truth that poems can do, and say, absolutely anything.)

It seems helpful to remember that Bishop, as a denizen of Key West, was part of a world where many people fish, although the triumph in the speaker’s voice for her having caught a “tremendous” one suggests that maybe she was somewhat new to the sport. (Fishing in the north Atlantic, assuming she even did so as a child, would not have been like this.) The rigor of the descriptive task, her “poet’s eye,” obliges the speaker to take full inventory of her prey, in lines that many have loved and remembered:

He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost with age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.

(As a side note, I often show this poem as a corrective to student writers who think it’s a sin to use the same word multiple times.)

The obligation of seeing, here, goes further, as the speaker tries to look the fish right in the eyes, “far larger than mine / but shallower, and yellowed, / the irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil / seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass.” The precision, not just of imagery but also of sound (the sonic echoes of the “l” sounds in larger and shallower and yellowed and foil and lenses and isinglass, along with the open “a” sounds of far and larger and than and backed and packed and scratched and isinglass) astonishes, as does the poet’s use throughout of internal rhymes, full rhymes and near-rhymes, just unpredictably enough to keep the reader’s ear attentive and anxious for the next, as we hasten along the fast-paced, mostly three-beat lines.

The fish’s shallow eyes do not to look back. This is one of those encounters with the Numinous that poets, at least since the Romantics, have so often attempted, by fronting wild creatures, and/or wild landscapes, in an effort to reach across the barrier of human consciousness into something greater. As so often happens in these cases, though, Nature does not wholly oblige; so instead, the poet finds herself focusing on how other hunters of this fish have left their hooks and lines behind in its flesh: “Like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom / trailing from his aching jaw.” Instead of embodying a vast and alien Nature, the fish seems like a wounded double for the speaker—but then comes the triumph, when “victory filled up / the little rented boat.” Whose victory? Of course it could be the victory of the poet, who has caught a fish; but here, it is certainly also the fish’s, who has survived so many battles. As a double for the poet, the fish can be a model for her own survival. His final triumph, of being set free, is then also hers; not from noblesse oblige, but from identification, she lets go of the fish, allowing them both to fight another day.

Here the poem does (at least) one more thing, by leaping off into the ether, with its rhyming final couplet (“—until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go”) that, instead of closing the poem, paradoxically opens it. The poet lets the fish go; she lets herself go; she lets the poem go; she lets us go. The rainbow covenant signal that God sent Noah was a promise of dry land, and a new home. What kind of home? That remains a mystery. We, all of us, make a leap of freedom away from the poem, from the boat, even from consciousness and poetry itself.

❧

The war in Europe was on everyone’s mind, of course, in those years Bishop spent in Key West. A US Navy station and its radio tower were visible from at least one of the places she lived there. The strange, and uncharacteristically ugly, poem, “Roosters” concerns war, at least in part, and is interesting for many reasons, I think, especially in how the poet manages subject matter that provides few, if any, moments of solace. Also fascinating are the mechanics of the poem: each stanza is constructed of three rhyming lines, mostly of two, then three, and then five beats. If you joined up the first two lines, you would have rough iambic pentameter couplets, but that extra (now internal) rhyme inevitably throws the rhythm off. The whole poem is deliberately, urgently off kilter, and even the stunning metaphors have an unpleasant air. The sound of the first rooster at dawn “with horrible insistence // grates like a wet match / from the broccoli patch.” The smell of sulfur, from both the match and the broccoli, brings a subliminal whiff of the satanic, and we are further shown the grim reality of bird droppings, the backyard outhouses, and hens who lead lives “of being courted and despised” by the militant, strutting roosters who “brace their cruel feet and glare // with stupid eyes / while from their beaks there rise / the uncontrolled, traditional cries.” The roosters’ chests are decorated with “green-gold medals,” and they “scream” at the speaker, telling her to get up and “stop dreaming.” She complains:

what right have you to give
commands and tell us how to live

cry “Here!” and “Here!”
and wake us here where are
unwanted love, conceit and war?

The poem goes on to describe two roosters fighting and one, dead, flung on a dung heap, then links the gospel story of St. Peter’s denial of Christ to a hope that a story about betrayal can turn in to one about forgiveness. When the sun rises at the end of the poem, we are left in limbo, unsure whether the day heralded by the bloodthirsty roosters will be one of battle or friendship.

While the imagery is unmistakably linked to war, we should not miss the underlying domestic trouble that the poem also suggests. It would also be a wrong to read this as a simple denunciation of male aggression, since the speaker implicates herself (and probably all people) in having an appetite for betrayal, and conceit, and fighting. By way of contrast with “Little Exercise,” which coos us to sleep, this poem rudely jerks us awake.

Next week: Three poems of Bishop’s years in Brazil: “Questions of Travel,” “Armadillo,” and “Santarém”

Join the conversation in our comments below! Subscribe to our free posts to receive Summer Reading by email.

---

April Bernard is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The World Behind the World. She is also author of the novels Pirate Jenny and Miss Fuller. She has written for Book Post on Colette, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hilary Mantel, Patricia Highsmith, Wallace Stevens, Janet Malcolm, and Angela Carter, among others.

Order Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems from Book Post bookselling partner Northshire Bookstore.

Join April and Book Post editor Ann Kjellberg in a virtual conversation looking back on our month of Bishop, hosted by our bookselling partner Northshire, on August 29 at 6 pm. Sign up here.

We are in the midst of a special summer offer on subscriptions to Book Post! Find out more here.

---

Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. “Summer Reading” is a special Book Post feature. You can join or check out of Summer Reading in your account settings.

Book Post aspires to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Coming soon: new posts from Ian Frazier on Trotsky in the Bronx; Yasmine El Rashidi on the recurrent device in Arabic writing of the memoir trouvé; Kathryn Davis on a lingering childhood fascination.

Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and Saratoga Springs, New York, is Book Post’s Summer 2024 partner bookstore! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. Read our portrait of Northshire here. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.

Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads@bookpostusa

If you liked this piece, please share and tell the author with a “like”
Not ready for a paid subscription to Book Post? Show your appreciation with a tip