No. 3 - May 2024
Author's Note: I've loved writing essays and how I feel like a scientist pulling material from many sources. It's such a great feeling of discovery. I was torn between writing an essay on Anna Akhmatova or Elizabeth Bishop for my thesis. I loved Bishop for her power of description and for her childhood memories, some of which seemed like mine. I have written some on Akhmatova and will work my scribblings on her into an essay. I also very much liked the Poet Alfonsina Storni and wrote an essay on her, which I presented at the University of Louisville. But Bishop seemed so solid a writer when I was finding my own voice years back, so she was my first choice. Her love of detail is rich and rewarding. An essay is a form of discovery, and that is also what a poem sometimes surfaces.
Shards of Childhood Memory
From where I lay, across the room stretching my tiny bones on what they called a sofa, I peered at them in dumb wonder as they reclined, head-to-foot, in their dramatically lit, mysterious, dark-green-curtained niche. I can look back on them now, many years and train trips later, and clearly see them looking like a Bernini fountain, or a Cellini saltcellar: a powerful but aging Poseidon with a small, elderly, curly Nereid. But that night I was dazed, almost scandalized. I had never seen either of them en dishabille before, not even in bed. In fact, I scarcely knew them.
What is interesting to note here is her sense of removal. It is as though she longingly looks in upon what can only be recreated in more ideal terms through an act of art. It is as though she were dwarfed in her “tiny bones” by those people to whom she refers as “them” and “they.” She scarcely knew them as a child, and hardly knew them any better in adult life. Many trips later she claims to see them “clearly,” although she never portrays their inner beings in any depth, but rather paints their exteriors in the likeness of “a Bernini fountain, or a Cellini saltcellar.” Perhaps, as an outsider, she has no way to enter the other, for that would entail too many dangers: the biggest being the loss of her perspective as an observer.
Grandparents crop up often in Bishop’s work—they, and other relatives, were her “caretakers,” yet seldom is there a display of affection for them or from them. In “The Moose” she hears her “grandparents’ voices/ uninterruptedly/ talking, in Eternity.” She lets the reader into their conversation, which is so plausible as to be real. It is Bishop’s strength as a writer that returns the familiar to us:
He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.
This putting away of Amos also speaks of her mother who was committed to a sanatorium after the early death of Bishop’s father in 1911. Bishop was keenly familiar with the experience of long absences. Hospitalized on several occasions, Bishop’s mother was finally committed to a hospital for life and the five-year-old Bishop saw her for the last time. Elizabeth Bishop lived from 1914 to 1917 in the coastal town of Great Village in Nova Scotia. After that she was pulled by grandparents back to the place of her father’s birth in Worcester. “The front of the house looked fairly familiar, very much the same kind of white clapboards and green shutters that I was accustomed to, only this house was on a much larger scale, twice as large, with two windows for each of the Nova Scotia ones and a higher roof.” So, she was uprooted and allowed to spend only her summers in Nova Scotia until she was thirteen.
Despite the upheaval of place, David Kalstone says in Five Temperaments: “She sees with such rooted, piercing vision, so realistically, because she has never taken our presence in the world as totally real.” Memory was the only constant for Bishop in the unpredictability of everchanging events and circumstances—the sanctuary to which she returned time and again for solace and information. Out of the ruins of the past, the artist is forced into creating herself/himself. From the anvil of longing, she forged a personal and artistic identity that was truly unique.
Brought to Worcester “against her wishes with a surprising extra set of grandparents” the young Bishop was plummeted into a “strange and unpredictable future.” The house in this new land seemed ominous to her, and something foreboding hung in the air. Bachelard says: “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” So, Bishop became a wanderer in search of home, and imagination and memory eventually became her home. “There exists for each one of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory.” If the house, as Bachelard suggests, is our first world, our first real universe, then how difficult those early formative years must have been for Bishop as she was shifted from one household to the next. In this new home “the cats were ugly, orange and white; they lived in the barn and ran away from me—not like my black nanny in Nova Scotia.” How unsettling this new place must have seemed; the very foundation of her world had been wrenched from her—she longed for the more ideal setting of Nova Scotia.
To sustain her stay with this “new set of grandparents” she reimages Nova Scotia throughout “The Country Mouse.” There, even “The soldiers, some of whom I actually knew, wore beautiful tam-o-shanters.” A great longing rises when one is propelled into a place that does not meet one’s previous experiences—it is from this deep longing that imaginative seeding can take root. As Helen McNeil notes: “Bishop used the circumstances of her life as the occasion of her poems; her lyric ‘I’ is usually autobiographical. Yet while it is possible to see moments in Bishop’s life in her poems, it is not appropriate to attempt to derive an intimate biography from them. Bishop’s interest was not in herself but in the human knowledge gained from the self’s experience.” Yet her past seems always to inform both her prose and her poetry, becoming the impetus behind many of her images.
In Worcester her loneliness grew when Agnes, the maid (one of her few friends) leaves for Sweden to marry. For Bishop this was another goodbye in a long chain of dismal farewells. With this new trauma she underwent a series of health problems: “First came constipation, then eczema again, and finally asthma. I felt myself aging, even dying. I was bored and lonely with Grandma, my silent grandpa, the dinners alone…at night I lay blinking my flashlight off and on and crying. As Louise Bogan so well put it:
At midnight tears
run into your ears
—The Collected Prose
Helen McNeil states, “Elizabeth got eczema, asthma, and bronchitis—illnesses of the lost child.” So, to create herself, to re-image her past was/ is the only alternative for the “lost child.”
A poem that strongly evokes the insecurity of uprootedness and its territory of fear is “In The Waiting Room”:
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
—Aunt Consuelo’s voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me;
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918
I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
—I couldn’t look any higher—
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Details become the boundaries containing the land upon which Bishop stands and the form of this poem spills as though it too were “falling, falling.”
What anchors both poem and its writer are the vivid details: “…Naked women with necks/ wound round and round with wire/ like the necks of light bulbs.” Near the end of the poem comes an even greater identification and recognition of the objects around her:
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us just one?
The familiarity of everyday things—boots, hands, the National Geographic—holds Bishop’s world together. The poem is about forging an identity—creating, in fact, Bishop’s identity. What makes this evident is the questioning self: “I scarcely dared to look/ to see what it was I was…/ why should I be my aunt/ or me, or anyone?” Although these questions seem to negate the importance of a self, that questing is implicit in the very questioning. And again, near the end of the poem, the same quizzical turn: “How had I come to be here, / like them, and overhear/ a cry of pain that could have/ got loud or worse but hadn’t?” This is reminiscent of the scream that hangs over “The Village.” Perhaps only the similarities found among people were what holds Bishop’s world together, yet everything in the poem states that may be “unlikely.” The above question might be the most compelling moment in the poem.
Still, the picture is bleak because “In the Waiting Room” she “was sliding/ beneath a big black wave/ another, and another.” Even looking into the outer world brings no relief—having left an internal world where the self is tossed about, only to step outside where “the war is on” and everything is “night and slush and cold”, is no consolation. There is no solace in either the external or internal world. Nearly nihilistic in her view, nothing seems of value—nothing seems knowable to Bishop. Yet, because she has communicated this experience, there is an indication there is some grounding to be found in language itself. Exorcised by the poem, she can surface.
A similar questing for identity can be found near the end of “The Country Mouse.” Here Bishop says: “You are you…how strange you are, inside looking out. You are not Beppo [the family dog] or the chestnut tree, or Emma, [the maid] you are you and you are going to be you forever.” It is interesting to note the removal of self—she does not say “I am me and I am going to be me forever.” No, in her eight uses of “you” she places herself outside herself, as though addressing someone faintly familiar. Even though she claims “you” as meaning herself, she is on the outside looking in. Such distancing speaks of the urgency this recall claimed, and Bishop compares this awareness to “coasting downhill” and smashing into a tree. She is left with a tantalizing question at the end of his childhood portrait: “Why was I a human being?”
There are no answers to such questions in Bishop’s work, except perhaps in the geography of things and even here one’s grasp is illusive because everything passes, changes into something else, as can be seen in “Crusoe in England,” where islands spawn islands, “like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs/ of islands.” It is this notation of illusive life around her that prevents her from succumbing to total self-absorption or from developing a completely nihilistic viewpoint. But even with these inner tensions at play, never does Bishop the artist lose her empathetic eye or wallow in self-pity. Looking at Beppo she notices: “He jumped nervously at imaginary dangers and barked another high hysterical bark. His hyper-thyroid eyes glistened and begged for sympathy and understanding.” In her “At Home with Loss” Joanne Feit Diehl says: “Experience of loss can yield to mastery.” It can also yield to an emphatic eye—to the quiet acquiescence attributed mostly to masters of a spiritual discipline. Bishop’s mastery was gained through those early losses—or despite them. She transformed her sense of homelessness into a form of knowledge, and then such knowledge found its expression in her poetry.
This passive consent to life is most evident in the villanelle “One Art.” Here Bishop loses everything—keys, a watch, houses, cities, rivers, a continent, and finally a mysterious “you,” who is surely someone extremely significant to her:
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
There is a sense of having to force herself to say, “write it” that makes one suspect that particular loss, that mysterious “you,” was a disaster, and that word loudly echoes at the end of the poem. Also, it is interesting to note how loss in this poem begins with simple domestic items and moves into a more universal collection of losses but then swings back to the human dimension.
A magical and incantatory effect can be found in the form of the villanelle—the very qualities of childhood itself. And perhaps it is finally the simplicity of the poem’s tone that makes “One Art” so believable: “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster.” There is a strong element of understatement here and obvious control—as though such a matter-of-fact acceptance endowed one with more power or released one from remorse. As Diehl says in “At Home with Loss”: “In her late poem ‘One Art’ (whose title conveys the implicit suggestion that the mastery sought over loss in love is intimately related to the control she maintains in her poetry), Bishop articulates the tension between discipline in life and the force of circumstance.” Clearly, she plays the role of the survivor in this poem—strip everything away and she will “miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.” It is through the employment of control that events do not become a “disaster.” Having relinquished much in childhood, the habit of loss becomes her method of creating a personal vision.
But, perhaps more than control, there is a sense of acquiescence to the inevitable in Bishop’s poems. This acquiescence in turn graces life because “…so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” If things have their own intention, then Bishop implies that they are beyond human control; there is no other way to be in the world, except to surrender to what is! Loss, renunciation, “The art of losing,” are all variations of the same theme, and the artist’s life must be given over to renunciation if the work is to be the primary focus. Perhaps this loss, like the emptying of self, occurs because “Life and the memory of it so compresses/ they’ve turned into each other,” as Bishop says in the “Poem” printed just before “One Art.” Everywhere present in this writer’s work is the mutability of things. What appears as one thing quickly dissolves into another, and given the history of her life, she lived those fastidious alternations in her work. As Bachelard says “…we cover the universe with the drawings we have lived.”
Her friend Robert Lowell said of Bishop in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art: “I am sure no living poet is as curious as Miss Bishop. What cuts so deeply is that each poem is inspired by her own tone, a tone of large, grave tenderness and a sorrowing amusement…when we read her, we enter the classical serenity of a new country.” The acquiescence previously mentioned is a close relative to the “serenity” Lowell refers to. Not only is Lowell’s reference evident in her poetry, but it is also highly visible in her prose as well. And a great “sorrowing amusement” can readily be felt “In the Village,” as well as a “grave tenderness.”
Here “inscapes” as well as “landscapes” echo from anvil to bell to the sea, and finally to her own mother’s scream. Nonchalant, nearly unobtrusive, that scream “hangs…in the past, in the present, and these years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps.” Yet, this scream is so all persuasive, so permeated throughout the atmosphere that all one has to do is “flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”
The scream itself is unobtrusive because of Bishop’s subtlety of expression. Never does the fear of that scream intercede between reader and experience. Again, she employs understatement to convey memory. There is a tenuous quality in the “perhaps” as she speculates that it might not have been loud to begin with—only grew louder in the recollection of it. To distance herself from the pain of that time, Bishop weaves this portrait in the third person—again, the spectator looking in the train-window of her past. Similarly, in “In the Village,” Bishop’s mother’s “dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass. The wallpaper glinted and the elm trees outside hung heavy and green, and the straw matting smelled like the ghost of hay.” But in this seemingly domestic scene the “clang” from the blacksmith’s shop transmutes into a scream; each becoming the other, suffusing this story with sorrow. Where innocence reigns, terror lurks: “The dress was all wrong. She screamed.” To Bishop’s credit, the child never allows the scream to consume her, because she never fails to keep an outward gaze upon the world. Her writing has a celebratory quality because of this: “Outside, along the matted eaves, painstakingly, sweetly, wasps go over and over a honeysuckle vine.” Only an eye that credits the world with a certain endearment can read the minute details of something as small as wasps. Bishop does this.
Octavio Paz remarked of Bishop’s work: “The poetry of Elizabeth Bishop has the lightness of a game and the gravity of a decision.” There is a similarity between this statement and Lowell’s observation of her “sorrowing amusement.” What appears done in the light-heartedness of game-playing carries the weight of a powerful and conscious decision: to portray her past with economy of language and emotion. To pick up a pen always has a certain amount of “gravity of decision.” Her’s is the writing of “reticence,” as Octavio Paz calls it. Even though Bishop has her own tears, she does not fail to see the suffering of others: “My grandmother is sitting in the kitchen stirring potato mash for tomorrow’s bread and crying into it. She gives me a spoonful and it tastes wonderful but wrong. In it I think I taste my grandmother’s tears; then I kiss her and taste them on her cheek.” This is one of the few times where a sign of affection is shown by the child—it is as though the display of emotion might upset the emotional balance of the speaker.
In the background, the family is in perpetual wait for a “scream.” “But it is not screamed again, and the red sun sets in silence.” Here, the use of “it” has an ominous quality. It is as though that sound emanated from far beyond the earth’s atmosphere; as though any fear were so vast, its origins must stem from elsewhere, even beyond the scope of human understanding. Yet, counterbalancing this seriousness, is a child-like perception of things: “She has a bosom full of needles with threads ready to pull out and make nests with. “She sleeps in her thimble.” This portrayal of Miss Gurley the dressmaker has a child’s playful points of view. This child’s vision of the world, one that sees little differentiation between things, (or the unity of all things) can also be felt in Bishop’s view of the animal world. In tow with Nelly (the family’s cow) on the way to pick mint, she says: “We both take drinks…her [Nelly’s] nose is blue and shiny as something in the rain. At such close distance my feelings for her are mixed…she gives my bare arm a lick, scratchy and powerful, too, almost upsetting me into the brook.” What a wonderful, lighthearted moment this is!
But the scream never fails to break through the atmosphere, always bearing with it its solemnity. As though in anticipation of its eventual arrival, Bishop says: “But neither of us is really listening to what he is saying; we are listening for sounds from upstairs, [Her mother stayed in a bedroom upstairs.] but everything is quiet.” It is her mother they are listening for, but the mother has been committed to a hospital for mental problems. The young child feels shame about her mother’s condition and confinement: “Every Monday afternoon I go past the blacksmith’s shop with the package [food, clothing, books—things the grandmother has prepared for Bishop’s mother] under my arm, hiding the address of the sanatorium with my arm and my other hand.”
A sense of despair and nervous anticipation permeates the air so that by the end of this childhood sketch the reader is returned to the sound which opened the memory. In the beginning of “In the Village” Bishop’s lines read: “A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over the Nova Scotian Village.” By the end she asks: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!” Even though she is referring to the blacksmith’s “clang,” both that sound, and her mother’s scream have become so intertwined they are by now, interchangeable. Even the sea bespeaks that sound. So indelibly pressed within her ears, the scream will not disappear. And since she has said “Oh beautiful sound” Bishop has clearly recognized the inextricable twinning of great sorrow with its parallel, beauty. For every beast is a beauty and every beauty a beast.
In her eerie “Sestina,” a child is frozen in rhyme and repetition; as though this stance of form could arrest time, its perpetual flux of change that ensues with its passing. But as Helen McNeil notes: “Bishop is not a poet of the self [through her work generates from self] and self-representation like Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath or the later Lowell; the autobiographical in Bishop tends to be submerged or displaced until later in her career.” So, in this poem we don’t even know the sex of the child, as though that removed Bishop from too close a biographical identification, although one can conclude the child is a girl from the visual objects that the child notices in the poem: the little Marvel Stove, buttons like tears, and the flower bed in front of the house that the child drew. This distancing enables Bishop to keep the reader from suspecting she is the subject of the poem; a sign of that “reticence” Paz attributes to her. It is interesting to note the stove’s name, Marvel, for that is the quality of childhood itself; a state where wonder, awe and amazement freely exist.
The “almanac” in this poem becomes an authoritative guide as it disperses directive bits of information. Perhaps, for Bishop it even becomes the lost father: “It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. / I know what I know, says the almanac.” This is an authoritative as that of a stern father addressing one of his offspring: I simply know what I know and that’s that, the almanac seems to be saying. “Time to plant tears,” says the almanac in the last stanza. This too is a firm, directive statement. When rain beats on the roof of the house, this becomes symbolic of a great inner struggle. Willard Spiegelman states: “We don’t normally think of Bishop as a poet of struggle; the tension in her poems is mostly internalized, and confrontations, when they occur, are between the self, traveling, moving, or simply seeing.” In “Sestina” tea becomes tears, rain becomes tears, buttons become tears, and “the house feels chilly,” and there’s nowhere to turn except toward the imagination. These tears are external signs of struggle, of tension. To compensate and to survive her own tears as well as her grandmother’s, the child draws a “rigid” house and a winding path leading to it—as though rigidity could become form, could become one’s home. An unbending house will at least contain her after the arduous task of getting there has been accomplished:
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
In the end, truth remains enigmatic, finally unknowable. But it is “time to plant tears” and that is resolution, however a tenuous a conclusion it may seem.
Transmutable as Bishop’s seeing is, even the visible testimony of poems could become tears, could become home. “The house we are born in [or live in during the formative years] is physically inscribed in us…it is a group of habits” Bachelard says. Bishop’s “Sestina” is full of the habits of her childhood experiences: the repetition, the poem’s firm sense of control is nearly rigid, as though that could stabilize the flux of change in the outer world. Her pain and her joy, since both have been removed from too close an identification with the speaker, become the reader’s own lament for what is lost in childhood. The tercet ending this poem seems to be saying, time to get on with work: “Time to plant tears.”
Perhaps a sorrowing amazement would better describe Bishop’s poetry than Lowell’s “sorrowing amusement.” Everywhere prevailing, everywhere suffusing her work, is the awe, the wonder that belongs to childhood. This perhaps arises from an acute sense of isolation, from what was lost in Bishop’s past. Robert Pinsky; says in E.B. & Her Art:
“She wrote so well about people and places because she had a powerful motive, embattled; that motive, in nearly all the poems, is to define oneself away from two opposing nightmares: the pain of isolation, and the loss of identity in the mass of the visible world.”
Sensing that much is worn away with time, she is urged by an inner need to capture the ephemeral moment: “He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that old black knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away.” This is where Bishop finds root. She must have the anchoring of an individual vision, because as she later says in the same poem: “…me a believer in total immersion.” One who dares to go under needs the grounding of something.
Separation is a natural law in the continuum of life; the suffering resulting from it can lead to renunciation and transcendence. Elizabeth Bishop knows renunciation. It is implicit in the history of her life which has been recorded in her childhood sketches. With acquiescence, she accepts loss, not as something that will entangle her, but that puzzles and then finally informs her. Here she speaks of the fleeting, the ephemeral:
All those other things—clothes, crumbling postcards, broken china; things damaged and lost, sickened or destroyed; even the frail almost-lost scream; —are they too frail for us to hear their voices long, too mortal?
Perhaps those early losses made her yearn to cast words into form; perhaps her poetry and prose pieces re-parented her orphaned past. Having left what was safe and familiar behind, Bishop picks up the shards of her childhood memories and gives them a home in the geography of her art, her work indelibly stamped in the drawings she lived.
WORKS CITED Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics Of Space. Boston, Beacon Press, 1964. Bishop, Elizabeth, The Complete Poems/1927-1979. New York, Farrar. Straus. Giroux, 1983. Bishop, Elizabeth, The Collected Prose. New York, Farrar, Straus. Girous, 1983. Diehl, Joanne Feit. Modern Critical Views/Elizabeth Bishop. E. Harold Bloom, New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985. Kalstone, David, ed. Five Temperaments. New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. McNeil, Helen. Voices & Vision/The Poet In America. Ed. Helen Vendler. New York, Random House. 395-425, 1987. Schwartz, Loyd & Estess P. Sybil, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. U. of Michigan P., 1983.
© 2024 Diana Mackinnon Henning
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