Elizabeth Bishop 4: Boston

Three poems

For the last several years of her life, Elizabeth Bishop lived in Boston and taught at Harvard, in nearby Cambridge. The poems I’ll be looking at come from this period—two of them, “Poem” and “Crusoe in England,” appeared in her final collection, Geography III; “Sonnet” was published just after her death in 1979.

I met the poet, whom we always addressed, and referred to, as “Miss Bishop,” in the fall of 1976. I was one of the dozen Harvard students taking her class on twentieth-century American poets (Frost, Stevens, Moore, and Lowell) that met in a small basement room once a week. Prompted by a bolder friend, I tagged along for “tea” at Miss Bishop’s, at her large loft apartment in a converted warehouse called Lewis Wharf, in downtown Boston, where we drank Dubonnet on the rocks and talked about travels and families and made one another laugh. There were treasures everywhere—a dark frame, elaborately carved and painted, surrounding an enormous mirror (“from Brazil,” she said); uncountable books and ashtrays and knickknacks and carpets and two comfy sofas; big windows that faced the busy harbor and the oncoming early dusk.

I visited her on my own a few more times, and my most vivid memory is her reading aloud to me a draft of her long essay about Marianne Moore, “Efforts of Affection.” (Later, in the 1980s, I would have the privilege of working with her editor, Robert Giroux, on readying the essay for its first publication, in Vanity Fairmagazine, where I then worked.) I tried to get her to talk about her writing; she would not talk about poetics, but was perfectly happy to talk about subject matter—the places, animals, and incidents in her work. She also read to me, and gave me a broadside copy of, the poem called “Poem,” included in her new book, Geography III.

As is the case with many of Bishop’s later poems, “Poem” is retrospective in focus, although it begins in a vivid present tense. The speaker, the poet, addresses us directly, once again sharing something, something that she has apparently just dug out from a pile of family memorabilia. A very small painting—“about the size of an old dollar bill”—gets inspected, and the precision of detail, now applied to a picture in miniature, reminds us of the intensity with which Bishop’s sandpiper (another double for the poet, in a different poem, called “Sandpiper”) examines his beach. He is “finical, awkward, / in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake,” examining “millions of grains” of sand, “black, white, tan, and gray, / mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.”

In “Poem,” Bishop’s typical hesitancies and second thoughts (“that gray-blue wisp—or is it?”; “A specklike bird is flying to the left. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?”) unfold in “real time” (or, rather, the poet’s sleight-of-hand imitation of real time). Its quietly expansive spoken quality, close to prose, draws us in, quite as if we might be otherwise inclined, skittishly, to shy away. Gentled along into this rural scene, we listen to the speaker as we might listen to an older relative, the kind who would exclaim, “Heavens!”

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!
It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.
His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab ….

This picture, “once taken from a trunk and handed over,” depicts a place the speaker already knows, and now she is asking us to look at something that, though new to us, is familiar to her, making her an expert guide. She says that, though she never knew the painter, a great-great uncle,

                   We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it’s still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks:
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?

The wrench of nostalgic recognition has a companion in the harmony, the community, of shared sight. And then, because Bishop allows another moment of devotional language, we are pushed into the spiritual realm of pondering what “abides.” What abides is this picture, this memory; but with a perfectly awkward, hyphenated adjective (“yet-to-be-dismantled”), the poet fatalistically acknowledges the limits of abidance:

Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
—the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

It is as much of an ars poetica as she ever wrote—what the great-great uncle painted stands for what the poet makes, a “picture” of life, or in this poem a picture of a picture, “useless and free,” that maybe the reader will recognize, and be able to share, with a coinciding vision. The broadside Miss Bishop gave me of “Poem” is not a single “broadside” sheet at all; it is actually a little booklet of the poem, printed on rectangular pages with a dark green marbled-paper cover, the object itself just about the size of an old dollar bill.

❧

I almost changed my mind about including “Crusoe in England” in these summer reading notes. This masterpiece, a persona poem spoken by the fictional Robinson Crusoe (or maybe the real-life Alexander Selkirk, on whom he was based) after he is rescued from his deserted island and brought back home to England to live out his days, deserves many more words than I can muster here. It is also rife with the kinds of details that scholars, both expert and amateur, love to worry at. Just for example: Why has Bishop brought in the anachronism of Crusoe remembering—or, rather, not remembering—the Wordsworth line about the “bliss of solitude” (since Selkirk, and Defoe’s Crusoe, were inhabitants of earlier centuries and could not possibly have read the Romantic poets)? Why has she made the island so much more like an island in the tropical Galapagos, with giant turtles and miniature volcanoes, than the actual island where Selkirk was marooned (off the colder southern coast of Chile), or the fanciful Caribbean Island (complete with palm trees and penguins) that Defoe described?

Bishop’s Crusoe complains, “My island seemed to be / a sort of cloud-dump,” where “the turtles lumbered by, high-domed, / hissing like teakettles.” The poet has written a slightly surreal fiction; or maybe it’s more like a dramatic monologue for the stage—but why, exactly?

As in “Poem,” and “Santarém,” and other poems from the later years of Bishop’s life, the retrospective storytelling urge is powerful. Here the use of a persona, like an actor’s mask, provides opportunity both for imaginative identification and, crucially, the means for the artist to more freely express dangerous, because vulnerable, emotions. Having left Brazil, her “island,” to return to the familiar home of the north Atlantic coast, Bishop, like the rescued Crusoe, is now missing her years in exile. Once again, she does not know where she belongs.

As brilliant, and charming, as so much of “Crusoe in England” is—the goats, the berries, the home-brew, the waterspouts!—emotionally its center lies in the relatively brief, understated account of the character “Friday.” In Defoe’s original novel, Friday, a black man, has escaped from another shipwreck, and Crusoe takes him on as a servant; in Bishop’s poem, he is an intimate companion. “He’d pet the baby goats sometimes, / and race with them, or carry one around. / —Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.” In Bishop’s version, once Crusoe and Friday get rescued and shipped back to England, Friday dies of measles.

Perhaps the poet’s own recent loss—Lota de Macedo Soares, the architect with whom she had shared a life in Brazil, died in 1967—can be mourned here, in fictional guise. But of course we need not read this great poem solely through the biographical lens, since Crusoe’s (and the poet’s, and our) sense of loss attaches not only to a particular place, and person, but to all losses, including the loss of time itself.

Loss is embodied, or maybe disembodied, in the poem’s most startling image, of Crusoe’s knife. Sitting in England, he gestures to the “uninteresting lumber” that surrounds him, and lands on a keepsake from his years on the desert island.

The knife there on the shelf—
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle …
Now it won’t look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.

❧

I’ll end these thoughts about Bishop’s poems with a perfect specimen of her re-forming of received forms, the posthumously published “Sonnet.” Here is the entire text:

Caught—the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed—the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

Indeed, it has a sonnet’s fourteen lines. It is also divided into an octet and a sestet, though in reverse order. (In the standard sonnet forms, both Italian and English, the octet comes first; then, after that mysterious volta, or turn, sometimes marked by a stanza break, the sestet takes the poem’s argument in a slightly different direction.) The rhyme scheme is also altered and, given the poet’s habit of using near-rhymes, can seem scarcely legible, as one tries to map this poem against the standard sonnet forms. In any case, we can clearly hear that the first two lines rhyme (bubble and level) with the fourth line (needle)—all feminine endings—and that the third and sixth lines also rhyme (divided, undecided). In the octet (which, as I mentioned, is in the wrong position), the only definitive rhymes are in the ninth and fourteenth lines (away, gay), although we can also hear a string of near-rhymes (mercury, bird, mirror).

By this point in her writing, Bishop rarely wrote in regular iambs, but did count beats, or stresses. For “Sonnet,” she has all two-beat lines. Of course, sonnets are supposed to be in iambic pentameter, with its regular five beats. We wonder what happened to those missing three beats—and I think I have figured out a possible explanation.

Formally, the poem is upside down in two ways: octet on bottom, sestet on top, and, instead of endingwith the couplet of an English sonnet, it begins with a couplet. The poem is also cut in half, lengthwise. The rest of it can be found in the mirror, by holding the poem on paper up to the glass: two beats on each side, with the missing fifth beat in the middle, in the space made by the mirror itself.   

A much earlier poem, “The Gentleman of Shalott,” also involves a mirror. Both poems, one observes, concern the condition of being hidden, closeted. The gentleman is “half in, half out” and “wishes to be quoted as saying at present, ‘Half is enough.’” By the time Bishop wrote “Sonnet,” she imagines the condition of being “caught” (stuck between affections, between places, between affinities) as no longer being “enough”—rather, here “breakage,” and a vanishing point, can offer the possibility of freedom. What was previously caught in a mirror, in a thermometer, in a compass, in the conditions of material limits, can finally be “gay,” and free, flying.

Bishop died quite suddenly of a brain aneurysm, a “bubble” in the bloodstream. Whether or not this is truly her final finished poem, it has become so in lore, a piece of literary mythology like that of Trelawny seizing the heart of Shelley from the bonfire. Was she, proleptically, seeing herself freed from her lifelong ambivalences by the arrival of her own death? It offers such exhilaration, with no hedging of bets, that I hope so. This freedom does not feel lonely at all.

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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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