by Eric Ormsby

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and
      Lloyd Schwartz.
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton.

from Parnassus, Volume 31 Nos. 1 & 2

I've never had the pleasure of fondling a trout. Like most of us, I've encountered that noble fish only when picking at its rosy flesh in a truite meunière with the tines of my fork, and even then gingerly. But when I read Hopkins' line "for rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim," I feel for a moment as though my fingers have grazed the thing itself. I delight in this illusion partly because words, for once, seem to have acquired the quick slippery density of a living creature; to have assumed heft and texture; to have become equivalent to the object of which they are normally only the sign. Partly too, I admire it for the impossibility of the endeavor. For words can never come close to the mute and irreducible density of things; nor are they meant to. Words point; they don't embody. Mediaeval logicians knew this well; they distinguished between de re and de dictu utterances, between those that deal with "the thing itself" as against "the word for the thing"—between Socrates the man and "Socrates" the name. Poets, those zealots of the word, all too often blur the boundary, only occasionally to magnificent effect.

As it happens, Hopkins' line was one that Elizabeth Bishop particularly admired; she cites it more than once in her letters and essays. Comparison with Hopkins is instructive. Nowhere in Bishop's poetry does she attempt to reproduce by force of words the look or shape or fingertip-feel of the world in his ambitious way; there are no "fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls," no "azurous hung hills," in her poems. Just the opposite: Though praised for her descriptive gift, for what Robert Lowell called her "famous eye," Bishop in fact depicts things sketchily. The details out of which she assembles her sea- and landscapes are prosaic, unobtrusive, dowdy. It's always "the same sea, the same," and its shore is composed of the same "millions of grains," virtually indistinguishable except for their various colors, and even these tend to be daubed in the broadest of hues: "black, white, tan, and gray." The words in her poems are plain too; they're almost never set in rivalry with the world; they don't strive for "inscape" but serve instead as panes of translucency through which a once-glimpsed world, an instantaneous vista, is abruptly surveyed in a succession of ghostly flashes, like scenes viewed in a slide-show. Bishop was seldom, if ever, a "gaudy" poet, like Stevens—or, for that matter, like her friend and mentor Marianne Moore. On the evidence of her best work, this was a matter of aesthetic—and perhaps even moral—principle. There was a prim, almost Shaker simplicity to her eye. If her peculiar way of seeing became "famous," that was not because it was conspicuously acute, but because it was chaste. Hers was a renunciatory eye. It scoured objects of superfluity with the force of a solvent.

A chaste eye isn't necessarily an innocent one. Though, as her letters attest, she drew the line at certain subjects, as well as certain words, she was no prig; unlike Moore, whose prudery betrayed an almost voluptuous luxuriance of eye, Bishop approached her subjects with equanimity: In her poems, no detail is given undue emphasis, all stand isolated in the same "ancient chill." At first glance, her descriptive technique appears almost novelistic. Of her third collection, Questions of Travel of 1965, Robert Lowell could write, in a letter of October 28 of the same year, "the book reads with the steady excellence of some perfect short story." Lowell is speaking, of course, of the effect of the entire collection, but one is tempted to apply it to individual poems as well. To do so would, however, be a mistake. Though Bishop employed certain of the devices of fiction, inserting descriptive strokes to evoke atmosphere or to propel a narrative, her ultimate aim was quite other, not merely idiosyncratic but downright subversive.

Any number of examples will illustrate this, but consider how Graham Greene, another master of the telling detail, and Bishop's close contemporary, uses description to set a scene. (Bishop encountered Greene only once, at a P.E.N. meeting in 1960, where, as she wrote to Lowell, she disapproved of his "stomping out. ") Greene opens The Power and the Glory, published in 1940, as follows:

Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet.

And a little further on, when Greene wants to evoke the town, he brings the vultures on again to offer a panoramic scavenger's view of the place:

One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea.

The details are skimpy: sun and dust, a few monuments, the river and the sea; even the vultures are in short supply. But we know at once, if only from the sparse adjectives with their emphatic alliteration ("blazing," "bleaching"), that Mr. Tench is probably not setting out for a Mexican hat dance or a mariachi jamboree. The very severity of the description heightens its portentousness; its melodrama is in understatement. Eight years later, in The Heart of the Matter, Greene would again find useful employment for those vultures—and that alliteration. When Mr. Wilson steps outside in the "empty baked" African street, he notes that "on either side of the school the tin roofs sloped towards the sea, and the corrugated iron above his head clanged and clattered as a vulture alighted." The details—the "hobbled turkeys" in the marketplace or "the smell of flowers under a balcony"—are minimal but carefully chosen. In "Greeneland" no detail stands on its own; each contributes to the narrative momentum, each acts as a tiny lash of the whip to drive the course of a destiny, each is an encapsulated omen.

In Bishopland, by contrast, the descriptive details may be equally sparse but their purpose isn't immediately evident. They're positioned like exhibits in a sequence whose significance remains enigmatic; each can stand on its own but no single item is privileged. For all their plainness, they remain strangely evocative; they're mysterious without being portentous. And their mystery emerges not so much out of what they are as out of where they are. (This has nothing to do, by the way, with the current cliche of discovering "the extraordinary in the ordinary." In Bishop's work, the ordinary remains ordinary; that is its astringent glory.) In a letter to May Swenson of July 3, 1958, she stated that for her the chief difficulty in poetry was "a problem of placement." This had to do, she goes on to say, with "choice of word, abruptness or accuracy of the image"; but it seems to me that it applies to her placement of the things in her poems as well.

The items in Bishop's vistas—and she was as addicted to lists and inventories as Whitman—are seldom there purely for the sake of verisimilitude, and follow no obvious or even logical progression. This can be most readily seen in her correspondence. One of the most characteristic features of her letters, not only to Lowell but to her many other friends, is how often she serves up minute and colorful accounts of things seen and places observed—from Sammy, her pet toucan, to Rio's Avenida Atlantica—in tumbling and sometimes rather chirpy profusion. Words in Air, which contains the gossipy and exuberant correspondence between the two poets over some three decades, swarms with such accounts, and these form a striking, and sometimes amusing, counterpoint to the more expansive Lowell's excited dispatches; though both poets are quite gabby, Bishop remains ultimately reserved, offering descriptive tidbits as substitutes for disclosures of unguarded feeling. By contrast, Lowell tends to flaunt his emotions. As a result, their letters occasionally read like skewed dialogues between Lowell's mouth and Bishop's eye. Her more vivid passages reinforce the impression that the sheer act of description—what she called, in a letter to Lowell of 1960, "the accumulation of exotic or picturesque or charming detail"—was something Bishop took great pleasure in for its own sake, and that she included such "accumulations" as gifts. If Marianne Moore wouldn't visit her in Brazil, she would send her a piece of the place gift-wrapped and beribboned with memorable phrases. As a result, a number of the letters, especially to Moore but also to Lowell, read like impetuous drafts for later poems. When they do develop into poems or segments of poems, usually after years of revision, they somehow retain that intimate accent; they seem inscribed to the reader. This may be one reason why her finished poems have so strong and wide an appeal; even when the speaker remains hidden, even when the poem seems most neutral in tone, it reads like a cherished letter from a distant friend.

Though Bishop's descriptions appear to be plain and direct, almost documentary in presentation, they're freighted with covert emotion, though it isn't always obvious what the emotion may be. In a letter of 1970, Lowell commented on "a clear poem whose meaning was hard to determine" in one of her books. This catches her main effect rather neatly. As one example, consider the opening stanza of "Cape Breton," from her 1955 collection A Cold Spring.

Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa."
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag's dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motorboat.

This seems straightforward enough; it could almost be the voice-over of a travelogue or an excerpt from a guidebook, especially with that parenthetic nugget of gratuitous information about sheep-stampedes—the sort of thing a chatty local guide might add in the hope of a tip. True, the long fourth line is suspiciously lyrical, but the "silly-looking puffins" and the baaing sheep are reassuring: They're distinctly unpoetical. (One can only speculate on what Hopkins might have made of these—the fluff-tufted riffs on "puffins," the bassoon obbligatos on bleats. We'd choke on puffin-breath, be smothered by wool-snarled wefts!) The passage is contrived to mimic a tourist's perspective; these are things as they might be seen by anyone and scrawled on a postcard home. There's no whoring after puffin or auk essences; the gaze that considers them is chaste, refusing to infringe on the things themselves, respecting their surfaces, their commonplace appearances. We don't know why the auks and puffins "all stand / with their backs to the mainland." Maybe they're bored; maybe they're hoping to spot a herring; maybe they favor an ocean view. The fact is given; it seems not to point to anything beyond itself.

This is a poem held together by nothing more substantial than mist—and a "thin mist" at that. Its structure is simplicity itself: It follows the path of a coastal road. Along the way it takes note of what there is to be seen: "occasional small yellow bulldozers," "the little white churches," a bus "packed with people, even to its step," a roadside stand and a schoolhouse, both closed, a flagpole without a flag. These are solid, if unremarkable, objects. At the same time, they seem to justify Lowell's praise, in a letter of 1970, of Bishop's "enormous powers of realistic observation and of something seldom found with observation, luminism (meaning radiance and compression, etc.)." What Lowell fails to note is that the luminosity is always at a low wattage, and deliberately so; in "Cape Breton," no single feature of the human scene is highlighted, all stand in the same flat glow while the natural elements—the sea, the mist, the woods—draw their power from remaining virtually unseen. Even so, each little detail swells with some unspecified emotion; the final effect is musical, indeed fugal: As one object succeeds another, they appear at once cumulative and contrapuntal, congregating in octaves like notes in a score.

By the third stanza, the visible features begin to give way to the pressure of what isn't seen but only surmised:

The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been      abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior, where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones—

What appears on a casual reading to be little more than an unpretentious depiction of a rural landscape—a Nova Scotian scene painted by Grandma Moses—turns out to be something quite different, neither menacing nor portentous but mutely elemental. The landscape that cannot be observed, where "meaning appears to have been abandoned," emerges not only as more enduring but more substantial than the pictured vista. This appearance is achieved by the least conspicuous of means: small repetitions, the sly play between passive and active verbs, the resort to such rhetorical figures as anaphora ("where ... where") and polysyndeton ("and ... and"), with its faintly biblical echoes. This is a poem of the utmost clarity yet with a stubborn, a deliberate, opacity at its heart. Without ever saying so outright, it conveys a sense of the fragility of the human presence on this coast; the abiding presences, barely glimpsed or guessed at, are the sea, the mist, the remote back woods, and, outlasting all our words, "the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones." (Is this why the sea birds "stand / with their backs to the mainland?" They've witnessed our goings-on from times beyond memory.) The fact that there's no stridency or dismay in the poem deepens its effect; this is no "environmental" statement, for there's nothing to be done. The poem ends:

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

Bishop's understated attention to small observable facts, honestly recorded, along with her refusal to dramatize or exaggerate, gives the poem its gradual impact. It may seem little more than an inventory, but it's a coherent one, put together like a patchwork quilt and embroidered with this legend: All this is only an instant in the long reaches of time but look with what loving accuracy it has been remembered.

Accuracy is in fact of the essence in any consideration of Bishop's poetry. Those of her poems that fail—and there are a surprising number of such failures preserved in the Library of America edition—do so more often than not because they're imprecise in matters of tone and feeling. The Library of America volume includes an untitled and fragmentary essay on poetry, tentatively dated to "the late 1950s—early 1960s," in which Bishop states that the three qualities she prizes most in poetry are “Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery" (italics hers). To illustrate these qualities, she gives examples from George Herbert, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Auden, Lowell, Moore, and Dylan Thomas. She might have included much of her own work; accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery are perhaps its most distinctive traits, and in spontaneity—or rather, the illusion of spontaneity—she seems to me to surpass most of those she cites. Spontaneity is, of course, the slipperiest of the three. None of the poets she singles out in the essay is "spontaneous" in any usual sense. Nor was Bishop herself. It was the effect of spontaneity she admired. By "spontaneity" I take her to mean a certain naturalness of manner and tone, a placement of words that appeared at once casual and inevitable, with all the force of a first impression. As Bishop noted in the same essay, "writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural." In poetry, you might say, nothing is more unnatural than the natural. By achieving such "spontaneity" in her greatest poems, Bishop proved herself to be the most skilful artificer among her contemporaries. From "The Map," which opens North & South, her first collection of 1946, to "Florida," "Roosters," and "The Fish," and later, "A Cold Spring," "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "The Bight," "Cape Breton," and ''At the Fishhouses" of her second collection, to the final splendors of Questions of Travel and Geography III, she catches that offhand note, often within the constraints of strict form, to pitch-perfect effect.

There are enough such perfectly realized poems—at least a dozen, by my count—to justify Bishop's current high standing, even if at times it seems precariously inflated. While it's good to have so much of her work in one volume—all the poems, published and unpublished, the translations, short stories, and essays, as well as a large selection of the correspondence—the Library of America edition may do her an inadvertent disservice. The sixty or so pages of "unpublished poems and drafts," originally edited by Alice Quinn and published as Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox in 2006, contain quite forgettable poems; indeed, most of them are rather awful, and one can see why Bishop refrained from publishing them. While these poems don't damage her reputation, as some have feared, they don't enhance it either, except perhaps by demonstrating just how hard Bishop worked to perfect the work she did make public. Too much of the prose included here is weak as well; the book reviews (a genre for which Bishop admitted she had no aptitude) are almost uniformly amateurish. As a result, the edition seems padded, though a more discriminating selection would make a slim book indeed (even Bishop lamented her "modest output"). Her letters, while a delight to read, are too darting and guarded to make one want to return to them again and again; despite their affability and high spirits, they reveal little of the person who wrote them. In her own sly way, Bishop was as circumspect as Moore. Her apparent openness, her chummy tone, camouflage a fierce reserve. In reading the thirty years of affectionate correspondence with Lowell, we know her no better by the final letter than we did from the earliest (though we get to know him almost too well). That "ancient chill" was in her from the start.

Perhaps this is overstated; perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of Bishop's lifelong shyness rather than of her reserve. To call her "modest," as is routinely done, isn't apt; as the letters show, she could be as ambitious and competitive and touchy as any of her contemporaries, and she certainly reveled in the numerous prizes, awards, and official honors that came her way. But she was painfully shy and suffered from it, since it led to terrible bouts of loneliness. In her poems, if not in her life, she managed to turn that shyness to subtle effect. ''A Cold Spring," dedicated to Jane Dewey, might seem an eccentric tribute to a friend. It offers a pretty straightforward description of a country place in early spring and is full of rustic details, from a loving mother cow to "sounding" bullfrogs. Dewey is addressed directly only three times and always by way of objects; Bishop mentions "your big and aimless hills," "your white front door," and finally "your shadowy pastures." These attributions, occurring at well-timed intervals, lace the poem together. But they also tinge the other details, so methodically listed, with a proprietary aura. The point isn't that the landscape in each of its features somehow belongs to Dewey or in some way is her; rather, the scene takes shape, detail by detail, as the very ground of a friendship in which each item, however homely, represents ever subtler "efforts of affection." (Bishop titled her wonderful reminiscence of Moore "Efforts of Affection," but the title could apply to all her finest poems.) The poem, like so much of Bishop's work, is shy in manner but bold in ambition.

When she wrote more directly, she could falter, perhaps most conspicuously in "One Art," her much-admired villanelle. I realize that for many readers this poem stands as one of the pinnacles of Bishop's achievement. Even as I write, "One Art" is no doubt being held up in writing workshops as a model to be studied and imitated—an appalling prospect. Of course it's a beautiful poem, but that's just the problem. The droll and witty rhymes, the calculated cadences, the sheer impeccable aplomb of the thing, divert attention from the shameless bathos of its premises. It erects a slick and glittering pavilion over a mud-wallow of self-pity. Bishop was occasionally given to self-pity (in one letter she even defends it rather mischievously), and there's nothing wrong with that; in her personal life, if not in her career, she suffered grievous losses from childhood on. But in "One Art," she cast the harmless if tiresome tendency to kvetch into exquisite stanzas. This would be bad enough, but the tone of stoical insouciance she affects throughout intensifies the kitschy sentimentality of the poem. "The art of losing isn't hard to master," it begins; and from that first dubious antithesis to the final parenthetical "(write it!)" —a device borrowed from one of Hopkins' "terrible sonnets"—the poem sashays, quivering but upright, along its own stiff upper lip. Because losing can't be an "art," the paradox wobbles as the poem progresses and devolves into mere attitude. This is the lachrymose sublime, the poetic equivalent of Bette Davis in Dark Victory, ever about to blubber but held back by the most decorous restraint.

This may sound harsh. Still, it should be possible to admire Bishop's genuine, and considerable, achievement without treating her every scribble as holy writ. In one of the blurbs on the paperback edition of her Collected Poems, an enthusiast who shall remain nameless burbles that she's one of the few writers whose every scrap is worthy of publication. Well, not really. Though she revered Hopkins, she remained wary of what she termed "that emotional rushing effect he produces" and strove to avoid it. When she succeeded in writing poems with "accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery," she was, and remains, incomparable. I suspect she'd be astonished at the adulation that surrounds her name, and perhaps embarrassed. To survey her work whole, as the Library of America edition now makes possible, is to appreciate anew out of how many false starts and hesitations, stumbles and blind turns, the genuinely enduring poems took their definitive shape. We may marvel at the skill that went into their making, but in the end it's their honesty—a far rarer quality in poems, and in poets—that may assure their survival. It's those baaing sheep, and the pokey yellow bulldozers, and the man carrying his child downhill towards his "invisible house," that stick in the memory—these somehow should survive against all the mutations of mist and the slow encroachments of that ancient chill.

About the Author
Eric Ormsby is the author, most recently, of Time's Covenant: Selected Poems (Biblioasis) and Ghazali (Oneworld). He lives in London.

Parnassus: Poetry in Review
New York

Editor: Herbert Leibowitz
Co-Editor: Ben Downing
Assistant Editors: Adam L. Dressler, Jeffrey Greggs, Alyssa Varner