I love how you can trace the trajectory of "The Fish"--and its movement towards identification, as you put it--through the set of verbs used: "I caught" (there's real distance here: the fish is an object to be acted upon, or a sign of the speaker's victory)--> "I thought" (the speaker moves from noticing the exterior details to imagining the interior details; the verbs rhyme and what a distance we've traveled from the one to the other!)--> "I looked" (the preposition "into" rather than "at" signals that the speaker is now trying to establish some intimacy with the fish, even if the fish/Nature doesn't fully oblige)--> "I admired" --> "I stared and stared" --> "I let the fish go."
This poem, and "Filling Station," are such remarkable examples of Bishop's ethics of perception: looking, when dilated, might lead to caring.
"The whole poem is deliberately, urgently off kilter": a perfect description of this and other Bishop poems.
Yes! The movement towards identification: I thought I noticed, nearing the end, that she portrays the "little rented boat" as it fills with victory like a kind of mirror of the fish—a fish-like shape, and the run-down splotches of color in the boat echoing the frayed interior (wallpaper, rags) that she sees in the surface of the fish. I also felt like we look down the short lines of the poem the way she looks down toward the fish hanging on its line by the side of the boat. And the last little feminine/masculine rhyme is like the pairing of the two of them (the spondee of "fish go" like the sudden—flap!—release of the fish). I love the way April invokes with her own four short sentences the striking break of the opening out of the poem at the end.
I like April's ending, too, as well as your points about the parallels between the fish and the boat. The wallpaper metaphor for the designs in the fish's skin is evocative. While she is holding him up to study, he is holding her, by evoking memories and imagination of old rooms in some long forgotten "home" / hence her use of "homely" ... maybe. Later, Bishop will describe the moose as being "homely as a house." Identification is a complicated possibility. I agree but think any identification is partial because she acknowledges that the fish has had many struggles and despite apparent passivity has hooked her and helped her accept her own shabby circumstances.
Thank you for that sequence of verbs! Every single detail, every single word used by this poet is deliberate and astonishing. Only re-reading and then again re-reading, can do this work justice.
I'm reading (the terrific) forthcoming novel by Garth Greenwell, "Small Rain." A relevant passage: "Read it again, I would tell my students, read it more slowly, when they looked up baffled by a poem, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, maybe, whom I loved, baffled not because anything was difficult or unclear, but because nothing seemed to happen, because, they almost always thought and sometimes said, what was the point. Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students ... The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to tell them, to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence."
Reading these three poems together, what struck me was the way Bishop seems to be trying to put war, aggression, betrayal into larger contexts that leave room for new 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." Shakespeare describes the rooster as, "the bird of dawning [that] singeth all night long" (during the month "our savior's birth is celebrated"). 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 Bishop presents Peter's tears as 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. Lovely that the poet's own articulation of the way a new day comes to gild the undersides of things, to make a preamble "like wandering lines in marble" is what resolves the tension of binary endings. "The sun climbs in, following "to see the end," faithful as enemy, or friend." Hope lives when their is no clear ending that can be stated with certainty. 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 it is the fisherwoman's ability to let go that creates the double victory of the rainbow, which stands for a covenant between poet and the other creatures in the world.
Copying here a comment from Ann Leamon that she left on the Nova Scotia post, just so we could have all our "Key West" comments together: "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.
So right. This mysterious feature, how a poet achieves tension and taughtness in the lines that give all the choices of diction a kind of ringing clarity and inevitability. I think it's something that Bishop's (many) imitators have wrestled to accomplish. The lines masquerade as being loose and conversational but they're not...
Wow, what a rich comment, thank you Mary Jo. There is so much here to consider. I did find "Roosters" very mysterious. The knot that I have not quite unraveled for myself is the moment of forgiveness, or whether the poem's own view of the roosters turns forgiving, if it does. I was reminded of a line from Akhmatova: "Don't you know you've already been forgiven?" (Or that's what I remember! When I look it up I find "You do not know what you've been forgiven.") Anyway: the thought being that the foreseen event has in a way always existed, as so many stories in the Gospels are extensively prefigured; the act is simultaneous with forgiveness for it, and the crowing of the cock marks that moment, which is a thing (relic) as much as a point in time. But how does this rooster overlay with the strutting warmongers? And April reminds us to look within the poet, to her own aggression and betrayals. I am still brooding on it. More re-readings needed!
The “old holy sculpture/could set it all together” bit that you nicely cite strikes me as very Yeatsian! Straight out of the Byzantium poems, lapis lazuli, among school children, in language and prosody. Which shows how Bishop had so much at her fingertips to allude to but in a transformative way. Since the content goes way past Yeatsian aestheticism, as you well show.
Lapis lazuli—I was so struck in "Roosters" by "tear-encrusted thick / as a medieval relic," trying to figure out what it reminded me of, I had a visual memory I couldn't quite place. I had to hunt around a little on the internet, I think I was thinking of relics with a bit of stone or hair or tooth encased in rock crystal, like this https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/464469
If we go with Dan's suggestion, then Yeat's golden bird fashioned by Grecian goldsmiths set upon a golden bough to sing and keep the drowsy emperor awake, Bishop recreates as the rooster in the holy sculpture. Interesting connection: bits of the "dying animal" in an elaborately fashioned reliquary. Neat that you found a Magdalen reliquary ... since she is mentioned in "Roosters."
I was traveling last week and couldn't follow along, but upon my return I found my copy of Bishop's Poems in the mail and have been catching up today. I am a complete newcomer to her work--have never read anything by her before, as well as I can recall. But I am enjoying these impressive poems, while also wondering whether one should really dare to comment much after only a reading or two, since they seem to demand more (as so many here have already said).
But one thing that did strike me in all three poems this week was that they seem to summon up and then defuse a kind of conflict or tension between human beings and the world around us. "Little Exercise" begins with the threatening storm but ends with the peaceful sleeper in the rowboat. "The Fish" seems to offer an almost Hemingwayesque battle between fish and fisherman, but then flips this neatly at the end as the competition turns into respect and even, as April suggests, identification. And in "Roosters" the combative protagonists also challenge humans, with a move later toward forgiveness and perhaps even friendship.
I don't know that I have anything very insightful to say about this, but in each case I thought a world initially portrayed as somewhat inhospitable or antagonistic dissolved into a feeling of possible harmony and reconciliation.
I appreciate this summary comment very much. They do, indeed, "summon up and diffuse conflict or tension between human beings and the world" and, at least The Fish, that happens through the encounter with a creature. I've been thinking of a point Bishop makes in her 1948 essay on Marianne Moore's animal poems, "... her animal poetry seduces one to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true lingua unicornis." I think Bishop, too, dreamt of this realm.
Mary Jo, thank you. I also appreciated and found myself pondering your comment this week about the religious symbolism in all of the poems. I was wondering about that already in the poems from Week One, in particular the image of the Nativity near the end of "2,000 Illustrations" and the Baptist seal and "A Mighty Fortress" in "At the Fishhouses." Knowing so little about Bishop, I can't draw any conclusions from that, but it did surprise me to find this so prominent.
I know. It might be useful for you to know a favorite poet of hers is the 17th-century religious poet, George Herbert. I think her poem, "The Weed" (which is amazing) was influenced by his "Affliction." I have to think about this pattern a little more, but the "someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat" reminded me of Jesus sleeping through the storm on the Sea of Galilee and being woken by panicked disciples. If she thought of that, too, is she joining her effort to calm fears with His? Someone noted the dedicatee, a man living free in Key West. Perhaps she did associate her somewhat itinerant lifestyle, poking along the shorelines of worlds, with that of the pilgrim.
Peter it's so great to have people reading Bishop here for the first time! That's part of the point! And such sensitive readings too. Certainly the whole fish thing is redolent with Christian symbolism. Apologies for pendantry but I'm remembering when a beloved art history teacher pointed out to me that the early Christians used the symbol of the fish as a sign for their secret meeting places, ixthus being an acronym for "Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior" in Greek. Maybe everyone knows this! One wonders if it stuck because, for early Christians and for Bishop too maybe, fish swimming around in their watery realm are such a strong image for life outside our own life, or within death. Just noticed this little rhyme in "The Fish": "gills breathing in / the terrible oxygen"; nice touch when one thinks of breath being the material of poetry.
Ann, thank you for pointing that out--I am feeling a little embarrassed for not having thought of the obvious symbolism of the fish itself!! I was also struck by that line about "the terrible oxygen," incidentally--interesting how she zeroes in there on the way the "breath of life" for us is death for the fish.
The Fish: I do appreciate the focus on identification and domesticity in these readings. However, to me the power of the poem (a bit like Death of the Hired Man) is in its recognition that the fish is close to dying. “He hadn’t fought at all,” tells us this is a fish that has lost passed beyond his normal will to survive and instead yields himself up to death in the boat with his five pronged beard and all. And indeed his body is already porous frayed scrambled beteeen inner and outer: “Letting the fish go” under these circumstances is a very dubious release indeed! He goes to his death, and the poem is his elegy if you will…
Yes! "He hung a grunting weight." The fish's placidity--"he didn't fight, he hadn't fought at all" gives her the space to explore through study what she really wants (to catch). Because he doesn't put up a fight, he functions as a kind of work table for her own imagination. So she turns him into a bouquet (Joan suggests) "to old age," perhaps ... the fruition of life experiences for each of us in our "little rented boat."
We should all have a work table in the shape of a fish. It makes me think of Marianne Moore's "The Fish" (surely the fact that Bishop's mentor-mother-figure wrote a poem by the same title is important and there are thematic similarities): wade
Maybe I'm being pollyannaish, but are we so sure it's dying? Is it possible it could go on this way for quite a while, or has, and this is part of the point? You have me thinking about these seaside scenes with boats and fisherman—certainly "At the Fishhouses," the oceanic presence in "The Map" and the implied/imaginary journey by ship in "Over 2000 Illustrations," the threat to the figure in the boat in "The Exercise," coming up, the "mountains [that] look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled"—the seaside is a kind of liminal place where one can pass a little between life and death. Bishop and Moore both I think work against a subliminal idea of the fish as something graceful, mobile, at ease in its element.
One clue we have as to Bishop's intentions, is her remark to Moore that she added the last line to make the poem less Hemingwayesque. If in the "Old Man and the Sea" man and fish are bound up in a fatal encounter, in Bishop's poem, there is a parting of ways, leaving each creature free to move on into further living (or dying on the off chance the fish gets eaten by sharks soon).
"I'm afraid it is very bad and, if not like Robert Frost, perhaps like Ernest Hemingway! I left the last line on so it wouldn't be, but I don't know..." One Art, 87
Also, for people's ref. I quote a letter from Bishop to Moore (1-14-39=One Art, Letters p.79), about a fish, though apparently not the fish which was a goliath grouper or jewfish: "The other day I caught a parrot fish, almost by accident. They are ravishing fish---all iridescent, with a silver edge to each scale, and a real bill-like mouth just like turquoise; the eye is very big and wild, and the eyeball is turquoise too---they are very humorous-looking fish. A man on the dock immediately scraped off three scales, then threw him back; he was sure it wouldn't hurt him." Moore is also responsible for certain revisions to the poem: "infested" and "gunnels." [see One Art, 87-88] As for Moore's attempt to revise "Roosters," that's a whole saga told by David Kalstone in Becoming a Poet.
Thank you! You have brushed aside my skepticism (unearned, since I’ve read so little Bishop biography) that she actually did her own fishing. Little Ann biographical fact: when I was working as a kid at FSG we were the publisher for Becoming a Poet. Kalstone died—of AIDS, it was those days—before it was finished, and left it on computer floppy disks, which no one knew how to read. We had, like, nearly manual typewriters in that office. I had to run around town trying to find some sort of computer “expert" to print the files out. The book was finally published many years later, after many wanderings. It was part of Robert Giroux’s lineage there.
Oh wow, that’s amazing, Ann! The Kalstone was formative for me when it came out. It still holds up as great. I’m also a fan of the Travisano bio. Which brings in so many more figures in Bishop’s life, not just the two great poets. I also find refreshing the less biographical approach offered here by April and the BP commenters. Travisano remarks that biographical approaches have dominated Bishop studies because the connections between the poems and life are fascinating but it’s good to cut loose and read the poems as poems. I think Bishop herself might have preferred that.
I was “brought up,” in several ways, in an environment very averse to biographical readings, but I’m becoming less strict as I mellow with age. It’s a pleasure for me when you have read a poem on its own as a freestanding thing, and then go back and find this layer from the life of a writer, like a harmony in music.
I like April’s take on “Exercise” as a process of comforting/self-comforting. I read it as a spell that breaks down the storm into less threatening glimpses: the sleepy dog analogy, the mangroves in their tight embrace “unresponsive,” a heron “uncertain” (not terrified), the water “shining,” the little palm trees "stuck" along the boulevard, suddenly revealed (released/transfigured/disfigured) the weeds “relieved”, the sea “freshened," the human someone (you, I, she, he) sleeping, “uninjured,” “barely disturbed.”
With each new reading over most of a lifetime, “The Fish” remains a thrilling poem, a fresh discovery. This time I paid greater attention to how Bishop transmogrifies the homely fish into flowers: the full-blown roses of his ancient wallpaper skin, the fine rosettes of lime that encrust him, the swim-bladder (which she can’t see) like a big peony, and suddenly the poem read as an unexpected bouquet to old age.
“Roosters” must have been great fun for Bishop to write. It’s so topsy-turvy, like Chagall’s paintings (where roosters often float above and below). When I Googled "gallus canit; flet Petrus" (I was stumped by “flet”), I came upon an interesting 2011 posting by Elizabeth Jones, then secretary of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia. Jones tells how heavily indebted “Roosters” is to a 1939 article in Art Bulletin—adding that the fine poem is “an example of how an artist refashions borrowings.” https://elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com/2011/04/first-encounter-xxxiii-bishops-roosters.html
Wow, what a great article, thanks so much! It's so thrilling how a great poem can work at once with readings that are innocent and deeply informed—though this poem is mysterious, and your discovery helps a lot. I feel like its leaps and lacuna indicate something she was wrestling with herself. Also thank you for this sensitive reading of how the poem does its comforting!
Thank you for these stimulating comments and for choosing "Little Exercise," a poem I didn't know! I agree about "trusting the poet," and that seems to be right in the Bishop spirit. Travisano (160-2) gives a great account of the dedicatee of "Little Exercise." He was a man of independent means, who had dropped out of Andover and Yale and chose to live at Key West to be around Pauline Hemingway. He was a good listener people liked being around who chose not to work but with less anxiety about that choice than Bishop. The final stanza might allude to Wanning's own attitude to life, "uninjured, barely disturbed" (though barely disturbed can shade into somewhat disturbed?). A possible clue to the inspiration of this poem is the penultimate stanza, with its conjuring (your word, I think) of "badly-lit battle scenes,/ each in 'Another part of the field.'" I may be mistaken, but I take the quotation marks to be something out of an old, bad silent war film. This invites us to see the whole poem's rendering of the storm as 'filmic,' rather than painterly, disjunctive in the way of a film but eventually forming a whole picture in the mind by some more fugitive process.
Oh that's interesting! I saw the "badly lit battle scenes" as elements of a panoramic painting, that you move your eye across. I was so struck that April lit upon the comforting barely-disturbed sleep of the figure in the rowboat as kind of the outcome of the poem, and a stand-in for the reader. Their being out in a rowboat in the mangrove seems so vulnerable; it makes the reprieve all the more convincing.
For what it's worth, I too was curious about the quotation marks around "Another part of the field," so I googled it, and it appears to be the title of Act II, Scene 4, of Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth, Part III (which I don't believe I've ever read). Which is a battle scene, at least of sorts (two characters fight--a very short scene).
Another fantastic set of observations. Thank you!
I love how you can trace the trajectory of "The Fish"--and its movement towards identification, as you put it--through the set of verbs used: "I caught" (there's real distance here: the fish is an object to be acted upon, or a sign of the speaker's victory)--> "I thought" (the speaker moves from noticing the exterior details to imagining the interior details; the verbs rhyme and what a distance we've traveled from the one to the other!)--> "I looked" (the preposition "into" rather than "at" signals that the speaker is now trying to establish some intimacy with the fish, even if the fish/Nature doesn't fully oblige)--> "I admired" --> "I stared and stared" --> "I let the fish go."
This poem, and "Filling Station," are such remarkable examples of Bishop's ethics of perception: looking, when dilated, might lead to caring.
"The whole poem is deliberately, urgently off kilter": a perfect description of this and other Bishop poems.
Yes! The movement towards identification: I thought I noticed, nearing the end, that she portrays the "little rented boat" as it fills with victory like a kind of mirror of the fish—a fish-like shape, and the run-down splotches of color in the boat echoing the frayed interior (wallpaper, rags) that she sees in the surface of the fish. I also felt like we look down the short lines of the poem the way she looks down toward the fish hanging on its line by the side of the boat. And the last little feminine/masculine rhyme is like the pairing of the two of them (the spondee of "fish go" like the sudden—flap!—release of the fish). I love the way April invokes with her own four short sentences the striking break of the opening out of the poem at the end.
I like April's ending, too, as well as your points about the parallels between the fish and the boat. The wallpaper metaphor for the designs in the fish's skin is evocative. While she is holding him up to study, he is holding her, by evoking memories and imagination of old rooms in some long forgotten "home" / hence her use of "homely" ... maybe. Later, Bishop will describe the moose as being "homely as a house." Identification is a complicated possibility. I agree but think any identification is partial because she acknowledges that the fish has had many struggles and despite apparent passivity has hooked her and helped her accept her own shabby circumstances.
Thank you for that sequence of verbs! Every single detail, every single word used by this poet is deliberate and astonishing. Only re-reading and then again re-reading, can do this work justice.
I'm reading (the terrific) forthcoming novel by Garth Greenwell, "Small Rain." A relevant passage: "Read it again, I would tell my students, read it more slowly, when they looked up baffled by a poem, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, maybe, whom I loved, baffled not because anything was difficult or unclear, but because nothing seemed to happen, because, they almost always thought and sometimes said, what was the point. Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students ... The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to tell them, to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence."
It's almost like Bishop invites you to ask, reading too peremptorily, What was the point? Like she shelters the poems within a seeming lack of point.
That seems so right and well-said! Can’t wait to see Small Rain
Reading these three poems together, what struck me was the way Bishop seems to be trying to put war, aggression, betrayal into larger contexts that leave room for new 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." Shakespeare describes the rooster as, "the bird of dawning [that] singeth all night long" (during the month "our savior's birth is celebrated"). 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 Bishop presents Peter's tears as 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. Lovely that the poet's own articulation of the way a new day comes to gild the undersides of things, to make a preamble "like wandering lines in marble" is what resolves the tension of binary endings. "The sun climbs in, following "to see the end," faithful as enemy, or friend." Hope lives when their is no clear ending that can be stated with certainty. 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 it is the fisherwoman's ability to let go that creates the double victory of the rainbow, which stands for a covenant between poet and the other creatures in the world.
Copying here a comment from Ann Leamon that she left on the Nova Scotia post, just so we could have all our "Key West" comments together: "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.
So right. This mysterious feature, how a poet achieves tension and taughtness in the lines that give all the choices of diction a kind of ringing clarity and inevitability. I think it's something that Bishop's (many) imitators have wrestled to accomplish. The lines masquerade as being loose and conversational but they're not...
Wow, what a rich comment, thank you Mary Jo. There is so much here to consider. I did find "Roosters" very mysterious. The knot that I have not quite unraveled for myself is the moment of forgiveness, or whether the poem's own view of the roosters turns forgiving, if it does. I was reminded of a line from Akhmatova: "Don't you know you've already been forgiven?" (Or that's what I remember! When I look it up I find "You do not know what you've been forgiven.") Anyway: the thought being that the foreseen event has in a way always existed, as so many stories in the Gospels are extensively prefigured; the act is simultaneous with forgiveness for it, and the crowing of the cock marks that moment, which is a thing (relic) as much as a point in time. But how does this rooster overlay with the strutting warmongers? And April reminds us to look within the poet, to her own aggression and betrayals. I am still brooding on it. More re-readings needed!
The “old holy sculpture/could set it all together” bit that you nicely cite strikes me as very Yeatsian! Straight out of the Byzantium poems, lapis lazuli, among school children, in language and prosody. Which shows how Bishop had so much at her fingertips to allude to but in a transformative way. Since the content goes way past Yeatsian aestheticism, as you well show.
That is a very cool connection, Dan!
Lapis lazuli—I was so struck in "Roosters" by "tear-encrusted thick / as a medieval relic," trying to figure out what it reminded me of, I had a visual memory I couldn't quite place. I had to hunt around a little on the internet, I think I was thinking of relics with a bit of stone or hair or tooth encased in rock crystal, like this https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/464469
If we go with Dan's suggestion, then Yeat's golden bird fashioned by Grecian goldsmiths set upon a golden bough to sing and keep the drowsy emperor awake, Bishop recreates as the rooster in the holy sculpture. Interesting connection: bits of the "dying animal" in an elaborately fashioned reliquary. Neat that you found a Magdalen reliquary ... since she is mentioned in "Roosters."
I was traveling last week and couldn't follow along, but upon my return I found my copy of Bishop's Poems in the mail and have been catching up today. I am a complete newcomer to her work--have never read anything by her before, as well as I can recall. But I am enjoying these impressive poems, while also wondering whether one should really dare to comment much after only a reading or two, since they seem to demand more (as so many here have already said).
But one thing that did strike me in all three poems this week was that they seem to summon up and then defuse a kind of conflict or tension between human beings and the world around us. "Little Exercise" begins with the threatening storm but ends with the peaceful sleeper in the rowboat. "The Fish" seems to offer an almost Hemingwayesque battle between fish and fisherman, but then flips this neatly at the end as the competition turns into respect and even, as April suggests, identification. And in "Roosters" the combative protagonists also challenge humans, with a move later toward forgiveness and perhaps even friendship.
I don't know that I have anything very insightful to say about this, but in each case I thought a world initially portrayed as somewhat inhospitable or antagonistic dissolved into a feeling of possible harmony and reconciliation.
I appreciate this summary comment very much. They do, indeed, "summon up and diffuse conflict or tension between human beings and the world" and, at least The Fish, that happens through the encounter with a creature. I've been thinking of a point Bishop makes in her 1948 essay on Marianne Moore's animal poems, "... her animal poetry seduces one to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true lingua unicornis." I think Bishop, too, dreamt of this realm.
Mary Jo, thank you. I also appreciated and found myself pondering your comment this week about the religious symbolism in all of the poems. I was wondering about that already in the poems from Week One, in particular the image of the Nativity near the end of "2,000 Illustrations" and the Baptist seal and "A Mighty Fortress" in "At the Fishhouses." Knowing so little about Bishop, I can't draw any conclusions from that, but it did surprise me to find this so prominent.
I know. It might be useful for you to know a favorite poet of hers is the 17th-century religious poet, George Herbert. I think her poem, "The Weed" (which is amazing) was influenced by his "Affliction." I have to think about this pattern a little more, but the "someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat" reminded me of Jesus sleeping through the storm on the Sea of Galilee and being woken by panicked disciples. If she thought of that, too, is she joining her effort to calm fears with His? Someone noted the dedicatee, a man living free in Key West. Perhaps she did associate her somewhat itinerant lifestyle, poking along the shorelines of worlds, with that of the pilgrim.
I agree about the someone sleeping in a rowboat, and knew what you were referring to. Thank you for the tip about Herbert--very interesting.
Peter it's so great to have people reading Bishop here for the first time! That's part of the point! And such sensitive readings too. Certainly the whole fish thing is redolent with Christian symbolism. Apologies for pendantry but I'm remembering when a beloved art history teacher pointed out to me that the early Christians used the symbol of the fish as a sign for their secret meeting places, ixthus being an acronym for "Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior" in Greek. Maybe everyone knows this! One wonders if it stuck because, for early Christians and for Bishop too maybe, fish swimming around in their watery realm are such a strong image for life outside our own life, or within death. Just noticed this little rhyme in "The Fish": "gills breathing in / the terrible oxygen"; nice touch when one thinks of breath being the material of poetry.
Ann, thank you for pointing that out--I am feeling a little embarrassed for not having thought of the obvious symbolism of the fish itself!! I was also struck by that line about "the terrible oxygen," incidentally--interesting how she zeroes in there on the way the "breath of life" for us is death for the fish.
The Fish: I do appreciate the focus on identification and domesticity in these readings. However, to me the power of the poem (a bit like Death of the Hired Man) is in its recognition that the fish is close to dying. “He hadn’t fought at all,” tells us this is a fish that has lost passed beyond his normal will to survive and instead yields himself up to death in the boat with his five pronged beard and all. And indeed his body is already porous frayed scrambled beteeen inner and outer: “Letting the fish go” under these circumstances is a very dubious release indeed! He goes to his death, and the poem is his elegy if you will…
Yes! "He hung a grunting weight." The fish's placidity--"he didn't fight, he hadn't fought at all" gives her the space to explore through study what she really wants (to catch). Because he doesn't put up a fight, he functions as a kind of work table for her own imagination. So she turns him into a bouquet (Joan suggests) "to old age," perhaps ... the fruition of life experiences for each of us in our "little rented boat."
We should all have a work table in the shape of a fish. It makes me think of Marianne Moore's "The Fish" (surely the fact that Bishop's mentor-mother-figure wrote a poem by the same title is important and there are thematic similarities): wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
Maybe I'm being pollyannaish, but are we so sure it's dying? Is it possible it could go on this way for quite a while, or has, and this is part of the point? You have me thinking about these seaside scenes with boats and fisherman—certainly "At the Fishhouses," the oceanic presence in "The Map" and the implied/imaginary journey by ship in "Over 2000 Illustrations," the threat to the figure in the boat in "The Exercise," coming up, the "mountains [that] look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled"—the seaside is a kind of liminal place where one can pass a little between life and death. Bishop and Moore both I think work against a subliminal idea of the fish as something graceful, mobile, at ease in its element.
the fish is not dying.
One clue we have as to Bishop's intentions, is her remark to Moore that she added the last line to make the poem less Hemingwayesque. If in the "Old Man and the Sea" man and fish are bound up in a fatal encounter, in Bishop's poem, there is a parting of ways, leaving each creature free to move on into further living (or dying on the off chance the fish gets eaten by sharks soon).
"I'm afraid it is very bad and, if not like Robert Frost, perhaps like Ernest Hemingway! I left the last line on so it wouldn't be, but I don't know..." One Art, 87
Of course, we don’t know. I’m open to imagining a future life for the fish.
Also, for people's ref. I quote a letter from Bishop to Moore (1-14-39=One Art, Letters p.79), about a fish, though apparently not the fish which was a goliath grouper or jewfish: "The other day I caught a parrot fish, almost by accident. They are ravishing fish---all iridescent, with a silver edge to each scale, and a real bill-like mouth just like turquoise; the eye is very big and wild, and the eyeball is turquoise too---they are very humorous-looking fish. A man on the dock immediately scraped off three scales, then threw him back; he was sure it wouldn't hurt him." Moore is also responsible for certain revisions to the poem: "infested" and "gunnels." [see One Art, 87-88] As for Moore's attempt to revise "Roosters," that's a whole saga told by David Kalstone in Becoming a Poet.
Thank you! You have brushed aside my skepticism (unearned, since I’ve read so little Bishop biography) that she actually did her own fishing. Little Ann biographical fact: when I was working as a kid at FSG we were the publisher for Becoming a Poet. Kalstone died—of AIDS, it was those days—before it was finished, and left it on computer floppy disks, which no one knew how to read. We had, like, nearly manual typewriters in that office. I had to run around town trying to find some sort of computer “expert" to print the files out. The book was finally published many years later, after many wanderings. It was part of Robert Giroux’s lineage there.
Oh wow, that’s amazing, Ann! The Kalstone was formative for me when it came out. It still holds up as great. I’m also a fan of the Travisano bio. Which brings in so many more figures in Bishop’s life, not just the two great poets. I also find refreshing the less biographical approach offered here by April and the BP commenters. Travisano remarks that biographical approaches have dominated Bishop studies because the connections between the poems and life are fascinating but it’s good to cut loose and read the poems as poems. I think Bishop herself might have preferred that.
I was “brought up,” in several ways, in an environment very averse to biographical readings, but I’m becoming less strict as I mellow with age. It’s a pleasure for me when you have read a poem on its own as a freestanding thing, and then go back and find this layer from the life of a writer, like a harmony in music.
Wow, what a story!
I like April’s take on “Exercise” as a process of comforting/self-comforting. I read it as a spell that breaks down the storm into less threatening glimpses: the sleepy dog analogy, the mangroves in their tight embrace “unresponsive,” a heron “uncertain” (not terrified), the water “shining,” the little palm trees "stuck" along the boulevard, suddenly revealed (released/transfigured/disfigured) the weeds “relieved”, the sea “freshened," the human someone (you, I, she, he) sleeping, “uninjured,” “barely disturbed.”
With each new reading over most of a lifetime, “The Fish” remains a thrilling poem, a fresh discovery. This time I paid greater attention to how Bishop transmogrifies the homely fish into flowers: the full-blown roses of his ancient wallpaper skin, the fine rosettes of lime that encrust him, the swim-bladder (which she can’t see) like a big peony, and suddenly the poem read as an unexpected bouquet to old age.
“Roosters” must have been great fun for Bishop to write. It’s so topsy-turvy, like Chagall’s paintings (where roosters often float above and below). When I Googled "gallus canit; flet Petrus" (I was stumped by “flet”), I came upon an interesting 2011 posting by Elizabeth Jones, then secretary of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia. Jones tells how heavily indebted “Roosters” is to a 1939 article in Art Bulletin—adding that the fine poem is “an example of how an artist refashions borrowings.” https://elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com/2011/04/first-encounter-xxxiii-bishops-roosters.html
A la Marianne Moore who did the same with news articles and other texts : )
The article was terrific as is the point about the flowers!
Wow, incredibly helpful article!
Wow, what a great article, thanks so much! It's so thrilling how a great poem can work at once with readings that are innocent and deeply informed—though this poem is mysterious, and your discovery helps a lot. I feel like its leaps and lacuna indicate something she was wrestling with herself. Also thank you for this sensitive reading of how the poem does its comforting!
Thank you for these stimulating comments and for choosing "Little Exercise," a poem I didn't know! I agree about "trusting the poet," and that seems to be right in the Bishop spirit. Travisano (160-2) gives a great account of the dedicatee of "Little Exercise." He was a man of independent means, who had dropped out of Andover and Yale and chose to live at Key West to be around Pauline Hemingway. He was a good listener people liked being around who chose not to work but with less anxiety about that choice than Bishop. The final stanza might allude to Wanning's own attitude to life, "uninjured, barely disturbed" (though barely disturbed can shade into somewhat disturbed?). A possible clue to the inspiration of this poem is the penultimate stanza, with its conjuring (your word, I think) of "badly-lit battle scenes,/ each in 'Another part of the field.'" I may be mistaken, but I take the quotation marks to be something out of an old, bad silent war film. This invites us to see the whole poem's rendering of the storm as 'filmic,' rather than painterly, disjunctive in the way of a film but eventually forming a whole picture in the mind by some more fugitive process.
Oh that's interesting! I saw the "badly lit battle scenes" as elements of a panoramic painting, that you move your eye across. I was so struck that April lit upon the comforting barely-disturbed sleep of the figure in the rowboat as kind of the outcome of the poem, and a stand-in for the reader. Their being out in a rowboat in the mangrove seems so vulnerable; it makes the reprieve all the more convincing.
For what it's worth, I too was curious about the quotation marks around "Another part of the field," so I googled it, and it appears to be the title of Act II, Scene 4, of Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth, Part III (which I don't believe I've ever read). Which is a battle scene, at least of sorts (two characters fight--a very short scene).
Thank you!
I wonder, and this is to go out on a limb, or a root, ha ha, are we entitled to take the whole poem as the dream of the sleeper in the boat?