Elizabeth Bishop 3: Brazil

Three poems

I’ll be looking at three poems: “Questions of Travel” and “The Armadillo,” written while Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil; and “Santarém,” which is about traveling on the Amazon but which she wrote some years later.

When I say that Bishop is a formalist, what I mean is not that she hews only to established forms. Certainly she has written her share of sonnets and sestinas, and is responsible for one of the most famous villanelles in English, “One Art.” But, and moreover, she has shown, in her own multiple invented forms and variations, that the structure a poem takes is always at least half of what the poem is “doing.” She never gets stuck in formulaic poetics.

In Brazil, where she lived in a rain-forest mountainside home belonging to a long-term partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop had for more than fifteen years the most settled period of her life. For someone always concerned with a search for home, it seemed she had finally found one. And yet—in the title poem of her 1965 collection, Questions of Travel, she presents us with a sort of personal “complaint,” a poetry essay in which she insists on doubting the possibilities of travel, or staying put, to solve the restless and anxious searching she had identified as her lot. Again, she includes “us”; it is “we,” not only “I,” who are troubled. After complaining, humorously, in the voice of a traveler petulantly accustomed to a different landscape, that “there are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams / hurry too rapidly down to the sea,” the poet goes on to ask:

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?

By the third stanza, our speaker repents her pique, admitting that, actually, “it would have been a pity” not to have the seen the wonders—mostly small, domestic details rather than the stuff of travel brochures—that she then itemizes. (The squeaking of wooden clogs, a bird and its wooden cage, rain on the roof.)

This poet, whose most singular gift was the ability to see with childlike wonder, here scoffs at the “childishness” of her curiosity and restlessness. Pushing the seemingly casual, eloquently “prosy” form she has chosen even further, she ends the poem with an italicized section that comments on what has gone before, circling back around to the poem’s opening expression of dissatisfaction. This argument with the self, and with us, gets even more explicit as she brings in a second speaker’s “voice,” her own esprit de l’escalier commentary (in a notebook, she says) on previous thoughts. It’s as if all the self-questioning that she’s already laid out in the poem, all that characteristic hesitation in real time, was not adequate to convey what she wants the poem to embody, which is utter ambivalence. She drops the “poet’s” voice for a second voice, her own saner (?) doppelganger and note-taker, who undercuts whatever imagery and poeticizing might be lingering from the previous lines, in order to lay down the paradoxes one must face in the glare of daylight.

“Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there …. No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”

There are many lines from Bishop’s work that swim up into my mind from time to time. One of the most vivid is this wry, fatalistic truth: “The choice is never wide and never free.”

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Another poem written during Bishop’s years in Brazil is “The Armadillo,” which features an even more radical second-guessing by the poet. Many commentators have written about the fact that this poem, like “The Fish,” nods to Bishop’s friend and mentor Marianne Moore; Moore’s “The Pangolin” begins with the self-reflection, “another armored animal,” as acknowledgment of Moore’s ongoing poetic interest in the self-protective armor of fishes, lizards, snakes, turtles—and pangolins. So here Bishop adds an armadillo to her friend’s imaginary zoo. It is also true that this poem is dedicated to Robert Lowell, that he in turn dedicated “Skunk Hour” to Bishop, and that biographers find much to say about that long, loyal, and sometimes fraught friendship.

My interest here, however, is in Bishop’s continuing argument with the self, and how she makes use of eccentric formal choices to dramatize it. The poem is in rough ballad form—rough in that, although the quatrains maintain the essential ballad rhyming of the second and fourth lines, they “wobble” (like the fire balloons) with unpredictable rhyming of the first and third lines. So, as is important in a ballad, the rhyme scheme is (at least) abcb—but here it is also, sometimes, abab. As I pointed out earlier with the discussion of “The Fish,” the unpredictability of the rhyming creates a subtle but pervasive uneasiness in the reader.

The other rough aspect here is in the meter. Common ballad measure is 4 beats–3 beats–4 beats–3 beats; Bishop is very loose here as well, although I assure you that one can, with some fudging, still sing this poem to such standard common ballad measure tunes as “Mary Hamilton,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. (Ballad measure is the same thing as hymn meter, which Emily Dickinson used; “common” is that 4–3–4–3; “long” is 4–4–4–4; “short” is 3–3–3–3.) When using these variations of strict rhyme and rhythm, Bishop is writing against the grain of anything easy or pleasant or even solemnly tragic. Her skeptic’s impulse dominates.

At first, she tells us, like a good reporter, that she has noticed a local phenomenon—the celebratory “fire balloons,” each a floating paper lantern sent aloft by the heat of the flame of a little candle attached beneath, described in lines of spectacular beauty:

Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.
…
…  With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it’s still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us

Danger enters the poem with a fire balloon crashing into the cliff by the house: “It splattered like an egg of fire.” Two nesting owls fly away, then:

Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

“Beautiful” is inadequate to describe the poet’s vision of the baby rabbit—which though alive is transformed into ash with ignited eyes, as if it had been burnt up in the fire, embodying the outcome we feared. We are also struck by the furtive departure of the armadillo, whose armor could not have saved him either, had the fire caught him.

But the great puzzle that Bishop makes of this scene is in her final stanza, the (again) italicized second-guessing of what we have just read.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

What is the “mimicry” alluded to? I think the poet means at least two things. First of all, for anyone who had lived through the years of the Second World War, the image of the firebombing of cities—London, Dresden, Berlin, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—would have remained vivid, no matter how far away one was from the battle. These “frail, illegal” fire balloons, and even the destruction that they can create, could be seen as “too pretty,” given their mimicry of what has recently devasted the globe.

And then there is the business of making pretty images in a poem. “Too pretty,” says Bishop of her own pretty lines, her “rose-flecked” and her “handful of intangible ash,” to describe the terrorized creatures fleeing a fire. Here the poet’s angriest self shakes a fist that is “ignorant” and impotent (though “mailed,” armored, by words, like a knight’s fist by metal, or like the armadillo’s body by scales) against the powers that rain violence and fire on the helpless, echoing the famous line about “ignorant armies [that] clash by night,” from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

When Bishop confesses, as she does here, to her own frustrations with her limitations as a writer, I am most in awe of her capacities. (Among her many other poems that take up this theme are “The Bight,” “One Art,” and “12 O’Clock News.”) Poetry that presses past its limits—to reach, perhaps, an ineffable truth—is always worth engaging; as another great old geezer (T.S. Eliot) once wrote, “For us there is only the trying.”

❧

In “Santarém,” written many years after Bishop was no longer living in Brazil, the final reversal comes, not from the poet herself, but from another voice entirely. Memory of a once-visited place, here a location where two rivers, the Amazon and the Tapajós, meet, will inevitably carry, for readers of Bishop’s earlier work, the ongoing “questions of travel,” but now the power of nostalgia seems stronger than any impulse to undercut it.

The style here is very prosy indeed, and one looks for signs of what prompts the casual tone, unfurling its gorgeous language in a voice that is talking to itself, as much as to us, thinking and correcting as it goes along:

I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.
Two rivers. Hadn’t two rivers sprung
from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four
and they’d diverged. Here only two
and coming together. Even if one were tempted
to literary interpretations
such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female
—such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off
in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

The temptation I feel here, again, is just to quote the whole thing so we can marvel at its marvels together, including “A dozen or so young nuns, white-habited,” who “waved gaily from an old stern-wheeler,” a cow standing on a flat barge, “chewing her cud while being ferried,” and a cathedral tower recently struck by lightning, with “a widening zigzag crack all the way down.” The comfortable near-prose of this poem makes room for a generous gathering-in of pleasures, in this, one of the only of Bishop’s poems I can think of that suggests the expansive list-making of Whitman.

The corrective, when it comes, is comedy. The speaker, entranced by an empty wasps’ nest hanging in a pharmacy, “small, exquisite, clean matte white, / and hard as stucco,” has been given it as a present; then, back on the river, a fellow-passenger’s question ends the poem: “ ‘What’s that ugly thing?’ ” The speaker has visited a place, and a moment, of dialectical possibility (rather than isolation and opposition), only to be bumped back into the reality of her solo vision, and lonely delight.

Next week: Three poems from the Boston years: “Poem,” “Crusoe in England,” and “Sonnet.”

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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.

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Image: Baependi, Minas Gerais, Brazil by Leo Foureaux

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