Hello everyone! Do to an error of *mine* (apologies!) the long quotes from “Armadillo” appeared in the email you got as long stanzas. They should be quatrains, as above, so sorry!
This post works so well with the previous two. In "The Map" and "The Fish," we had moments of microscopic self-correction, where the speaker questions the accuracy of her details: are these shadows or shallows? Is it five pieces of fish-line or four plus a wire-leader? Here, we have moments of more macroscopic self-correction, where the speaker is questioning not just the details of the poem but the larger project of the poem/poetry: in "The Armadillo," for instance, should I be aestheticizing violence like this? (Though that poem also has its small moments of self-correction: stars, but actually planets, but actually tinted planets. For Bishop, you can't distinguish these scales of self-correction so easily since accuracy at the level of detail *is* the project and has large-scale ethical implications.)
I love your reading of Bishop's wobbling use of the ballad form. It fits perfectly with that poem's more general ambivalence: she's turning this event into a story, a beautiful poem, while also refusing to do so with the last italicized section.
To add to your list of marvels from "Santarém": not just that the priest has a brass bed, but that it's the only one in town!
Thanks again for these posts. They're making my Sundays!
Yes, this sense woven through April’s readings and the poems’ “wobble”—where old-fashioned form is about landing on an anticipated cadence, the form here as she shows waylays an arrival at certainty. Like the third lines of the first two stanzas of “The Armadillo” are a little long, like the balloons lifting off and the chambers filling. It makes the triple rhyme at the end redoubling the “cry” and putting such emphasis on the vision of the fist even more of a reversal. So glad you are enjoying!
On of the things Elizabeth Bishop loved about Brazil was its funky, unfinished, handmade quality, so different from the standardized USA of the 1950s. I cherish he detail about the two wooden clogs, each sounding a different note, belonging to the filling station attendant, is almost the heart of the poem to me (not sure the italicized bit represents a saner self-if anything going into italics has a distancing, ironic effect to me). I even fancifully imagine these musical clogs, along with the brown bird in its bamboo baroque cage, to have been an inside joke Bishop could have shared with Lota, as they traveled in Brazil together, and (still more fanciful) imagine this pair of lovers from different backgrounds as themselves not unlike two clogs matched in difference. A few pages on in the book, Lota is speaking to her gardener, and says "you jumped out of your clogs." In any case, this kind of wondering observation is what Brazil brought out in Bishop and culminates in Santarem. Travel brings out a desire to possess: this is clear from the very first poem in the book, "Arrival at Santos": "your immodest demands for a different world/ and a better life." The second poem in the collection explores that same desire in the context of the original conquest of Brazil. But even Brazil's funkiness has its downside. The fire balloons, incidentally, are not just made from candles like the paper bags in New Mexico but are fueled by a large supply of petroleum, and thus their extreme dangerousness. Thanks for your helpful guidance through these challenging poems. I hadn't made the connection between the armadillo and the mailed fist, and so many other valuable observations, thank you...
It struck me that the clogs and the birdcage, in the gas station, were humble, particular things, encountered in a humble place, that step forward as giving travel a purpose, after the abstractions of the previous stanza that present as a doubtful rationale for travel. The “bamboo church” reminded me of the “church, Cathedral rather” in Santarém, whose status—exalted? simple? in the cage’s case, pretend?—is subject to revision.
After reading “The Armadillo,” I wondered, why not “The Owls” or “The Rabbit”? And did the rabbit survive? The owls “shrieked up out of sight.” The armadillo with head down and tail down “left the scene.” The baby rabbit “leapt out”—"a handful of intangible ash / with fixed ignited eyes”—which made me believe it was instantly incinerated! But maybe not. In Bishop’s epilogic lines she references the fire, the shriek, the panic—and (her own) weak fist railing against the sky. Probably not against God, but men who launch fire balloons, or as April surmises, men who commit crimes of war. (Btw, during Bishop’s years in Brazil, the beloved balloon festivals were at their height, but due to fires, they were outlawed in 1998. Yet there still are fanatics who launch balloons, some more than 200 feet high. Keep your heads down!)
As I read “Santarém,” I thought of Bishop’s lines from “Questions of Tavel”: “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres?” In “Santarém,” Bishop is transported by the gorgeously evoked scene, yet the peasants appear as strangers. She doesn’t engage with them (though her mind is engaged by them), and until the missionary nuns wave as they head up to a lost tributary, no one engages with her. Yet once inside the pharmacy, she engages so intensely that the pharmacist rewards her with the lovely wasp nest. And though it will soon be disparaged onboard by Mr. Swan of Phillips Electric, she is so open to everything in this poem (the dazzling dialectic), that she prefaces his insult by telling us he’s “really a very nice old man.” What wide-open eyes—and a wide-open heart—she has!
I had what I feel like is a mad thought associating the raised mailed fist with Milton’s Satan, who also streaks through the sky. Milton keeps associating Satan with light, and of course with protest of fate. But I do feel like this is over-the-top of me!
May just be coincidence, but in Lowell's "Skunk Hour," the answering poem to "The Armadillo," Milton's Satan is invoked, in the phrase, "myself am hell." I personally thought the mailed fist very Arthurian, so I thought of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, especially the Death of Arthur with the raised arm clothed in white samite that catches Excalibur hurled into the meer.
Just to give you a feel for the sanctioned violence of Tennyson's Arthur, and a passage with the word "mail," too. The arm from the meer follows hard upon.
and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base,
And chance and craft and strength in single fights,
And ever and anon with host to host
Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,
Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash
The dictionaries say the phrase "mailed fist" is a calque from the German "eiserne Faust." If so, subtly subversive of Bishop to introduce the word 'weak' before this Bismarckian (cf. also 'blood and iron'?) journalistic cliche.
I love April's last line in this post about the way Santarem ends on a moment of dialectical possibility that, as it plays out, bumps the speaker back to the reality of her solitary pleasure in the wasp's exquisite nest (paraphrased). You made me see, April, that this is totally consistent with her vision: each one of us is solitary but curious in that, as we move through the world, we play a two-noted tune with our walking (in crude footwear) and thinking (neither here nor there). We also embody watery dialectic she sees as the two rivers come together but preserve their distinct colors.
I've always read "Questions of Travel" (like "The Filling Station") as a somewhat fresh experience of being in a foreign place. It is incredibly overwhelming, and it feels a little wrong and pointless, greedy and overreaching, but observation of ordinary things steadies her and us. The world speaks through pantomimes, sounds, and curiosities, but it's our pondering that makes history out of material objects and the "weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages." And there are boring patches, too, in every trip. It's life after all. And the work of homemaking which makes places feel familiar goes on everywhere. I don't feel this poem ends with utter ambivalence but a resounding "No." that silences the question of where should I be. "The choice is never wide and never free." Home always depends on human making.
It makes total sense that Bishop would reject the nostalgia of remembered places (the confluence of two great rivers). Golden light gives way to ... a "gathering in of pleasures" (I love this phrase, too) that make the scene a group trip (like the busride in The Moose) where the epiphanic moment is not her vision of the moose but a gathered one: everyone's comment gets a place. In "Santarem," it is much the same. Could the wasp's nest be a symbol for Bishop's kind of colony (not the colony of conquest)?
An aspect of the form of “Questions of Travel” that intrigues me is its repeated words.
Waterfalls…too…too…many…many…waterfalls…those…those…age…ages…traveling, traveling, should, should inexplicable…inexplicable dream…dreams…have…have…
And that’s just the first page!
For a poem without rhyme and strict meter, these repeated words help establish structure (April is surely right to underscore Bishop’s sense of structure and continuity). Do they also carry some deeper meaning, related to the search for home? In her letters, Bishop also repeatedly harps on the things at Samambaia that make her feel at home and make the home, including the waterfall. On a still deeper level, she experienced “perfect recall” of her childhood once settled in Brazil, so perhaps Brazil repeated home for her, however far away it seems on the map!
I wondered if the repetition of words was meant to create a sense of acceleration and superabundance, like the waterfalls hurrying too rapidly down the stream and the clouds spilling over their sides into rain, and then, waterfalls. And then we have tears again, proto-waterfalls, like the superabundant tears that cover the chanticleer in “The Rooster.”
Indeed! Or we can also think of the freezing cold water in "At the Fishouses" (April already commented on this): "flowing and drawn...flowing and flown." Repetition with variation. Sameness with difference.
dear all, sorry to keep posting so much, but I stumbled across a paragraph from Bishop's prose that might shed some light on Santarem. It's from "A Trip to Vigia":
"We went out. Huge thunderclouds rolled back and forth, the river was higher, the tide had turned. All the lights went on in the forsaken plaza, although it was not dark. The pearly, silent, huge church of Vigia had made us all feel somehow guilty at abandoning it again. The town's little white houses were turning mauve. In the high, high skies shafts of long golden beams fell through the thunderclouds. Nature was providing all the baroque grandeur that the place lacked..."
The last sentence in particular suggests that, in parallel fashion, the baroque "church or cathedral rather" in Santarem is not merely ornamental but is sponsoring the golden effulgence everywhere, that the magical atmosphere has spilled from a cathedral unable to house it. Or something! It's an instance of 'spilt religion'?
Thanks so much, April! It's been a huge pleasure to read Bishop's poems and see where you point us. I've appreciated the other comments too (esp. Ann, Dan and Mary Jo), and regret I won't be able to join the Boston poems discussion, or the Thursday conversation. I'm sailing to Nova Scotia!
How fortuitous! Have a wonderful time. It’s been great to have you here. Maybe come back and give us some locale-informed Nova Scotia comments! I’ll post a link to a recording of our conversation. We will miss you!
Due to repeated travel and family commitments, I have not been able to follow these discussions as closely as I would have liked. But thank you again. These were wonderful poems, and I found your reading of "The Armadillo" especially helpful. I was struck again by the frequent religious imagery that appears in Bishop's poetry (or at least the selection you have given us).
"Questions of Travel" spoke to me in some special ways. Temperamentally, I am pretty reserved, shy, and a little intimidated by the unfamiliar. I actually remember as an undergraduate--in retrospect, this is deeply ironic--being baffled by the fact that anyone would want to spend a semester studying abroad. But I've ended up traveling a reasonable amount--I married a woman from Germany, have taken students on multiple study-abroad trips of varying durations, have been to Switzerland and Austria for research, and so on. So I feel the tug between "home" and "away" rather strongly and at times am not even entirely certain which is which. Bishop's questions reverberate with me: "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?" But also the rejoinder: "But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road...." I have come to think that travel is best when we try to experience the "away" as "home" and when it also helps us experience our "home" as a little more "away." And I find a lot of that in this poem.
Hello everyone! Do to an error of *mine* (apologies!) the long quotes from “Armadillo” appeared in the email you got as long stanzas. They should be quatrains, as above, so sorry!
This post works so well with the previous two. In "The Map" and "The Fish," we had moments of microscopic self-correction, where the speaker questions the accuracy of her details: are these shadows or shallows? Is it five pieces of fish-line or four plus a wire-leader? Here, we have moments of more macroscopic self-correction, where the speaker is questioning not just the details of the poem but the larger project of the poem/poetry: in "The Armadillo," for instance, should I be aestheticizing violence like this? (Though that poem also has its small moments of self-correction: stars, but actually planets, but actually tinted planets. For Bishop, you can't distinguish these scales of self-correction so easily since accuracy at the level of detail *is* the project and has large-scale ethical implications.)
I love your reading of Bishop's wobbling use of the ballad form. It fits perfectly with that poem's more general ambivalence: she's turning this event into a story, a beautiful poem, while also refusing to do so with the last italicized section.
To add to your list of marvels from "Santarém": not just that the priest has a brass bed, but that it's the only one in town!
Thanks again for these posts. They're making my Sundays!
Yes, this sense woven through April’s readings and the poems’ “wobble”—where old-fashioned form is about landing on an anticipated cadence, the form here as she shows waylays an arrival at certainty. Like the third lines of the first two stanzas of “The Armadillo” are a little long, like the balloons lifting off and the chambers filling. It makes the triple rhyme at the end redoubling the “cry” and putting such emphasis on the vision of the fist even more of a reversal. So glad you are enjoying!
On of the things Elizabeth Bishop loved about Brazil was its funky, unfinished, handmade quality, so different from the standardized USA of the 1950s. I cherish he detail about the two wooden clogs, each sounding a different note, belonging to the filling station attendant, is almost the heart of the poem to me (not sure the italicized bit represents a saner self-if anything going into italics has a distancing, ironic effect to me). I even fancifully imagine these musical clogs, along with the brown bird in its bamboo baroque cage, to have been an inside joke Bishop could have shared with Lota, as they traveled in Brazil together, and (still more fanciful) imagine this pair of lovers from different backgrounds as themselves not unlike two clogs matched in difference. A few pages on in the book, Lota is speaking to her gardener, and says "you jumped out of your clogs." In any case, this kind of wondering observation is what Brazil brought out in Bishop and culminates in Santarem. Travel brings out a desire to possess: this is clear from the very first poem in the book, "Arrival at Santos": "your immodest demands for a different world/ and a better life." The second poem in the collection explores that same desire in the context of the original conquest of Brazil. But even Brazil's funkiness has its downside. The fire balloons, incidentally, are not just made from candles like the paper bags in New Mexico but are fueled by a large supply of petroleum, and thus their extreme dangerousness. Thanks for your helpful guidance through these challenging poems. I hadn't made the connection between the armadillo and the mailed fist, and so many other valuable observations, thank you...
It struck me that the clogs and the birdcage, in the gas station, were humble, particular things, encountered in a humble place, that step forward as giving travel a purpose, after the abstractions of the previous stanza that present as a doubtful rationale for travel. The “bamboo church” reminded me of the “church, Cathedral rather” in Santarém, whose status—exalted? simple? in the cage’s case, pretend?—is subject to revision.
After reading “The Armadillo,” I wondered, why not “The Owls” or “The Rabbit”? And did the rabbit survive? The owls “shrieked up out of sight.” The armadillo with head down and tail down “left the scene.” The baby rabbit “leapt out”—"a handful of intangible ash / with fixed ignited eyes”—which made me believe it was instantly incinerated! But maybe not. In Bishop’s epilogic lines she references the fire, the shriek, the panic—and (her own) weak fist railing against the sky. Probably not against God, but men who launch fire balloons, or as April surmises, men who commit crimes of war. (Btw, during Bishop’s years in Brazil, the beloved balloon festivals were at their height, but due to fires, they were outlawed in 1998. Yet there still are fanatics who launch balloons, some more than 200 feet high. Keep your heads down!)
As I read “Santarém,” I thought of Bishop’s lines from “Questions of Tavel”: “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres?” In “Santarém,” Bishop is transported by the gorgeously evoked scene, yet the peasants appear as strangers. She doesn’t engage with them (though her mind is engaged by them), and until the missionary nuns wave as they head up to a lost tributary, no one engages with her. Yet once inside the pharmacy, she engages so intensely that the pharmacist rewards her with the lovely wasp nest. And though it will soon be disparaged onboard by Mr. Swan of Phillips Electric, she is so open to everything in this poem (the dazzling dialectic), that she prefaces his insult by telling us he’s “really a very nice old man.” What wide-open eyes—and a wide-open heart—she has!
I had what I feel like is a mad thought associating the raised mailed fist with Milton’s Satan, who also streaks through the sky. Milton keeps associating Satan with light, and of course with protest of fate. But I do feel like this is over-the-top of me!
May just be coincidence, but in Lowell's "Skunk Hour," the answering poem to "The Armadillo," Milton's Satan is invoked, in the phrase, "myself am hell." I personally thought the mailed fist very Arthurian, so I thought of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, especially the Death of Arthur with the raised arm clothed in white samite that catches Excalibur hurled into the meer.
Just to give you a feel for the sanctioned violence of Tennyson's Arthur, and a passage with the word "mail," too. The arm from the meer follows hard upon.
and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base,
And chance and craft and strength in single fights,
And ever and anon with host to host
Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,
Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash
Of battleaxes on shatter'd helms, and shrieks
After the Christ, of those who falling down
Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist;
Certainly the “mail” seems to have a chivalric intimation.
The dictionaries say the phrase "mailed fist" is a calque from the German "eiserne Faust." If so, subtly subversive of Bishop to introduce the word 'weak' before this Bismarckian (cf. also 'blood and iron'?) journalistic cliche.
I love April's last line in this post about the way Santarem ends on a moment of dialectical possibility that, as it plays out, bumps the speaker back to the reality of her solitary pleasure in the wasp's exquisite nest (paraphrased). You made me see, April, that this is totally consistent with her vision: each one of us is solitary but curious in that, as we move through the world, we play a two-noted tune with our walking (in crude footwear) and thinking (neither here nor there). We also embody watery dialectic she sees as the two rivers come together but preserve their distinct colors.
I've always read "Questions of Travel" (like "The Filling Station") as a somewhat fresh experience of being in a foreign place. It is incredibly overwhelming, and it feels a little wrong and pointless, greedy and overreaching, but observation of ordinary things steadies her and us. The world speaks through pantomimes, sounds, and curiosities, but it's our pondering that makes history out of material objects and the "weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages." And there are boring patches, too, in every trip. It's life after all. And the work of homemaking which makes places feel familiar goes on everywhere. I don't feel this poem ends with utter ambivalence but a resounding "No." that silences the question of where should I be. "The choice is never wide and never free." Home always depends on human making.
It makes total sense that Bishop would reject the nostalgia of remembered places (the confluence of two great rivers). Golden light gives way to ... a "gathering in of pleasures" (I love this phrase, too) that make the scene a group trip (like the busride in The Moose) where the epiphanic moment is not her vision of the moose but a gathered one: everyone's comment gets a place. In "Santarem," it is much the same. Could the wasp's nest be a symbol for Bishop's kind of colony (not the colony of conquest)?
An aspect of the form of “Questions of Travel” that intrigues me is its repeated words.
Waterfalls…too…too…many…many…waterfalls…those…those…age…ages…traveling, traveling, should, should inexplicable…inexplicable dream…dreams…have…have…
And that’s just the first page!
For a poem without rhyme and strict meter, these repeated words help establish structure (April is surely right to underscore Bishop’s sense of structure and continuity). Do they also carry some deeper meaning, related to the search for home? In her letters, Bishop also repeatedly harps on the things at Samambaia that make her feel at home and make the home, including the waterfall. On a still deeper level, she experienced “perfect recall” of her childhood once settled in Brazil, so perhaps Brazil repeated home for her, however far away it seems on the map!
I wondered if the repetition of words was meant to create a sense of acceleration and superabundance, like the waterfalls hurrying too rapidly down the stream and the clouds spilling over their sides into rain, and then, waterfalls. And then we have tears again, proto-waterfalls, like the superabundant tears that cover the chanticleer in “The Rooster.”
Indeed! Or we can also think of the freezing cold water in "At the Fishouses" (April already commented on this): "flowing and drawn...flowing and flown." Repetition with variation. Sameness with difference.
dear all, sorry to keep posting so much, but I stumbled across a paragraph from Bishop's prose that might shed some light on Santarem. It's from "A Trip to Vigia":
"We went out. Huge thunderclouds rolled back and forth, the river was higher, the tide had turned. All the lights went on in the forsaken plaza, although it was not dark. The pearly, silent, huge church of Vigia had made us all feel somehow guilty at abandoning it again. The town's little white houses were turning mauve. In the high, high skies shafts of long golden beams fell through the thunderclouds. Nature was providing all the baroque grandeur that the place lacked..."
The last sentence in particular suggests that, in parallel fashion, the baroque "church or cathedral rather" in Santarem is not merely ornamental but is sponsoring the golden effulgence everywhere, that the magical atmosphere has spilled from a cathedral unable to house it. Or something! It's an instance of 'spilt religion'?
What an amazing quote! Thank you!
Thanks so much, April! It's been a huge pleasure to read Bishop's poems and see where you point us. I've appreciated the other comments too (esp. Ann, Dan and Mary Jo), and regret I won't be able to join the Boston poems discussion, or the Thursday conversation. I'm sailing to Nova Scotia!
How fortuitous! Have a wonderful time. It’s been great to have you here. Maybe come back and give us some locale-informed Nova Scotia comments! I’ll post a link to a recording of our conversation. We will miss you!
Due to repeated travel and family commitments, I have not been able to follow these discussions as closely as I would have liked. But thank you again. These were wonderful poems, and I found your reading of "The Armadillo" especially helpful. I was struck again by the frequent religious imagery that appears in Bishop's poetry (or at least the selection you have given us).
"Questions of Travel" spoke to me in some special ways. Temperamentally, I am pretty reserved, shy, and a little intimidated by the unfamiliar. I actually remember as an undergraduate--in retrospect, this is deeply ironic--being baffled by the fact that anyone would want to spend a semester studying abroad. But I've ended up traveling a reasonable amount--I married a woman from Germany, have taken students on multiple study-abroad trips of varying durations, have been to Switzerland and Austria for research, and so on. So I feel the tug between "home" and "away" rather strongly and at times am not even entirely certain which is which. Bishop's questions reverberate with me: "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?" But also the rejoinder: "But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road...." I have come to think that travel is best when we try to experience the "away" as "home" and when it also helps us experience our "home" as a little more "away." And I find a lot of that in this poem.
Thanks!