Uniwersytet Warszawski
Wydział Neofilologii
Instytut Anglistyki
Adam Zdrodowski
Irony as a Means of Escaping Categorization and Finding a Distinctive
Poetic Voice in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop.
Praca doktorska napisana pod kierunkiem
prof. dr hab. Agnieszki Salskiej.
Table of Contents:
Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………….3
Chapter 1. The Concept of Irony and its Relevance to the Analysis of Elizabeth
Bishop’s Work.
Introduction……………………..……………………………………………..…..4
Classification of Irony……………………………………………………………..7
Rhetorical Irony…………………………………………………………………...8
Romantic Irony……………………………………………………………….…..12
Tensions within the Notion of Romantic Irony. Difficulties in Defining the Term.
Paul de Man’s Definition of Irony and its Criticism………………………….….18
Bloom’s Clinamen as an Instance of Constructive Irony………….……………..23
The Relevance of the Theories of Irony to the Analysis of Bishop’s Work……..26
Chapter 2. Elizabeth Bishop’s Formal and Intertextual Ironies………………………..32
Chapter 3. Bishop’s Irony and the Context of the Work of Marianne Moore and Robert
Lowell…………………………………………………………………………...…...…68
Chapter 4. Bishop’s Irony as a Stylistic Counterpart of her Expatriation and
Homelessness. Irony as a Connecting Device...............................................................114
Chapter 5. The Politics of Irony. Irony as a Masking Device. The Private and the Public
Spheres in Bishop’s Poetry..…………..………………………………………….......157
Conclusion………………………………………………………………....…….……198
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..…205
Streszczenie……...………………………………………………………..……….….217
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Abbreviations:
CP – The Complete Poems.
CPr – The Collected Prose.
EAP – Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box.
OA – One Art. Letters, Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux.
WIA – Words in Air. The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and
Robert Lowell.
LA – Poems, Prose, and Letters. The Library of America, 2008.
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Chapter 1
The Concept of Irony and its Relevance to the Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s
Work.
Introduction.
It seems that an understanding of irony is vital for an understanding of the
majority of contemporary thought in general. If the contemporary subject really suffers
because he or she cannot cope with what Lyotard calls “the postmodern condition,” if
he or she cannot make sense of the multiplicity of narrations, then irony can prove to be
a remedy, a cure that is paradoxical and bitter, but also – one that may offer the subject
a possibility of gaining at least a limited degree of independence. Irony offers
a method of connecting narrations and discourses that seem completely incompatible,
irony can serve as a loose binding that enables the subject to gather together disparate
elements and thus define one’s identity and construct a voice. The usefulness of irony,
especially in the case of poets, consists also in the possibility of reshaping the voice of
one’s predecessor. This is shown in Harold Bloom’s famous category of clinamen, or
poetic misprision, that can be classified as a special case of the use of irony (Bloom’s
ideas will be discussed below). The very necessity of appropriating and distorting
somebody else’s voice instead of inventing a voice of one’s own from the scratch,
however, results from a condition that – according to Harold Bloom – began to be felt in
Romanticism and is still felt today. Bloom borrows from Nietzsche the term “the
condition of belatedness” to designate a feeling that “the contemporary life can... never
‘seize the moment’; it feels as if it was stolen by the ancestors whose spirits mercilessly
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haunt the present” (Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie1 10). In A Map of Misreading Bloom
writes: “Romantic tradition differs vitally from earlier forms of tradition, and I think this
difference can be reduced to a useful formula. Romantic tradition is consciously late,
and Romantic literary psychology is therefore necessarily a psychology of belatedness”
(35). This feeling of belatedness is coupled with the anxiety of influence “threatening
the autonomous position of the I” (Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie 7). The realisation of
influence is for the subject a source of suffering and the subject, to ease the pain, tries to
resist the truth: “the romantic consciousness is thus as double, dynamic and torn by
internal conflict as the Freudian psyche: it is a composite of false self-knowledge, which
declares full autonomy and thus renounces all dependencies, and a deeply repressed
truth of being a helpless, dependent object of influences” (Bielik-Robson, The Saving
Lie 7). In Bloom’s view, however, the subject constantly oscillates between the deceit –
the renunciation of influence and dependence – and the truth – the awareness of
influence. Romantic consciousness is, therefore, split and is constantly seeking to do
away with the split:
The idea of reconciliation, which found its most systematic expression in
Hegel’s dialectical Versöhnung, is, in fact, constantly propelled by the desire to
appease the conflict which, from the very beginning, haunts the romantic
consciousness. Therefore, romantic consciousness is more a syndrome of the
underlying problem than a solution – and precisely as such, as a syndrome, it
maintains its validity till nowadays. The malaise of influence discovered by the
romantics, the first modern individualists, has not yet been cured: our current
defensive techniques in which we try to repudiate the necessity of dependence
1
Bielik-Robson’s study is going to be published in March 2011. I quote from the manuscript by kind
permission of the Author, following the manuscript’s pagination.
5
are just as vehement as they were two hundred years ago. (Bielik-Robson, The
Saving Lie 9)
The passage quoted above points to two aspects of romantic consciousness. First, there
is the “malaise of influence” that is a source of suffering for the subject and that makes
the subject develop defensive strategies against this painful condition. Secondly, the
subject is hoping to find a way of appeasing the conflict, to find reconciliation. It seems
that irony can help the subject in performing both of these tasks, that is, in the defence
against the painful pressure of influence and in the reconciliation of different influences
the subject has to cope with.
In my analyses both functions of irony will be considered. On the one hand,
irony will be viewed as a defensive mechanism that has its sources in the anxiety of
influence and the condition of belatedness. On the other hand, it can be used by the
subject as a tool that can help in gaining one’s freedom and singularity. It can grant the
subject a reconciling perspective, become a tool that will be helpful in gathering
together and joining disparate factors and building a cohering and singular whole. In the
case of Elizabeth Bishop both of these functions of irony will prove significant. First of
all, it will be interesting to see how she approached the very idea of becoming a woman
of letters, and how she treated the traditional roles and functions an American woman
poet should perform. I will also deal with the question of how Elizabeth Bishop
defended herself against the influences of her precursors and contemporaries such as
Wystan Hugh Auden, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Thus, I will be interested in
the defensive potential of irony both on the level of politics and psychology – the
function of a poet in the society and Bishop’s opinions and doubts about her capability
to perform these functions – and on the level of literary and stylistic influences.
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Moreover, from a biographical perspective, irony can be seen as a stylistic counterpart
of Bishop’s homelessness.
On the positive side, irony understood as a mechanism that can be used to build
one’s identity will be even more important in the analysis of Bishop’s work. I will
examine how irony, seen as a reconciliatory device, helped Bishop to cope with, on the
one hand, literary influences, and – on the other, the demands of the literary world. I
will be interested in the ways in which irony enabled her to join various resources she
had at her disposal and form a coherent, and unique voice.
Classification of Irony.
Before I proceed to the discussion of the role of irony in Bishop’s poetics, I
should present the most important classifications of irony and the definitions and
approaches to the term that will be helpful in my readings of Bishop’s work.
Irony is usually divided into four main types: situational (or cosmic) irony,
Socratic irony, rhetorical or verbal irony and romantic irony (Głowiński, 6; Zoe
Williams).
Situational irony takes place when it seems that “God or fate is manipulating
events so as to inspire false hopes, which are inevitably dashed” (Jack Lynch qtd. by
Zoe Williams).
Socratic irony aims at eliciting the truth: in Plato’s dialogues Socrates “takes the
role of the eirôn or ‘dissembler’ and, assuming the pose of ignorance and foolishness,
asks seemingly innocuous and naïve questions which gradually undermine his
interlocutor’s case and trap him (through the latter’s admissions) into seeing the truth.”
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(“Irony” 427). According to Socrates irony is a trope of learned ignorance, the
realisation of contradiction (Bielik-Robson, Duch powierzchni 200).
Rhetorical irony is most commonly defined as saying something else than that
which one means. This is usually done to strengthen the impact of one’s utterance and
to persuade our interlocutor that we are right.
Finally, romantic irony is defined as the subject’s heightened awareness of his or
her deeds, “a true presence of mind” (“Romantic irony” 767), and is manifested in
literature through the use of devices that show the author’s awareness of what he or she
is doing or of what is happening to him or her.
In my analyses, I will not refer to situational or Socratic irony. The main focus
of my analyses will be romantic irony. I will also make occasional references to various
uses of verbal irony in Bishop’s poetry; moreover, I will be interested in the
relationships between rhetorical irony and romantic irony. Therefore, below I will
outline some of the approaches to rhetorical and romantic irony. I will try to show how
the two notions have been described, how they are related to each other, and how they
can be applied to the analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s work.
Rhetorical Irony.
It seems that Bishop’s conception of irony was restricted to rhetorical irony
understood, quite narrowly, as saying the opposite of what one means. In an interview
with Ashley Brown, commenting on the differences between the poetry written in Brazil
and the English language poetry she said:
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The Brazilians’ poetry is still more formal than ours – it’s farther from the
demotic. It is true, of course, that they had a modernismo movement in 1922,
led by Mario de Andrade and others. But they still don’t write the way they
speak. And I suppose they have still never quite escaped from romanticism. It is
an interesting fact that there is no word in Portuguese for “understatement.”
Marianne Moore’s poetry is nearly all understatement. How can they
understand us? So much of the English-American tradition consists of this.
They have irony, but not understatement. (Schwartz, Estess 290)
As we can see, Bishop treats irony and understatement as two separate
categories, assuming, it seems, that irony means exclusively saying the opposite of what
one means. However, if one defines verbal irony as “saying what one does not mean”
(“Irony” 430), the definition will embrace figures of speech like hyperbole and litotes –
thus, contrary to what Bishop believes, understatement can be treated as one of the
vehicles of verbal irony and I will treat it as such since irony understood as an instance
of understatement will be relevant both to the reading of Bishop’s work and to the
comparative analysis of Marianne Moore’s and Bishop’s approaches to irony.
When discussing rhetorical irony, it is important to consider the question of
whether there are any discernible verbal signs of rhetorical irony. Namely, how do we
know that an utterance is ironic?
According to Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, irony is defined as an instance of
echoing an utterance or opinion (Głowiński 75-108). For example, if on a rainy day
somebody utters the phrase “What wonderful weather we are having today,” the
utterance is an echo of the same utterance that the speaker could use on a sunny day,
without any ironic meaning. In their essay Sperber and Wilson give the example of
Mark Antony’s speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar. They observe that each time
9
Mark Antony repeats the phrase “And Brutus is an honorable man” in the context of
new facts, the sentence becomes more ironic.
However, according to Beda Alleman (Głowiński 17-41), irony functions
differently in contemporary literature. First of all, Alleman claims that the repetition of
phrases and sentences is not an unmistakable sign of irony, since we may get repetitions
that are completely non-ironic: although Alleman does not provide examples, one may
think of the repetitions used for mnemotechnical purposes, especially in oral poetry,
songs or folk poetry. Even the refrains in villanelles – a form that has its origins in
Italian folk tradition (Sosnowski, “Skarb kibica” 130) – do not have to be read
ironically. Moreover, Alleman argues that in the field of contemporary literature the
situation becomes much more complicated, since very often any signs of irony are
virtually absent. He argues that, because the reader of ironic texts is so sophisticated, the
fewer signals of irony he or she receives, the more ironic the text may be and the more
pleasure the reader will feel.
I think that the problem of the lack of signals of irony may account for the early
readings of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry when she was read as a woman poet who is good
at precise description while the irony of her poetry was largely overlooked. For
instance, in a review of North & South, Oscar Williams mentions Bishop’s “keen eye
for small physical detail” and claims that Bishop tends to be too academic, too smooth
and not independent enough: “She has... possibly overeducated herself in what is, or
rather was, going on in the best circles, and hasn’t trusted enough in her own psyche…
Miss Bishop has real perception but it is struggling with her angel in a too fashionable
apartment” (Schwartz, Estess 184). And Louise Bogan notices that Bishop demonstrates
“a naturalist’s accuracy of observation,” and “is firmly in touch with the real world and
takes a Thoreaulike interest in whatever catches her attention” (Schwartz, Estess 182).
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The same is true about the interpretation of her relationship to her precursors, as
she used to be considered merely an imitator of Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens or
Wystan Hugh Auden while her ironic strategies were altogether ignored. This was
especially the case after the publication in 1946 of her first book, North & South. Some
reviewers seemed to take a stereotypical and patronizing attitude, typical in the case of
reviews of a poet’s first book. For example, in the review from which I quoted above,
Oscar Williams wrote: “The present book whose publication has been rumored for
a decade is, one senses, out a bit too soon in spite of such magnificent hesitation. For
there are poems that are Audenary and Wallace Stevensish, and socially conscious
poems that have not shaken off the ferment and not-so-fine frenzies belonging to
others” (Schwartz, Estess 185). Louise Bogan writes about Bishop’s “slight addiction to
the poetic methods of Marianne Moore” (Schwartz, Estess 182).
The subtleties of her echoing ironies may also be one reason why she was called
“a writer’s writer” or even, by John Ashbery, “a writer’s writer’s writer” (“Second
presentation of Elizabeth Bishop” 164).
One can say that the early reductionist interpretations of Bishop’s work were
partly the result of the reviewers’ unwillingness and incapabality to decipher her ironies.
Linda Hutcheon, in her Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony, presents
a pragmatic approach to irony, emphasizing the role of the reader – at the expense of the
writer – in the process of deciphering and, in fact, creating irony. She also stresses the
essential imbalance of irony: “Irony is a ‘weighted’ mode in the sense that it is
asymmetrical, unbalanced in favour of the silent and the unsaid” (Hutcheon 46). One
should add that interpreting the silent and the unsaid is the role of the reader, and that
the ironic force of the text depends to a large extent on reader’s interpreting skills and
his or her willingness to engage in the process of interpretation.
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My assumption in the present essay is that Bishop is largely in control of her
irony and that this device is an important tool in building her poetic identity. One
cannot, however, overlook the role of the reader in interpreting Bishop’s irony. The
necessity for readerly interpretation does not, however, weaken the position of the
author. In fact, the reader’s cooperation in interpreting the work binds the author all the
more closely with the community of readers. Bishop’s is the Kierkegaardian mastered
irony whereby the common effort of the writer and the reader in producing and
interpreting irony connects the writer with the society (Frazier 146). (One should also
observe that Bishop is a reader of her own work as in her later poems she refers to, and
quotes from her earlier work.)
Romantic Irony.
Romantic irony is the kind of irony that was described by Novalis as “genuine
consciousness, true presence of mind” (“Romantic Irony” 767). Anthony Whiting writes
that the term romantic irony was popularized by the German scholar Hermann Hettner
in 1850. Before that date, although the phenomenon as such got a wide attention and
was substantially discussed, the term was not used (Whiting 10). Whiting notes that
romantic irony
rejects the world of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, a world not only ordered
by immutable laws but one whose order is able to be comprehended by the
reason. As Schlegel writes, “Irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility,
of an infinitely teeming chaos” (LF 247, no.69). This “teeming chaos” is
inexhaustibly vital. New forms are created and older ones die away in a neverending process that has no goal, purpose, or design. (10)
12
The inexhaustibility of the “teeming chaos,” the subject’s awareness of this
inexhaustibility as well as an ever-present duality – the split into literal meaning and
intended meaning, the split between the subject and the object, and the split within the
subject’s psyche – are among the crucial features of romantic irony. But irony is much
more than the mere consciousness of the instability, mutability and chaos of the
universe and much more than the subject’s realisation of his or her constant struggle
with this chaos. Irony may also be a means of taming this “teeming chaos,” it may
become an ally in the subject’s struggle for a difficult freedom and order. Anthony
Whiting writes: “In addition to affirming a chaotic and abundant universe, romantic
irony also affirms the power of the mind to construct a world out of chaos” (11).
How is romantic irony manifest in literature? As Cuddon observes “this form of
irony is often at its best when the author is showing us what he is doing while he is
doing it” (11). The importance of the ironist’s awareness of his/her artistic craft was
emphasized in the famous essay by Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire et généralement du
comique dans les arts plastiques”: somebody who is comic remains unaware of his or
her nature; the artist – who is necessarily an ironist – must be doubled and must be
doubly aware of what is going on in his or her doubled subjectivity: “Les artistes créent
le comique; ayant étudié et rassemblé les éléments du comique, ils savent que tel être est
comique, et qu’il ne l’est qu’à la condition d’ignorer sa nature; de même que, par une loi
inverse, l’artiste n’est artiste qu’à la condition d’être double et de n’ignorer aucun
phénomène de sa double nature” (262-3).
The author may show the awareness of the craft in various ways. In general,
these manifestations include the use of all kinds of devices that break up the illusion of
reality and naturalness, all places in the text where the author shows his or her
awareness of the fictional nature of literature. For example, the author might address his
13
or her words directly to the reader (as it was done in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
or in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones), reminding the reader that he or she is just reading
a work of fiction. In the case of theatre, a good example of ironic procedures is the use
of asides that remind the spectators that they are watching a performance and that show
that the author of the play as well as the actors are very well aware of the artificiality of
the enterprise they are engaged in.
Other examples of ironic practices include the author’s commentaries on a given
work, inserted in the very work, sometimes directed to the reader and sometimes to the
writer himself or herself (they may be put in parentheses, like the “Write it!” from
Bishop’s “One Art”); these devices draw the reader’s attention to the textuality of the
text. (Originally, the Latin word textus means “patchwork”, [Markowski 32], so already
the etymology suggests that a text is necessarily a substance woven from heterogeneous
elements. Two factors seem important here – not only the fact that the text consists of
disparate pieces, but also that it has been woven, made consciously, that significant
effort has been put into its creation, and the process has taken a lot of time). The
autocommentaries may, for instance, reflect upon the choice of phrases or the very use
of poetic devices that stress the materiality of the text and show the author’s awareness
thereof (like rhyme, assonance or alliteration). Moreover, the use of the above
mentioned poetic devices in prose, where they become more conspicuous than in poetry,
renders the work ironic (a good example of such strategies is provided by the novels of
Vladimir Nabokov). In general, one can say that in a literary work all quotations from
other literary works may be read as ironic, since they reveal that the work we are
reading is woven from other texts and that the work’s relationship to reality, or as
Kierkegaard says, actuality, it represents, is problematic. In the case of Elizabeth
Bishop, the autocommentaries tend to be rather convoluted and the irony works on at
14
least two levels. For instance, in “Poem” she not only playfully comments upon her own
use of language but also – as she analyses the painting – she concentrates on its
artificiality (she notices brushwork, etc.). Moreover, quite often, she would not reveal
overtly that a given commentary may refer to writing as such. For example, “The Map”
explores the relationship between the map and reality, as well as the relationship
between cartography and history. Nevertheless, as the questions of arbitrariness and
representation are raised, the reader is invited to read the poem as an enquiry into the
nature of any sign system, including language: thus, the poem can be read as an
autocommentary on Bishop’s craft as well. But, even though we may read her work as
self-reflexive, it does not mean that the relationship of the words to whatever they try to
describe is not important. On the contrary, Bishop, in her choice of words, wants to be
as precise and meticulous as possible, she tries to be faithful to the things she writes
about. Although she knows that what she is doing is in the end a carefully built artifice,
she is committed to this artifice or fiction. This attitude is characteristic of Schlegelian
irony as it is described by Anthony Whiting – even though the author who uses irony is
aware of the fictional and artificial nature of the work, it does not mean that he or she
may easily dismiss the work as unimportant. Whiting observes:
Though aware that all structuring concepts are, ultimately, fictions, the ironist
also accepts and is committed to these fictions... [T]he mind is sincerely
committed to its creations even as it indicates its awareness of their limitations
through its playful attitude toward them. Not only are the attitudes of
commitment and detachment held simultaneously, but for Schlegel both
attitudes are equally necessary. Skepticism alone would leave the mind
detached and isolated while commitment alone would blind the mind to its
finite limitations. (11-12)
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Although the focus of my analysis is the notion of romantic irony – both as it
was understood by the Romantic critics and as it is seen by their contemporary
disciples, I will also be interested in Bishop’s problematic relationship to romanticism.
As one reads the above-quoted opinion where Bishop says that the Brazilian poets
“have still never quite escaped from romanticism,” it seems that she wants to place
herself in opposition to the Brazilians and, by using the emotionally charged verb
“escape” suggests that the indebtedness to romanticism is something negative. It seems
though, that she herself is more indebted to romanticism than she is willing to admit.
She might have absorbed the romantic ideas either directly – through her extensive
readings in Keats and Shelley – or indirectly – through, for instance, her interest in the
work of Wallace Stevens. Whatever might be the sources of Bishop’s inspiration with
and indebtedness to romanticism, it is interesting to look at her work as a struggle with
romantic approaches to poetry and to poetic inspiration. Throughout her career she tried
to ironically question and subvert the typically – or stereotypically – Romantic approach
to poetic inspiration. Mark Ford observes: “Although a poet brought up on the
Romantics, and one who worked more obviously in the Romantic tradition than most of
her contemporaries, Bishop could never believe in the dream of spontaneous poetic
power, of full-throated ease, figured by Keats’s nightingale or Shelley’s skylark or
Baudelaire’s albatross” (Ford 20). To support his argument, Ford gives the example of
the speaker of “The Unbeliever,” whose attitude is, according to the critic, “the
antithesis of the joyous sense of freedom inspired by Romantic contemplation of the
endless mysteries of nature” (20). Ford adds that Bishop had the intention of writing
a poem about Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson “in which they are figured
as ‘self-caged birds’. The poem was never finished, but it’s easy to imagine that Bishop
felt the phrase might apply also to herself; her sense of entrapment in a particular set of
16
circumstances contrasts as strongly with Romantic visions of freedom and autonomy as
her birds do with Romantic birds” (21).
Although Ford may be right in saying that Bishop “could never believe in the
dream of spontaneous poetic power,” her vision of the poet as a self-caged bird is not as
unromantic as he suggests. What Ford writes about the full-throated ease of the
romantic artist corresponds more closely to a stereotypical vision of the poet’s situation
– a romantic poet is somebody who sings with ease an enthusiastic praise of the poet’s
freedom and the joys of unconstrained poetic imagination. What Bishop does, however,
may in fact remind us of Kierkegaard’s depiction of the romantic ironist. This is what
Anthony Whiting says about the ironist’s inability of breaking out of the isolation cage
that he has constructed himself:
Kierkegaard is describing… the ironist’s painful recognition of his absolute
isolation and of his inability to break out of this isolation. Every way out of the
self turns out to be another entrance into the self. In poetically producing
himself and his environment, the ironist completely encloses himself, an
enclosure that renders “null” the ironist’s relation to any other person and
thereby eliminates the possibility of overcoming isolation through the bond of
human sympathy or love. (21)
It seems that Elizabeth Bishop’s life – and poetry – was a constant oscillation between
the need for “human sympathy or love” and the self-imposed enclosure and isolation of
the ironist. One can also say that there were moments in her life when she was able to
find a way out of this binary opposition of irony-induced isolation and the desire for
fruitful and happy coexistence with others. And I think this was done, paradoxically,
with the help of irony used in such a way that, instead of isolating the subject, it enables
17
the subject to participate in the Kierkegaardian “community of ironists.” This is the kind
of irony that made Bishop feel at home with fellow writers and ironists – like Moore
and Lowell – that gave her a sense of belonging to a community, a sense of closeness,
but – at the same time – it enabled her to keep a safe distance and manifest her unique
stance. The same kind of irony was present in her writing – thanks to it, she was able to
both acknowledge her debt to writers that influenced her and, at the same time, show
her independence and singularity.
Tensions within the Notion of Romantic Irony. Difficulties in Defining the Term.
Paul de Man’s Definition of Irony and its Criticism.
Because Bishop’s link with romanticism is more intimate than she was willing to
admit and extremely complex, an analysis of her work in the context of romantic irony
may prove fruitful and in keeping with the spirit of her writing. Also, if the
consciousness of one’s craft, the awareness of what one is doing, as well as the
manifestation of this awareness in one’s work is a typical feature of romantic irony, one
finds in Bishop’s writing abundant evidence of a romantically ironic mind at work.
Therefore, following the classification presented by Agata Bielik-Robson in her book
Duch powierzchni. Rewizja romantyczna i filozofia, I will outline a general
classification of contradictory approaches to romantic irony. I will also refer to BielikRobson’s study The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction.
Bielik-Robson divides romantic irony into two main categories. In the first
interpretation, the aim of irony is to change both the subject and the material reality at
the same time so that the conflict may be at least partially resolved. In the second
reading, irony is understood as a self-referential trope, an aimless trope that gives the
18
subject a promise of an easy freedom in the realm the real. The first type of approach to
irony originates in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, a fervent opponent of Fichte, and
is later taken up by Harold Bloom. The second approach is characteristic of G. W. F.
Schlegel and is also to be found in Paul de Man’s essay “The Concept of Irony.”
In my analyses, I am going to concentrate on the concepts of Paul de Man and
Harold Bloom. Therefore, it is necessary to present their approaches to irony in greater
detail. In his essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” de Man presents a definition of irony
– a definition that owes a lot to Baudelaire’s reading of irony presented in the essay “De
l’essence du rire” – that can be fruitfully used in literary interpretations. For example, de
Man’s model has been successfully and convincingly used in Geoff Ward’s essay on
James Schuyler (“Schuyler and the Rhetoric of Temporality”) included in Statutes of
Liberty. The New York School of Poets. In my reading, however, I will concentrate on
de Man’s “The Concept of Irony,” where he presents a more radical definition of irony,
criticizing the ideas he formulated in “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” The reasons for
looking at de Man’s “The Concept of Irony” are threefold. Firstly, in the essay de Man
offers a concise and convincing summary of the history of theories of irony and the
difficulties encountered by theorists who tried to arrive at a definition of the term.
Secondly, de Man’s definition of irony is so innovative and famous that it cannot be
ignored in a work devoted explicitly to irony. At the same time, de Man draws such
radical conclusions from his reading of Kierkegaard and Schlegel that his concepts,
when applied faithfully, render interpretation and understanding impossible and cannot
be helpful in the description of the work of a poet who uses irony as a defensive and
identity-building device. Hence, the third step in my presentation of de Man’s essay will
be to outline the criticism directed against de Man, especially in the work of Agata
Bielik-Robson. After a presentation of criticism voiced against de Man, I will proceed
19
to a summary of Harold Bloom’s views, concentrating on his concept of clinamen that
can be interpreted as a species of irony used by the subject as a defensive and identitybuilding mechanism. I believe that Bloom’s theory can provide us with an interesting
alternative to de Man’s views on irony, an alternative that will prove more productive
and more constructive than de Man’s proposition. Furthermore, de Man’s radical views
on irony will serve as a point of reference in the following, analytical chapters. Namely,
contrasting de Man’s theoretical formulations on irony with Bishop’s use of the device
will help me better describe the character of Bishop’s irony.
Aware that irony is a term that escapes definition Paul de Man tries nevertheless
to offer one in his lecture, “The Concept of Irony.” The title of de Man’s essay refers to
Kierkegaard’s book The Concept of Irony and is, as de Man observes, an ironic title
since “irony is not a concept” (163). De Man demonstrates how some attempts at
formulating a definition of irony prove unsuccessful and concludes by saying that
“definitional language seems to be in trouble when irony is concerned” (165). First of
all, he shows that the definition of irony given by Northrop Frye, as “a pattern of words
that turns away” from its literal meaning is not a definition in the literal sense, since – as
it is – it states that irony is a trope, and to understand Frye’s definition, we would have
to know exactly what a trope is but, unfortunately, we do not (165). De Man also
observes that irony has various performative functions: “irony consoles and it promises
and it excuses. It allows us to perform all kinds of performative linguistic functions”
(165). As a result, irony cannot be reduced to a trope and so formulating its definition
becomes even more complicated.
In his summary de Man shows the two directions in which the definitions of
irony go: first, there are definitions that attempt to say what irony is, definitions that
present irony as a rhetorical device, a trope. Secondly, there are definitions that
20
concentrate on the performative aspects of irony – they show what irony is doing in
language, and – in a broader perspective – what it can do for or with the subject. When
de Man formulates his definition of irony, he tries to combine the two aspects –
rhetorical and performative – of the phenomenon. Giving in the essay “The Concept of
Irony” his own, famous definition of irony as “the permanent parabasis of the allegory
of tropes,” de Man adds that his listeners will not find this definition helpful: “[t]hat’s
the definition which I promised you – I also told you you would not be much more
advanced when you got it, but there it is: irony is the permanent parabasis of the
allegory of tropes” (179). However, although de Man might have tried to combine the
two facets of irony, it seems that the result is not very successful.
Criticizing de Man’s approach Bielik-Robson argues that the problem of the
limits of irony is more than a question of rhetoric since irony is an irreducible property
of being. Furthermore, she says that in de Man’s approach romantic irony only seems to
be an ally of the subject’s freedom, whereas in fact it breaks the ultimate boundary, i.e.
the very existence of the subject. According to her analysis, in “The Concept of Irony”
de Man – having defined irony as “the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes” –
tries to show that parabasis consists in the oscillation between opposites and enables the
subject to claim “autonomy” that is in the end not a true autonomy at all but an
effacement of the ‘I’. She argues that the definition of irony presented in the essay “The
Concept of Irony” is based upon a double error: first, on a misinterpretation of Fichte
and, secondly, on a selective reading of the Schlegelian concept of “permanent
parabasis.” The misinterpretation of Fichte consists in moving the concept of selfcreation (Selbstsetzen) entirely into the realm of language. This is how de Man sees it:
21
The self, in Fichte, is a logical category. And Fichte talks about the self not in
terms of anything experiential, not of anything we think of when we say ‘self’:
ourselves, or somebody else, or even a transcendental self in any form. Fichte
talks about the self as such as a property of language, as something which is
essentially and inherently linguistic. The self is, says Fichte, posited originally
by language. Language posits radically and absolutely the self, the subject, as
such… and the self does this – can only do this – by means of an act of
language. Therefore the self is, for Fichte, the beginning of a logical
development, the development of a logic, and as such has nothing to do with the
experiential or the phenomenological self in any form, or at least not originally,
not first of all. It is the ability of language to posit, the ability to setzen, in
German. It is the catachresis, the ability of language catachretically to name
anything, by false usage, but to name and thus posit anything language is
willing to posit. (“The Concept of Irony” 172-3)
As a result, the ego can be said to be absolutely anything as it depends upon the freedom
of catachresis. De Man breaks with the understanding of irony that consists in, as he
himself says, “reducing it to a dialectic of the self as a reflexive structure” (169) – this is
an interpretation that is employed by Baudelaire and by de Man himself in “The
Rhetoric of Temporality.” In “The Concept of Irony,” however, de Man goes much
further and proposes a reading that reduces the understanding of irony to rhetorical
irony and a dangerous kind of rhetorical irony at that. Namely, in the case of the earlier
interpretations, language and subjectivity were connected, rhetorical irony was linked
with romantic irony; but the linguistic, the rhetorical was not by any means more
important than the ego. Here, in “The Concept of Irony,” the ego has no power over
language; the ego is posited by language in the act of catachresis and, thus, has no
power to stop the machinery of rhetorics. Consequently, irony – as a self-sufficient,
22
radical trope – has the power to completely dissolve the ego, to reduce it to null.
Contrary to what Wayne C. Booth says, de Man claims that there is no way to stop
irony, there is no irony that can be stopped. De Man’s irony is rhetorical irony in the
sense that it resides entirely in the realm of language. It is not “rhetorical” in the sense
classical and neoclassical authors applied to it: it is not a device that one can use at will
to achieve given political or artistic aims. It is not a tool that can be used at will. In fact,
it is not a tool at all, but rather a power of language to dissolve the subjectivity of its
user, a power that puts the subject in lethal danger.
In de Man’s interpretation irony is not a moment in the dialectics of the I; on the
contrary, the I is only a moment in the dialectics of irony (Bielik-Robson, Duch
powierzchni 220). As a result, subjectivity is effaced – there is no space for it in the
realm of irony. Whereas Fichte wanted irony to lessen or efface the tension between
freedom and the constraints of the subject, de Man in “The Concept of Irony” sees this
trope as a figure of catachresis, a trope that is full, independent and has a different status
than the other tropes.
Bloom’s Clinamen as an Instance of Constructive Irony.
A different approach to irony – one that is less dangerous to subjectivity than
that proposed by de Man – is to be found in the writings of Harold Bloom. In The
Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry Harold Bloom – drawing upon psychoanalysis,
Greek mythology, the Bible and the Kabbalah, among other things – presents his own,
rather idiosyncratic, theory of poetic influence. Bielik-Robson notices : “His
kabbalistically complex trope of poetic influence seems to be so closely tied with his
own private idiom that it hardly survives as a scheme: when repeated, even by
23
sympathetic critics, it quickly turns into ‘oedipal’ banality” (The Saving Lie 1).
Moreover, even though his critical thought is radically innovative and daring, his private
canon of poetry is extremely conservative and reductive (Gutorow, “Trop i tron” 388).
His canon is ostentatiously male-oriented (including necessarily Blake, Wordsworth,
Whitman, Yeats and Stevens) and – when he grants entry to this canon to some new
poets, he does so not because the new poets are radically different but because – in his
opinion – they somehow resemble the ones that have already been canonized. And, to
be more precise, he makes them resemble the canonical poets through a reductive
reading of their work. This is also true in the case of Elizabeth Bishop – in the
introduction to the first collection of critical essays on her work, Elizabeth Bishop and
Her Art, Bloom situates her safely in the canon of female poets – alongside of Emily
Dickinson and Marianne Moore – and claims that Dickinson’s eye is the “truest
precursor” of “Bishop’s famous eye” (Schwartz, Estess X). He also seems to suggest
that the female canon is interesting because it can be linked to the dominant male canon:
“Within her tradition so securely, Bishop profoundly plays at trope. Dickinson, Moore,
and Bishop resemble Emerson, Frost, and Stevens in that tradition, with a difference due
not to mere nature or mere ideology but to superb art” (XI). Still, in spite of the
idiosyncrasies of Bloom’s theories and in spite of his conservative approach to literary
canon, I think that the critic’s tool may prove useful in the analysis of Bishop’s work.
However, I am going to use Bloom’s views in a way in spite of him, i.e. I am going to
show that the tools Bloom would like to apply to Bishop so as to normalize her and read
her work reductively, may be used to demonstrate how she herself found her position in
the canon, how she created her own voice on her own terms and not according to a
conservative role model. In this way, using Bloom’s concepts in the analysis of
Bishop’s work, I am going to try to read his theory in an ironic manner, though in his
24
review of the Polish translation of Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence Jacek Gutorow
observes that Bloom likes to be ironic but he is never being ironic about his own
theories (“Trop i tron” 384). However, before I begin my reading of Bishop with the
help of Bloom’s theory, I will briefly present those concepts of his that may prove
useful in my analyses. In Bloom’s opinion, the history of poetry is a series of agonistic
encounters between strong poetic precursors and young poets – Bloom calls them
ephebes – who want to establish themselves as poets and become even stronger than
their poetic fathers. He argues that poetic history is made by strong poets who misread
one another “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (The Anxiety of Influence
5). He emphasises the fact that he is interested only in what he calls strong figures:
“Battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at
the crossroads; only this is my subject here, though some of the fathers, as will be seen,
are composite figures” (11). He adds that the discovery of influence within themselves
does not have to make young poets less original (“But poetic influence need not make
poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not therefore
necessarily better,” 11). Neither does it make them weaker since the gist of becoming
a strong poet entails the necessity of misreading, distorting the voice of one’s precursor:
“Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves”
(5).
In The Anxiety of Influence Bloom divides a poet’s development into six phases
that he calls “revisionary ratios.” These serve as both defensive mechanisms that enable
the younger poet to fend off the influence of the older poet’s poems and as strategies for
building one’s own poetic position. Here, I will mainly refer to the first revisionary ratio
that, in the interpretation of Agata Bielik-Robson, is the Bloomian counterpart of the
concept of irony. Harold Bloom defines clinamen in the following way:
25
Clinamen, which is poetic misreading or misprision proper; I take the word
from Lukretius, where it means a “swerve” of the atoms so as to make change
possible in the universe. A poet swerves away from his precursor, by so reading
his precursor’s poem as to execute a clinamen in relation to it. This appears as
a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem
went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in
the direction that the new poem moves (The Anxiety of Influence 14).
The Bloomian clinamen does not efface the anxiety of influence but, in a way,
enables the poet to suffer on his/her own terms, to bear the pressure of influence and
belatedness as a self, not entirely free and unbound but still a self. In The Anxiety of
Influence Harold Bloom compares the discovery of poetry to an awareness of falling:
“Poetry begins with our awareness, not of a Fall, but that we are falling” (19). The
young poet who has just discovered poetry within himself and, simultaneously, he has
discovered influence, may, as he is falling, perform a swerve that will improve his
situation and ease the pain: “As I fell, I swerved, consequently I lie here in a Hell
improved by my own making” (45). Although, executing the clinamen may be
a thoroughly painful experience, it may be the only possibility for a poet to gain a voice
of one’s own. As Bielik-Robson notes, thanks to clinamen or poetic misprision the
inner life can escape from set cultural patterns and gain a kind of singularity (Duch
powierzchni 197).
The Relevance of the Theories of Irony to the Analysis of Bishop’s Work.
Since irony is such a difficult term to define and Elizabeth Bishop is a poet that
evades description, I am not going to limit myself to just one approach to irony. In
26
analysing Bishop’s work, I will refer to different theories of irony, depending on the
problems I will be tackling. Also, I hope that making use of several theories of irony
will enable me to better grasp the manifold and evasive nature of Bishop’s poetics and
to show how Bishop – with the help of various ironic strategies – fights for poetic
independence and gains a voice that is at once recognizable and resistant to reductive
interpretations. Finally, I would like to see if Bishop’s approach to irony can reshape
our understanding of the term and add something to the theory of irony in general.
I would also like to add that my work is neither a study in philosophy nor
an essay in literary theory and that I refer to the various approaches to irony in order to
better grasp the complexity of Bishop’s work and not in order to arrive at final
generalizations about the nature of irony. I also realise that Bishop was not
a theoretician of irony and that her understanding of the term is more literary and
practical than philosophical. Although she read and appreciated William Empson, for
instance, I think that, as far as the use of irony is concerned, she was more strongly
influenced by the strategies of other poets, especially by authors such as Marianne
Moore, Wystan Hugh Auden, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Charles Baudelaire.
This is why I am going to examine her relationship to these poets’ poems – I want to see
what she appropriates for herself from other poets’ poetics, how she reshapes, misreads
or distorts her predecessors’ work, how she molds other writers’ voices to fit her poetic
aims and how she builds her own distinctive poetic voice.
Moreover, although the notion of irony does appear in numerous studies of
Bishop’s oeuvre – for example, in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: the
Biography of a Poetry, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with
Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, as well as in the collection of essays The
Geography of Gender, edited by Marilyn May Lombardi, and most notably in the text
27
by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, “Perversity as Voice” – no systematic, book-length study
of Bishop’s approaches to, and uses of, irony exists. I believe that reading her work in
the context of irony may help to provide a non-reductive interpretation of her work.
I hope that an analysis of Bishop’s work from the perspective of irony will throw some
light not only on her poetics but also on the psychological and political aspects of her
work as well as on the relationship between these fields. As far as the political issues are
concerned, my main point of reference will be Camille Roman’s Elizabeth Bishop’s
World War II-Cold War View. Although Roman makes an explicit reference to irony
only occasionally, her book provides an in-depth analysis of Bishop’s masking and
negotiation strategies, strategies that can be interpreted as instances of the use of irony
for psychological and political reasons. In her work, Roman applies the terminology
proposed by Michel de Certeau in chapter six of The Practice of Everyday Life. De
Certeau proposes a classification of negotiation strategies which serves Roman as the
basic framework for analysing Bishop’s work. The strategies are: visible complicity,
quasi-visible dissent, quasi-(in)visible dissent, and confounding silence (Roman 4).
Commenting upon de Certeau’s classification and explaining her use thereof
Roman writes:
He states that a writer can struggle openly with politics in a climate of free
discussion. He goes on to argue, however, that the writer must search for other
subversive strategies of dissent during “moments” of suppression that are
difficult to observe but not completely hidden [quasi-(in)visible]. I consider the
following as examples of such strategies: 1) rewriting or parodying earlier
poems, songs, and newspaper clippings or reporting on specific historical and
cultural events, thereby creating “readerly” poems; 2) writing but not publishing
in order to preserve the “moment” of suppression for a later, more open
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“moment” and audience; 3) multiple codings of published texts; 4) strategic
self-censorship; and 5) silence. (4)
Although I am not going to use the classification employed by Roman in a systematic
way, I am going to make occasional references to the terms she borrowed from de
Certeau. I believe that these terms help in pinpointing the aims that Bishop may have
wanted to achieve with the help of irony.
The following chapters will examine different aspects and functions of Bishop’s
irony. Chapter 2 analyses irony in connection with questions of form and intertextuality.
I will look at formal devices, like condensation, repetition or the echoing of earlier texts,
to show how the use of such devices can strengthen the irony of a given text. I will
focus on two poems: “One Art” and “The Gentleman of Shalott.” Several drafts of “One
Art” will be analysed to show how the text evolves from formally unconstrained, nonironic and emotionally straightforward notes to a formally complex, condensed, and
emotionally reticent text of the well-known villanelle. The poem will be read against the
background of Bishop’s personal life. “The Gentleman of Shalott” will be analysed in
the context of Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”
Chapter 3 will examine Bishop’s irony in the light of the work of Marianne
Moore (a poet who had a major influence on Bishop) and Robert Lowell (an important
contemporary). Two interconnected problems will be foregrounded. Firstly, irony will
be considered as a defensive and deferentiating mechanism – I want to see how Bishop
used irony to defend herself from the other poets’ influence and how she used the
device in question to shape her own distinctive poetic voice. Secondly, I will try to
define how Bishop’s use of irony is different from that of her precursors and
contemporaries. Occasionally, I will allude to Moore’s and Lowell’s private life as both
29
of them had a significant influence not only on Bishop’s writing but also on her
personal life.
Chapter 4 will consider Bishop’s irony in the context of her homelessness and
expatriation. In my analyses, I will start with a reading of Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture”
in the context of William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and
Wystan Hugh Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.“ Readings of “Poem” and “Crusoe in
England” will follow. Reading the poems I will show how irony helps Bishop cope with
the feeling of homelessness and deracination by providing a necessary distance to one’s
problems. Simultaneously, irony – being a device that can help connect disparate and
seeming incompatible elements – can serve as a tool of building a new sense of
belonging, a new home. Irony can help the subject gather together the scattered
elements that at first seem to have nothing in common but are important to the subject;
irony can also help one reconnect oneself to the world.
In the final chapter irony is analysed as a masking device. I will start my
discussion with poems that explicitly deal with masking and costume (“Pink Dog,”
“Exchanging Hats”), reading Bishop’s ironic strategies in the light of gender studies,
particularly in the context of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. To better define Bishop’s
irony, I will juxtapose it with the notion of the American sublime, as understood by
Wallace Stevens. I will proceed to an analysis of several Bishop’s love poems,
juxtaposing the lyrics published during her lifetime with the ones she did not wish to
make public. The juxtaposition will foreground the issues that are masked in the poems
Bishop considered complete and decided to print; the juxtaposition will also help
examine the ways in which certain issues are covered, masked or disguised. In the final
part of the chapter, I will read several of Bishop’s Brazilian poems, showing how
simple, binary oppositions (for instance, the opposition between the private and public
30
spheres) are questioned and undermined and how Bishop’s complex approach to irony
results from careful observation of nature and rigorous self-control. I will also
demonstrate how Bishop’s reading of the Brazilian natural and political landscape may
well serve as an interpretation of her own biography and work.
The analyses will be concluded with a brief summary of Bishop’s contribution to
the theory and practice of irony and suggestions for further investigations of the theory
of irony and Elizabeth Bishop’s work.
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Chapter 2
Elizabeth Bishop’s Formal and Intertextual Ironies.
In the following chapter I want to look at formal constraints as potential sources
of irony. I will concentrate on two possible results of Bishop’s choice of a strict verse
form: the condensation of the material present in the drafts necessitated by the demands
of the chosen form (for example, the repetition of words and phrases) and the effect of
the formal constraints on what is being said (i. e. the possibility that the form, or strict
obedience to it, will make one say something one did not plan to say in the beginning).
I will start by looking at Bishop’s early attempts at writing an elegy and then I will
proceed to the analysis of the drafts of Bishop’s famous villanelle “One Art,” to see how
the poem was condensed and how Bishop departed from the things she began to say at
the outset, in the first drafts. Then, I will proceed to the analysis of “The Gentleman of
Shalott” in the context of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” – as an ironic, minimalist
rendition of the famous ballad.
Before I start discussing the drafts of Bishop’s poem, I will outline the most
important events in her personal life in order to provide a context for a reading of her
elegiac poetry, most notably the villanelle “One Art.” Elizabeth Bishop’s life was
marked by loss from the very beginning. When she was eight months old her father died
of Bright’s disease. Her mother could not cope with this loss and during the next four
years she was repeatedly hospitalized in mental instututions until – in 1916, when her
daughter was five – she was “diagnosed as permanently insane” (Lombardi 233) and
spent the rest of her life in a mental asylum. Elizabeth Bishop has never seen her again.
After having become virtually an orphan, she was taken into the home of her maternal
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grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she lived a considerably stable and
happy life. However, a year later, her Boston paternal grandparents, afraid that living in
the country will prove bad for her upbringing and education, decided that she should
stay with them. Bishop’s body reacted violently to this change of home – she began to
suffer from asthma and eczema. Also, her moving to a new home opened for Bishop
a period of constant change of places; the sense of homelessness and deracination has
never left her. Also, quite early in her life she developed an addiction to alcohol and she
has never managed to break the habit. Brett C. Millier notices that alcohol made it
possible for Bishop to talk about herself: “In a nature so reticent, which kept painful
memory and personal anguish even from itself, alcohol provided license to talk, to cry,
to stop being the stoical New Englander she had been raised to be” (Millier 150). The
loss of her parents and her home was in a way repeated and reenacted in the losses of
her loved ones, or the losses of the people close to Bishop for which she would often
blame herself. Her love relationships were also, with some exceptions, failures. In the
1930s she fell in love with her college friend and roommate Margaret Miller. In 1937
Bishop, Miller, and Louise Crane voyaged in Europe. On the nineteenth of July 1937,
during a trip to Burgundy, the three women were involved in a car accident: “Louise was
driving fast, at about five thirty in the afternoon, when a car passing them forced them off
the road... [a]nd the car rolled, throwing all three women out. “At first I thought we
were all safe –,” Elizabeth wrote. “’Then we realized simultaneously, I think, that
Margaret’s right hand and forearm were completely gone’” (Millier 123-4). Also, in the
1930s Elizabeth Bishop dated Bob Seaver, a young man who had suffered from polio.
After Bishop refused to marry him, Seaver shot himself. Throughout her life, Bishop
believed that it was her rejection that drove him to suicide:
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Later in her life in her most abject moments of guilt and self-recrimination,
Elizabeth told the story of the death of Bob Seaver, the boyfriend of her college
years, who committed suicide in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on November 21,
1936. Seaver had wanted to marry Elizabeth, and she had told him that she felt
she would never marry. On her return from Europe, she had been called on to
make this point more emphatically. When Seaver shot himself, perhaps in
frustration at his loneliness and his physical limitations, the only note he left
was a postcard, which arrived in her mail a few days after his death. It said, “Go
to hell, Elizabeth.”
Primed as she was to absorb this kind of guilt, Elizabeth felt until her
own death that she had “ruined” Bob Seaver’s life. Marrying him was
impossible, but his death and his unanswerable condemnation of her were
devastating blows. (Millier 112)
After many years during which Bishop kept changing her places of residence
and searched in vain for stability in her private life, she finally settled in Brazil. In 1951
she passed through Brazil during what was to be her trip around the world and, while
there, she had a violent allergic reaction to the fruit of the Brazilian cashew tree (cajú).
She had to stay longer and during that time she developped a relationship with Lota de
Macedo Soares whom she had already known back in the States. Suddenly, Bishop had
both a home and a stable relationship with another person. Bishop stayed in Brazil for
almost seventeen years. All this came to an end when Soares committed suicide:
Lota arrived in New York on the afternoon of September 19 [1967 – A.Z.]. She
came bearing presents of coffee and curios for her friends but looking, Elizabeth
said later, tired and depressed. They spent a “peaceful and affectionate” evening
together and then went to bed. Sometime during the night, Lota got up and took
34
an overdose of tranquilizers. By the time Elizabeth woke up and went to her at
half past six, she was nearly comatose... After five days in an unbroken coma,
she died at the age of fifty-seven. (Millier 395-6)
After Lota’s death, Elizabeth Bishop engaged in an unsuccessful relationship
with Suzanne Bowen. Bowen’s psyche was frail and she depended too much on Bishop
in financial matters while Bishop was too dependent emotionally. In 1970, when the
relationship with Bowen was coming to an end, Bishop accepted Lowell’s proposal to
teach at Harvard where she met Alice Methfessel, the administrative director of
Kirkland House: “From this time until the end of her life, Elizabeth depended on Alice
for support of many kinds, and Alice became Elizabeth’s main source of secretarial help
and tax advice, her chauffeur, her travelling companion, her nurse, her rescuer from the
consequences of alcoholism, her “saving grace” (Millier 435).
However, when in 1975 it seemed that Methfessel, who could not stand Bishop’s
emotional and physical dependence on her, was about to abondon her partner, Bishop
fell apart. Millier notices that this crisis might have become an impulse for writing “One
Art” (the poem was written in the fall of 1975). Her biographer observes that, according
to people who knew both women at that time, some of the images must refer to
Methfessel: “the joking voice, which people who knew both women say evokes Alice as
surely as blue eyes would have done” (Millier 514). Bishop’s letters from this period
articulate her concerns: “The letters agonize over her prospects of a lonely old age
crowded with fans, students, and hangers-on but empty of love and of trips and retreats
with Alice. Out of this despair, apparently, came ‘One Art’” (Millier 513).
Even though the direct impulse for writing the poem might have been connected
with the possibility of losing Alice Methfessel, the poem can be read as Bishop’s elegy
for all her life’s losses, especially if one remembers that, before writing “One Art,”
35
Bishop made several attempts at writing an elegy (the problem will be discussed later).
Brett C. Millier observes:
[T]he poem is also Elizabeth’s elegy for her whole life. She apologized for the
poem, saying, “I’m afraid it’s a sort of tearjerker” – clearly she was somewhat
uncomfortable with even this careful approach to the confessional… [T]he
“joking voice,” the gesture Elizabeth loved (and employed even in writing this
painful poem) in Alice, in Lota Soares, in these other friends dead and gone –
the phrase brings them all into the poem. In Elizabeth’s distillation of
immediate crisis into enduring art, the lesson in losing becomes even more
a lesson one keeps learning throughout one’s life (513-4).
Thus, even if Bishop’s fear subsided after Alice’s eventual return (Millier writes that
‘[only] Alice’s return solved” Bishop’s problems, 514), the poem may be read as
a humble, but all-encompassing, elegy for all Bishop’s life’s losses. We know that, apart
from the unfinished ode2 to Uncle Sam, a toucan she accidentally poisoned in March
1958, Bishop made at least two attempts at writing an elegy. When she was working on
her fourth book of poems, Geography III, her initial idea was to compose a poem for
Lota, with the working title “Elegy” and include it in the collection (Lombardi 234).
Then, she changed her mind, and decided to write, apart from her new volume of
poetry, a book-length elegy for Lota (234). There is no doubt that the addressee of these
two works (that remained unfinished) was to be Lota de Macedo Soares. Millier quotes
some of Bishop’s notes to the long poem about Lota: it was to be written “in sections,
some anecdotal, some lyrical different lengths – never more than two short pages,” and
2
There only exists a very fragmentary draft of the poem that seems to be nothing more than a violent
outpouring of grief: “Sammy, my dear toucan…/ I killed you! I didn’t mean to, / of course, I cried & cried
- / it was all my fault, / Sammy, dear Uncle Sam” (qtd. in Millier 298).
36
it was to be an elegy for Lota’s “reticence and pride,” “heroism brave and young,” her
“beautiful colored skin,” “the gestures (which you said you didn’t have).” She also
planned to include some memories of Lota: “the door slamming, plaster-falling – the
cook and I laughing helplessly,” Lota’s “courage to the last, or almost the last–;“ “regret
and guilt, the nighttime horrors, the WASTE” (Lombardi 234).
Among Elizabeth Bishop’s drafts we find an unfinished poem – “Aubade and
Elegy” – dedicated probably to Lota de Macedo Soares. It is impossible to determine
whether “Aubade and Elegy” is an unfinished version of one of the two elegies
mentioned above, or a draft for yet another poem. Since the text is not well-known and
because it may provide an interesting context for an analysis of the villanelle, I will
quote it in its entirety (Alice Quinn provides a photograph of Bishop’s typescript. I copy
the poet’s original spelling):
No coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee
No revolution can catch your attention
You are bored with us all. It is true we were boring.
1.
For perhaps the tenth time the tenth time the tenth time today
and still early morning I go under the crashing wave
of your death
I go under the wave the black wave of your death
Your e not there! not there! I see only small hands in the dirt
transplanting sweet williams, tamping them down
Dirt on your hands on your rings, nothing more than that but no more than that-
On the same page, Bishop provides an alternative version of the first stanza:
37
the smell of the earth, the smell of the black dark coffee roasted coffee
black as fine black as humus –
no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you [the
last repetition of the phrase added in pencil]
no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee
can wake you
No coffee
(EAP 149)
Although Bishop did not use any phrases or ideas from “Aubade and Elegy” in
“One Art,” what both poems do have in common is the use of repetition, or, more
precisely, the repetition of certain lines that function as refrains in a song; in the case of
“One Art” the repetitions are more systematic due to the chosen form (villanelle). Also,
the use of metonymies in “Aubade and Elegy” (“small hands in the dirt / transplanting
sweet williams”) might signal the more extensive use of metonymies in “One Art” (“my
mother’s watch,” “the joking voice,” “a gesture / I love”).
There is one more aspect that may link “Aubade and Elegy” with “One Art.” But
before I establish the link between the two poems, it is necessary to explain what the
term “aubade” refers to and how the poem can be linked to another untitled lyric by
Bishop beginning with the line “It is marvellous to wake up together” (EAP 44).
“Aubade” is the French counterpart of the Provençal and Spanish “alba,” that is a poem
that, according to Cuddon “expresses the regret of parting lovers at daybreak”
38
(“Aubade” 60), but it also celebrates the lovers’ meeting in the first place. The most
famous modern example of the form in the English language is Ezra Pound’s “Alba:”
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
(112)
If “It is marvellous to wake up together” celebrates the moments of tenderness
between lovers and only hints at some possibility of danger lurking somewhere 3, ready
to reshape their relationship (“Without surprise / The world might change to something
quite different”), “Aubade and Elegy” goes much further: it is not only an aubade, but
an “Aubade and Elegy,” a sort of an aubade à rebours, written after the disaster, only
hinted at in “It is marvellous to wake up together,” took place.
I want to argue that “One Art” performs both what “It is marvellous to wake up
together” did, i.e. like an aubade, it celebrates a relationship with another person but
also shows how frail it can be and, like the poem “Aubade and Elegy,” performs the
work of mourning. Moreover, the form of the poem enhances the tension between
“being two” and “no longer being two.” In her article “Elusive Mastery: The Drafts of
Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’”4 Brett Candlish Millier observes that there is an
interesting correspondence between the chosen form5 (only two rhymes, and two lines
3
“It is marvellous to wake up together” will be analysed in greater detail in Chapter 5.
4
The article has later become – in a changed form – a part of Millier’s book Elizabeth Bishop: Life and
the Memory of It. In most cases I refer to Millier’s book. There are some parts of the article, however, that
are not to be found in the book and thus I sometimes make references to the earlier article.
5
Just as “One Art” is not Bishop’s first attempt at writing an elegy, neither is it her first attempt at writing
a villanelle. She tried to write one in the 1930s, after the accident in which Margaret Miller’s forearm was
39
that return as refrain in a predetermined order) and the thematic concerns of the poem:
“Bishop conceived the poem as a villanelle from the start, and the play of “twos” within
it – two rivers, two cities, the lost lover means not being “two” any more – suggests that
the two-rhyme villanelle is a form appropriate to the content” (Lombardi 236). One may
add that, as I have argued in the first chapter, referring to Baudelaire’s essay “De
l’essence du rire,” the split into two is an inherent feature of irony – the division into
surface meaning and intended meaning, and the split within the ironic subject, a sort of
intra-subjective dialectics that takes place within the ego that is doubled and divided:
one part of the subjectivity becomes the object and the other part becomes the subject
that views the object with ironic detachment. At the same time, an ironic mind is one
that constantly questions its previous choices and decisions, or – as Schlegel puts it –
one that incessantly destroys and creates at the same time (Whiting 10). This is
precisely what Bishop does in her villanelle as well as in other poems. For instance, she
delicately flouts the scheme of the villanelle (e.g. by introducing slight changes in the
repeated lines), in order to place herself in a position of somebody who complies with
the rules of the form and does not comply with them at the same time. To illustrate my
points clearly I will quote the poem in its entirety:
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
severed. In her drafts we find a sketch of a poem, unrhymed, about Louise Crane’s dream, along with the
rhyme scheme of a villanelle and some lines (all crossed out) in which Bishop tried to establish a possible
rhyme scheme (EAP 34-35). In 1950 Bishop completed a villanelle entitled “Verdigris” (EAP 261) and in
the 1960s she tried to write a villanelle about an aviary in the rain with the rhymes: fiduciary, subsidiary,
sumptuary, beneficiary (EAP 261). As Alice Quinn notices, Bishop “apparently instinctively associated
[the form of villanelle] with catastrophe” (EAP 260).
40
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
– 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.
(CP 178)
An important means of Bishop’s distancing herself from too simple
interpretations of irony, and in general, from methods of categorization that prove too
facile is a subtle questioning of the binary scheme of “One Art.” As Millier notices, the
speaker and her lover are no longer “two” – and the realization of the fact is a factor that
destabilizes the neat formal and semantic structure of the poem. The destabilization is
41
signalled already in the title. Even though the phrase “one art” obviously means an art
that is just one among many other arts, the numeral “one” as the opening word of the
title to a poem that is based on binary correspondences, signals a possibility of
undermining the villanelle’s binary structure. One may add that an escape from too
simple categorizations, a questioning of binary oppositions is something that Bishop
would do quite often. (The issue will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 5.)
In the Appendix to Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox. Uncollected Poems, Drafts,
and Fragments edited by Alice Quinn we find 166 drafts of “One Art.” Some of them
are photographs of her typescripts, some – photographs of Bishop’s barely legible
handwritten notes, others – a combination of the two. The title “One Art” appears as late
as draft 15. In the first draft Bishop considers three possible titles: “How to Lose
Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things” and “The Art of Losing Things.” All the three
variants signal Bishop’s preoccupation with loss. Already in the changes of the title we
can see a movement from the particular to the general, from the definite to the
unspecified, and the final choice of the word “art” shows Bishop’s decision to focus on
art, or, more precisely, to focus on the relationship between art and loss. Draft 1 seems
to be a prose plan for the poem. What is striking in the draft, however, is a fragment that
appears just after the proposition that we should learn to lose things by mislaying them.
Bishop writes there: “This is by way of introduction. I really / want to introduce myself”
(EAP 225). Such a fortright declaration is very far from Bishop’s famous reticence. She
is equally direct in the fragments in which she talks about her lover’s eyes and hands
6
Alice Quinn reproduces 16 drafts of the poem and presents them in the order established by Vassar
College Library and supported by Brett C. Millier. However, Victoria Harrison, in Elizabeth Bishop’s
Poetics of Intimacy disagrees with the numbering of the first nine drafts. I stick to the classification
established by Vassar Library and presented by Alice Quinn in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box.
Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments.
42
(“only the eyes were exceptionally beautiful and the hands looked intelligent”) and in
the ending that contains Biblical references: “He who loseth his life, etc. – but he who /
loses his love – neever [sic], no never never again –“ (EAP 225). It seems that the
emotionally charged words and phrases, presented here in a raw form, will not yield
poetry, but become poetic clichés. In general, as Brett C. Millier notices, “[I]n its
unedited catalog of losses, the draft resembles one of the alcohol-induced outpourings
of grief and guilt she experienced that fall (508).” Through reworking the drafts Bishop
reaches compression that is, as we learn from Marianne Moore’s “To a Snail” “the first
grace of style” (91) and “the colloquial tone” that is “a trademark of her polished style”
(Millier 512). Besides Moore, another precursor of Bishop’s “distillation of immediate
crisis into enduring art” (Millier 514) may be Emily Dickinson who in the poem 448
wrote: “This was a Poet – It is That / Distills amazing sense / From ordinary Meanings –
“ (Dickinson 1960)7. Harold Bloom noticed (Schwartz and Estess X) that Dickinson’s
eye is the precursor of Bishop’s. It seems, however, that Bishop absorbed Dickinson’s
poetic method as well.
The photographs of Bishop’s drafts printed in Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox,
make it impossible to decipher all the poet’s notes. Both in her article “Elusive Mastery:
The Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’” and in the book Elizabeth Bishop: Life and
the Memory of It, Brett C. Millier quotes some of the poet’s notes and revisions that
were not reprinted or are impossilbe to make out in Alice Quinn’s edition of Bishop’s
7
I refer to the edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry prepared by Thomas H. Johnson since this is the
edition thanks to which Bishop started valuing Dickinson’s poetry more than she had before. In a letter to
Robert Lowell she wrote: “I never really liked Emily Dickinson much, except a few nature poems, until
that complete edition came out a few years ago and I read it all more carefully. I still hate the oh-the-painof-it-all poems, but I admire many others, and, mostly, phrases more than whole poems. I particularly
admire her having dared to do it, all alone – a bit like Hopkins in that“ (LA 858). Quoting from
Dickinson, I only give the poems’ numbers (according to Johnson’s edition), omitting the page numbers.
43
unpublished material. Millier adds that in draft 1 “The final stanza is crossed out,
though legible under scoring is “But your loss spelt disaster.” The words “evident” and
“false” are set to one side, ready to be worked in” (Lombardi 237-8). Millier also quotes
Bishop’s handwritten notes for the possible rhymes for the poem: “ever/never/forever,”
“geography/scenery,” and “intelligent,” “sent,” spent,” and “lent” (Lombardi 237-8).
Draft 2 is already an incomplete villanelle – with the line “The art of losing isn’t
hard to master” and the rhyme “no disaster” ending the third line (EAP 226). Millier
quotes a set of rhymes that could have taken Bishop’s poem in a different direction –
“gesture,” “protestor,” “attestor,” “foster,” “boaster” – and claims that the set “suggests
a possible angry, almost litigious response to loss” (Lombardi 238).
Although Bishop drops the Biblical allusions and the bizarre reference to hands
that looked “intelligent,” the blue eyes, after having been left out in draft 2, are used
again in draft 10 as “eyes of Azure Aster” (EAP 234) to be discarded once more in draft
12. The disappearance and reappearance of the blue eyes shows how personal the poem
really is: i.e. the resignation from the sentimental references – sentimental, but no doubt,
very important to Bishop – cost her a great deal of struggle and demanded a lot of
nervous energy. Even though Bishop claimed that “One Art” was written without much
effort, that it was “like writing a letter,” (Spires 64) the changes in the drafts (the
insistent return of emotionally loaded phrases) suggest that getting rid of the overtly
emotional fragments and opting for ironic understatement instead of a direct, meticulous
catalog of losses must have been difficult for the poet.
Another mark of the difficult transition from the private sphere of emotional
disaster to the public sphere of art is the change from “say it” into “write it” in the last
line of the poem. In draft 9 the poem ended in the following way: “All that I write is
false, it’s evident / The art of losing isn’t hard to master. / oh no. / [anything] at all
44
anything but one’s love. (Say it: disaster.)” (EAP 233). Brett C. Millier observes that
“[t]he formalized spontaneity of “(Say it: disaster)” enables the poem to accommodate
the overflow of emotion that to this point had disarrayed the final stanza and made the
villanelle’s ritual repetitions inadequate to manage the emotional content” (510).
However, the change (to “write it”) that made the poem even more detached (or at least,
seemingly so) appears in draft 10 but it is finally crossed out and returns for good in
draft 11 (with a minor variation in draft 12: “Go on! Write it!,” EAP 236).
The change of “say it” to “write it” is crucial since Bishop is trying to deal with
the emotional disaster precisely through writing and repetition. The poem has an
obsessive, incantatory quality – the pair of words “master – disaster” ending the refrain
lines of the villanelle try to drum into the reader’s ear the necessity of learning to master
a disaster. And the disaster that is at stake is loss (words “losing”, “lose” and “lost”
appear 11 times in this 19-line poem), in different forms – from losing door keys, or
your “mother’s watch” to losing “you.”
And how does one go about mastering the eponymous one art? If the art in
question is the skill of coping with a disaster, coming to terms with a loss, it seems that
one has both to forget about this loss (lose it, let it be lost) and remember it (remember
that you have lost something). This is precisely what the poem does – it repeats,
remembers what one no longer has, reminding one of it and thus enabling the subject to
incorporate the loss into her identity. But, apart from forgetting and remembering it, one
has to – as the last line has it – write it. Writing turns out to be the essential factor that
can save one from drowning in loss.
However, repetition is used not only for mnemotechnical and psychological
purposes (one must remember that one has to learn how to cope with loss); it also
reinforces the ironic potential of the poem. Each line, even if it is repeated without any
45
changes, appears in a different context (next to different lines); also, apart from this
spatial dimension (the proximity of different lines), there is also a temporal change: the
reader reads the repeated phrase later, with a slightly changed perspective. Thus, an
“ideal repetition is impossible” (Gutorow, “Różnica i powtórzenie” 162; translation
mine – A.Z.). Each repetition makes the reader alert to different aspects of the repeated
phrase, each time the repeated fragment is understood in a different way, sometimes, in
a way that is sharply opposed to the earlier interpretation of the given passage.
If one knows and remembers about the personal context of “One Art,” one is
tempted to read the poem as one of the most personal and traumatic lyrics in Bishop’s
career. On the other hand, when we consider the drafts of the poem, the whole work of
writing “One Art” seems to be a movement from the personal to the general, from the
sharply particular to the delicately signalled, from meticulous enumeration and
description to a barely marked mentioning of the losses and – most significantly – from
the overtly and intensely expressed or even overexpressed to the ironically understated.
However, even though the early drafts of the poem are so much more personal,
the crucial rhyme “master – disaster” appears as early as in the second draft. The rhyme
sends us back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” The repetitions of “never never never
again” (EAP 225) that appear in draft 1 of “One Art” reinforce the poem’s connection
with Poe’s lyric:
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore –
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'
46
(Poe, Selected Stories and Poems 226)
The notoriety of “The Raven” makes it almost impossible for an American poet writing
about loss to bypass Poe’s poem. While no twentieth century reader can look at “The
Raven” without an ironic distance, Bishop, I think, shows simultaneously quite a lot of
respect to Poe’s craft. Approaching the poem she behaves like a curious child who takes
apart a complicated mechanism (for instance – a watch) but – unlike the child – she
does know how to reassemble it and make it work, only she does it in her own way. One
may also think here about one of the procedures invented by Oulipo (Ouvroir de
littérature potentielle, workshop of potential literature), the Paris-based group of writers
and mathematicians who are interested in inventing mathematically precise procedures
that could aid writers in creating good literary texts. Namely, they decided to produce
the so-called poèmes haï-kaïsants that consist solely of the rhyming words of famous
sonnets. They came to an (only half-ironic) conclusion that the rest was redundant
(Oulipo. La littérature potentielle 181). Of course, Bishop goes one step further than the
Oulipian writers – she begins with Poe’s two rhyming words and his theme (loss), but
also supplies the rest of the poem alongside the borrowed words. And, although she is
as conscious a craftsman as Poe, there is, I think, a fundamental difference between
them: Poe’s repetitions and the almost “jingling” sound of his poem have a deadening
quality. It seems that Poe wants to silence the loss, to forget about it and avoid facing it.
Moreover, he does it not only in the poem itself, but also in his theoretical writings.
Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition” is a meticulous and extremely detailed
account of writing “The Raven” – the poet explains and justifies all his decisions, from
the length of the poem (“the limit of a single sitting”), to its tone, the choice of the
subject (“the death… of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in
47
the world”), the choice of refrain and the way it should be used and the choice of meter
(Poe “The Philosophy of Composition” 1536, 1538).
The account is so precise, detached in tone, and mechanical that one begins to
suspect that Poe’s explanations are an instance of self-irony. If indeed we are dealing
with irony here, it is heavier than the one Bishop uses. One can say that on the surface
Poe is trying to say that everything in poetic composition can be explained and he
indeed explains everything in “The Raven.” But precisely because apparently nothing
remains unaccounted for, one begins to suspect that there must be a hidden secret
lurking underneath. The situation resembles the gesture of Raymond Roussel who in
an article entitled “Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres,” published posthumously,
revealed some of the rules and puns that were the starting points for some of his stories,
poems and novels. Writing about Roussel’s posthumous testimony Michel Foucault
observes:
There is a strange power in this text whose purpose is to “explain.” So doubtful
is its status, its point of origin, where it makes its disclosures and defines its
boundaries, the space that at the same time it upholds and undermines, that after
the initial dazzling there is but one effect: to create doubt, to disseminate it by
a concerted omission when there was no reason for it, to insinuate it into what
ought to be protected from it, and to plant it even in the solid ground of its own
foundation. How I Wrote Certain of My Books is after all, one of his books.
Doesn’t this text of the unveiled secret also hold its own secret, exposed and
masked at the same time by the light it sheds on the other works? (Death and
the Labyrinth 6)
48
The strangeness of Poe’s endeavour to explain everything, to depict the process
of creation as something purely technical, makes one suspect that there must be
something hidden, both behind “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Raven”
itself. The irony is less subtle than Bishop’s since it is too readily discernible. At the
same time, such a detailed account of the writing process creates a comic effect.
What is it exactly that Poe mocks in his essay? At first glance, it appears that he
ridicules the idea of spontaneous poetic creation, of mysterious flights of poetic
imagination that cannot be accounted for. Hence, his idea of detailing and justifying
every aspect of the composition of “The Raven.” But, as has been argued above, since
his account is excessively meticulous, the essay directs the reader at a secret that must
lie behind the composition and so the essay, as well as mocking the inspired flights of
imagination, can be interpreted as criticizing the mechanical approach to poetry writing.
Poe ends up satirizing both approaches and it only becomes visible when we notice the
humour of his essay. Poe’s and Bishop’s approaches to form are very different. Poe
constantly oscillates between the two poles – spontaneous creation and mathematically
precise craftsmanship, detached and devoid of emotion – and never lets the reader forget
about the artificiality of the form he has chosen. Bishop’s approach to form is more
subtle. There is much more than just the wavering between the personal and
spontaneous on the one hand, and the artificial and predetermined on the other. Even
though the rigidity of the villanelle and the use of characteristic echoes of Poe in
prominent position in the poem seem impossible to reconcile with the very personal and
intimate content of the poem, Bishop does the impossible and feels at ease in the strict
and repetitious verse form. Although the starting point (rhymes and repetitions
enforcing the associations with Poe) is unpromising, Bishop ends up with a poem that
sounds natural and unforced. The rigid form turns out not to be an obstacle but an ally
49
that helps in nuancing the poem and bringing all the subtleties of tone to the surface.
There are two important reservations one must make here. Firstly, for Bishop, as we
know from the drafts of “One Art,” the choice of form was not exactly her starting point
– she started by writing a prose-like account of her losses and then put the material into
the form she had chosen – the form provoked a condensation of language and emotions.
Secondly, Bishop changed the form at will (e.g. she decided to include variations in the
repeated line) to make it more suitable to her poetic aims.
And what are the tonal and emotional consequences of Poe’s and Bishop’s
different approaches to poetic form? Whereas Poe’s mechanical repetitions muffle the
pain, Bishop’s repetitions make the speaker remember the loss, face it and then,
hopefully, overcome it. Thus, instead of a note of fatalism that is present in Poe’s poem,
in Bishop’s lyric one can hear a tone of heroism (but there is nothing ostentatious about
it). Consequently, Elizabeth Bishop’s reference to Poe’s lyric might be interpreted as
an instance of Schlegelian irony: she performs a destruction of Poe’s poem, while
simultaneously creating a new poem of her own.
Let me now look at the last line, at the changes that occurred in the drafts and
the relationship of the word “disaster” to the chosen form of the poem. Brett C. Millier
observes that “[m]ore than once in the drafts of Bishop’s published poems, one finds
that she came to express in the final draft nearly the opposite of what she started out to
say” (507) This is also the case of “One Art.” In earlier drafts the ending about losing
one’s love was not ironically understated (draft 9: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master
/ oh no. / anything at all anything but one’s love (Say it: disaster.)”). As a result – the
poem ended up as a conventional love lyric – it conveyed a message that could be
interpreted in the following way: I can come to terms with the loss of anything but you.
Thus, all the work of the poem, its subtle ironies repeated throughout with minor – or
50
major – variations were annulled by the last line, as if the whole effort of writing the
poem meant nothing and the eponymous “one art” was totally ineffective. When she
decided upon the ending we know from the final version, the poem gained its quality of
mastery. Saying that none of the mentioned losses “will ever bring disaster” (CP 173) (a
phrase repeated with significant variations) is an ironic understatement, and the irony of
it is underscored by the phrase “I shan’t have lied”. Grammatically, as Millier observes
(512), its future perfect tense opens the way to the following interpretation: the loss I am
talking about will not be a disaster after I come to terms with it; now, it is possible that
I am lying (512).
When reading the poem, it is helpful to bear in mind the etymology of the word
“disaster:”
[ad. F. désastre (1564 in Hatz.-Darm.) ‘a disaster, misfortune, calamitie,
misadventure, hard chance’; f. des-, DIS- + astre ‘a starre, a Planet; also
destinie, fate, fortune, hap’ (Cotgr.), ad. L. astrum,; after It. Disastro ‘disastre,
mischance, ill lucke’ (Florio). Cf. Pr., Sp., Pg. desastre, also Pr. benastre good
fortune, malastre ill fortune, and Eng. ill-starred.]
1. An unfavourable aspect of a star or planet; an obnoxious planet’. Obs.
2.
a. Anything that befalls of ruinous or distressing nature; a sudden or
great misfortune, mishap, or misadventure; a calamity. Usually with a and pl.,
but also without a, as ‘a record of disaster’.
2. b. A bodily affliction or disorder. Obs. Rare. (“Disaster” 723)
Thus, a disaster is something that goes against the order of things, something against the
order of the stars, a happening that is contra naturam. The speaker’s heroism is the
51
more admirable since she is trying to come to terms with something that should not
have happened in the first place.
And what is the relationship between “disaster” and Bishop’s choice of
the poetic form? Since she decided to write a villanelle in which the word appeared at
the end of the third line, it must reappear at the end of line 19, as the final word of
the poem. So, even though the poet almost managed to persuade herself that losing
whatever she has lost is not a disaster, the form ironically – or spitefully – plays against
such a declaration. Writing the third line of the poem, the second of the two that return
as refrains, she already decided that “disaster” will be the poem’s closing word and that
the last line will literally spell disaster. The penultimate line seems to be
a pronouncement of a little surrender on the part of the speaker. Instead of repeating
“[t]he art of losing isn’t hard to master” for the fourth time, Bishop introduces a slight
change and writes: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master” as if realising – after
having enumerated all the losses, and anticipating the final “disaster” – that mastering
the art of losing might prove a little more difficult than she wished it to be in the
beginning. However, the real struggle with the form, and with loss, takes place in the
last line of the poem: just like the penultimate line, the last line is not the exact
repetition of the previous refrain lines. Instead of repeating in line 19 what was said in
lines 3, 9 and 15, as the structure of the villanelle would demand, Bishop introduces
some unexpected variations. Before she finally says “disaster”, she as if stammers –
“though it may look like (write it!) like disaster” – as if she wanted to avoid, or at least,
postpone, the pronunciation of the final word. The phrase in brackets, a kind of order
uttered with emphasis, almost shouted, strengthens the impression that the speaker is
reluctant to do what the form requires. The result is perfectly Bloomian – she says what
she must say – “disaster” – but she does it on her own terms, distorting the final line,
52
and thus performing a kind of clinamen in respect to the demands of the chosen form.
Although she loses – having to pronounce the emotionally charged word “disaster,” the
word “almost impossible to lift” as she put it in “Five Flights Up” (CP 181) – she does
it after performing a significant swerving. What is really hers, what constitutes her
signature is the unnecessary – from the formal point of view – repetition of the word
“like.” Moreover – though this interpretation may be a little bit far-fetched – when the
word “like” is repeated it somehow loses its first meaning – that of a comparative
conjunction – and the whole phrase sounds almost like an invitation to “like disaster.”
Reading the drafts of “One Art,” one can separate three main problems Bishop
struggled with: first, we can see the effort of the artist to shape personal grief into art,
that is to make that which is private, public. Secondly, in her dialogues and struggles
with key figures of American literature (Poe, Dickinson), she tries to assert herself and
find her place in the mainstream poetic canon; she does this with the help of elaborate
ironic strategies. Finally, another way in which Bishop tries to find a place in the poetic
tradition, is employing a well-established and rigid form and making it her own by
leaving on it a mark, a sort of signature.
I will now look at the poem “The Gentleman of Shalott,” as I think it shows
a different way of approaching the problem of placing oneself within the literary canon
and negotiating with strong precursors as well as a different approach to traditional
forms. What “One Art” and “The Gentleman of Shalott” do have in common, is that in
both of them Bishop resorts to irony:
Which eye’s his eye?
Which limb lies
next the mirror?
For neither is clearer
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nor a different color
than the other,
nor meets a stranger
in this arrangement
of leg and leg and
arm and so on.
To his mind
it’s the indication
of a mirrored reflection
somewhere along the line
of what we call the spine.
He felt in modesty
his person was
half looking-glass,
for why should he
be doubled?
The glass must stretch
down to his middle,
or rather down the edge.
But he’s in doubt
as to which side’s in or out
of the mirror.
There’s little margin for error,
but there’s no proof, either.
And if half his head’s reflected,
thought, he thinks, might be affected.
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But he’s resigned
to such economical design.
If the glass slips
he’s in a fix–
only one leg, etc. But
while it stays put
he can walk and run
and his hands can clasp one
another. The uncertainty
he says he
finds exhilarating. He loves
that sense of constant re-adjustment.
He wishes to be quoted as saying at present:
“Half is enough.”
(CP 9-10)
Writing about “The Gentleman of Shalott” Lorrie Goldensohn observes: “The poem is
immensely playful; there is an ebullience to the challenges that the situation poses that
irony only partly disperses. And then, too, contained within the mystery of Bishop’s
favored binary forms is the logical puzzle, resonant with further implications, as to
whether the Gentleman is truly double or split, plenary or lacking – either point of view
is possible” (282).
Indeed, the poem is “immensely playful,” which does not mean that it does not
address quite serious problems. First, I am going to read it as a discussion of
Baudelaire’s understanding of the ironic subject. Then, I am going to see how Bishop
reads Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” or rather what she writes on the margins of the
famous ballad.
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“The Gentleman of Shalott” can be read as an exploration into the question of
Baudelaire’s le comique absolue. In his essay on laughter Baudelaire writes that
laughter is a sign of superiority of man over nature: “Je veux dire que dans ce cas-là le
rire est l’expression de l’idée de supériorité, non plus de l’homme sur l’homme, mais de
l’homme sur la nature” (“De l’essence du rire” 254). He also writes (and I have
discussed the issue in Chapter 1) that the subjectivity of the ironist must become
doubled: one part of it becomes the object laughed at, the other – the subject that is
laughing. The doubling of the ego creates the distance that is necessary for laughter and
irony. The speaker of Bishop’s poem, however, prefers to be modest: “He felt in
modesty / his person was / half looking glass, / for why should he / be doubled?”
Bishop’s seeming modesty complicates the question of the subject’s structure a great
deal. In Baudelaire’s interpretation, the subjectivity of a person who is able to laugh at
his/her own fall, the philosopher, is doubled. In Bishop’s poem, it is divided into two.
The half that is left, however, is reflected in the mirror. Thus, the personality of the
speaker is both not full, lacking and, at the same time, doubled by being reflected in the
mirror. Baudelaire’s subject is excessive, while Bishop’s Gentleman of Shalott is both
lacking (there’s only half of him) and too full (he is reflected), or, in the words of
Goldensohn, “truly double or split, plenary or lacking” (282). At first glance, it may
seem that Bishop and Baudelaire differ in that the latter’s subject constitutes a unity in
the beginning and is doubled only later, whereas Bishop’s Gentleman of Shalott is from
the very beginning both split and doubled. In this context his final declaration – “Half is
enough” – is obviously an ironic understatement.
I think, however, that a closer reading of Bishop’s lyric and a comparison with
Tennyson’s ballad will show that the ontological status of the Gentleman of Shalott is
even more problematic. When one looks closer at the first stanza, it turns out that the
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Gentleman gathered that he is half body and half looking glass because he noticed that
he was too symmetrical, his eyes and limbs were identical: “For neither is clearer / nor
a different color / than the other.” From this observation he draws the following
conclusion: “To his mind / it’s the indication / of a mirrored reflection / somewhere
along the line / of what we call the spine.” In contrast to Tennyson’s lyric, in Bishop’s
poem everything takes place in the mind. The poem is a fantasy about fantasy, i.e. the
poet is fantasizing about what the Gentleman’s fantasies might have been. Let us trace
his train of thought:
-
He notices that his body is too symmetrical. One might think here about the danger
of William Blake’s “fearful symmetry.”
-
The other possibility is to perceive his body as a series of unconnected parts (“leg
and leg and / arm and so on”).
-
As both options are terrifying, he prefers to believe, to fantasize that, since his body
is too perfect, too symmetrical, half of it must merely be a reflection.
What the Gentleman of Shalott does brings to mind is the Lacanian concept of the
mirror stage – the child sees his/her reflection in the mirror and recognizes a radical
discrepancy between the child’s lack of coordination and the wholeness of the mirror
image. The image, because of its wholeness, creates a tension between the child’s
experience of itself and the perfect, coherent image. The mirror image, because of its
wholeness, threatens the subject with fragmentation. To resolve the tension and to avoid
fragmentation, the child decides to accept the image as its own. Thus, in the process of
identifying oneself with the specular image, the ego is born (Lacan 75-81). In Lacan’s
theory, the ego is the product of a misunderstanding (the identification of the child with
the image). Nevertheless, there are significant differences between Lacan’s views and
the Gentleman’s situation. Firstly, it seems that in the case of the Gentleman of Shalott
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the process is more conscious, i.e. the Gentleman chooses to believe that he is half
reflection (and we know that a high degree of consciousness about one’s actions is a
feature typical of the ironic mind). Secondly, in Lacan’s theory, after the child has
accepted the mirror image as its own, another tension is born, i.e. the child strives to
attain the ideal of perfection (“the ideal ego”) associated with the perfect and coherent
image in the mirror. Thus, the subject becomes alienated from itself. In Bishop’s poem
this split (between the ego and the ideal ego) becomes the poem’s subject treated in a
slightly comical and confusing manner (we do not know which half is which).
Does irony have anything to do with this process? Faced with an alternative that
is impossible to accept (either total fragmentation manifested in the enumerations: “leg
and leg and / arm and so on,” or the terrifying perfect symmetry), the subject produces
a fauf-naïf fantasy of split and doubling. Although the split is painful for the subject, it
is the only way in which the Gentleman can conceive of himself and his identity
(perfect symmetry is inhuman, whereas complete fragmentation makes the construction
of any identity impossible) and irony offers a method of thinking about himself, irony
makes it possible for the Gentleman of Shalott to produce a coherent fantasy about his
identity. Thus, the Gentleman of Shalott is both a figure of irony (since, like an ironic
mind, “he loves / that sense of constant re-adjustment”) as well as an ironic figure (it is
possible that, although he has decided to conceive of himself as half looking-glass, he
does not want to be aware that the concept of his ego he has created is just a fantasy. He
hides it from himself to save his identity). Also, one can view the mirror as an allegory
of irony: “But / while it [the mirror] stays put / he can walk and run / and his hands can
clasp one / another.” The mirror is that which makes it possible for the Gentleman to
move. The mirror is like an axis around which, and thanks to which, things may
revolve. But if one bears in mind that the mirror is imaginary, one can say that what
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makes the movement possible is a certain strategy of the mind, a certain approach, in
this case, an ironic one.
The mirror theme, and the fact that the mirror functions like a sort of axis (or
“what we call the spine”) is also reflected in the arrangement of the lines. For instance,
in some places we get mirror-like reflection inside lines and inside the poem. In the
phrase “The uncertainty / he says he / finds exhilarating,” in the line “he says he” the
verb “says” is a mirror in which one of the pronouns “he” is reflected (we do not know
which one); the verb is like an axis around which the personal pronouns revolve.
The effect that the mirror creates, and the way the effect of reflection is repeated
and reenacted in the language used is similar to what Michel Foucault describes in The
Order of Things (the English translation of Les mots et les choses) when he analyses
Velazquez’s “Las Meninas:”
The mirror, by making visible, beyond even the walls of the studio itself, what
is happening in front of the picture, creates, in its sagittal dimension, an
oscillation between the interior and the exterior. One foot only on the lower
step, his body entirely in profile, the ambiguous visitor is coming in and going
out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing. He
repeats on the spot, but in the dark reality of his body, the instantaneous
movement of those images flashing across the room, plunging into the mirror,
being reflected there, and springing out from it again like visible, new, and
identical species. (10)
In the case of the Gentleman of Shalott the split and doubling takes place not
exactly “in the dark reality of his body” but rather “in the dark reality of his” mind and
then is repeated and reenacted in the language. We also have a kind of oscillation, not
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“between the interior and the exterior” but rather between the two parts of the
Gentleman’s self (divided in imagination), a vortex-like movement that gives the reader,
and the Gentleman, a vertiginous sensation. There is one more aspect that can link
Foucault’s analysis to the Gentleman’s situation: as Tadeusz Komendant observes in the
afterword to the Polish edition of Les Mots et les choses “the stylistic dominant of
Foucault’s writing (écriture) is oxymoron” (349, translation mine – A.Z.). Thus, the
enigmatic character in Velazquez’s painting, “the ambiguous visitor” is ”coming in and
going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing”
(Foucault, The Order of Things 10). Similarly, the Gentleman of Shalott is at the same
time split and doubled, real and reflected and if we change the pronoun “it” to “he” in
the phrase “while it [the glass] stays put / he can walk and run,” we will get yet another
oxymoronic figure. As it is, however, the juxtaposition of the Gentleman and the mirror
reflects an essential difference between an oxymoron and irony (understood as a device
that can serve to gather and link disparate elements of a discourse or various
discourses). An oxymoron can be defined as “[a] figure of speech which combines
incongruous and apparently contradictory words and meanings for a special effect”
(“Oxymoron” 627). Thus, in the case of an oxymoron the two elements that form it are
irreconcilable, whereas irony seems to work on a higher level and is precisely that
which may make two, or more, disparate elements, function together. In other words, it
seems that, since irony is much more than just a rhetorical device, when one looks at an
oxymoron from the perspective of irony, its elements may stop being incongruous and
their contradictions may turn out to be only apparent. That is, even though the
Gentleman of Shalott may seem an oxymoronic figure, we can look at him from an
ironic perspective and, thanks to this, see some coherence in his identity.
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The question of the way Bishop approaches the theme of reflection can be better
answered when we contrast her poem with Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” the
ballad to which Bishop (ironically) refers in her poem. Also, reading “The Gentleman of
Shalott” via Tennyson’s lyric will show the manner in which Bishop approached the
mainstream tradition, a way of dealing with it that is different from her approach to the
precursors that she demonstrated in “One Art.”
At first glance Bishop’s lyric seems not to have much in common with
Tennyson’s ballad (apart from the title). On closer reading, however, Bishop’s poem
may be read as a sort of ironic footnote to Tennyson’s lyric, one that explores questions
that may seem marginal or anecdotal in Tennyson’s poem. First of all, Bishop discards
the ballad form, retaining only some of its characteristic features. The approach is
different from what she would later do in “One Art” – there she would take from Poe
the characteristic rhyming words and the general topic. Also, she takes a wellestablished poetic form (though not from Poe) and tries to make it her own. Here, she
discards the form chosen by Tennyson, she also gets rid of the Tennysonian narration;
instead, she develops a sort of “what if” fantasy loosely based on some of the original
poem’s motifs. To see what she decides to discard, and what are the results of this
strategy of voluntary limitation, one should take a closer look at the ballad form and
then compare it with Bishop’s poem in order to see what Bishop decides not to adopt.
Cuddon writes:
Like ballade and ballet, the word derives from the late Latin and Italian ballare
‘to dance’. Fundamentally a ballad is a song that tells a story and originally was
a musical accompaniment to a dance. We can distinguish certain basic
characteristics common to large numbers of ballads: (a) the beginning is often
abrupt; (b) the language is simple; (c) the story is told through dialogue and
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action; (d) the theme is often tragic (though there are a number of comic
ballads); (e) there is often a refrain. To these features we may add: a ballad
usually deals with a single episode; the events leading to the crisis are related
swiftly; there is minimal detail of surroundings; there is a strong dramatic
element; there is considerable intensity and immediacy of narration; the narrator
is impersonal; stock, well-tried epithets are used in the oral tradition of kennings
and Homeric epithets; there is frequently incremental repetition; the single line
of action and the speed of the story preclude much attempt at delineation of
character; imagery is sparse and simple. (“Ballad” 71)
Indeed, one might observe Bishop’s general predilection to dance-like forms and
their poetic recycling: apart from the ballad (Bishop not only drew upon it in “The
Genleman of Shalott” but also used it in “The Burglar of Babylon”) she liked the
villanelle, the pantoum (she always wanted to write one but never did, EAP 261). She
also wrote repetitious, circular, trance-like poems, like “The Monument” or “Cirque
d’Hiver.” The latter progresses circularly, ending in an ironically understated “Well, we
have come this far” (CP 31), and the lightness and apparent naïvete of “Cirque d’Hiver”
suggests that there is a quality of a wind-up toy in a carefully-constructed, formallyconstrained poem.
Also, Bishop was fond of any kind of repetition of words, usually discouraged in
traditional grammar manuals. I do not want to argue that the repetition has always
something to do with dancing – this is just to say that, instead of organizing her syntax
according to traditional rules of grammar, she preferred to follow her own, private and
musical syntax, creating ironic effects. David Kalstone, drawing upon examples from
Bishop’s “Cape Breton” writes about “daring repetitions of words Bishop is fond of (the
kind of thing we are warned away from in elementary grammar), repetitions that for
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a moment tease us into some sense of plain identity between human speech and things:
‘the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones’; ‘light song-sparrow songs floating
upward’” (Kalstone 120).
In the case of “The Gentelman of Shalott,” even though the form of Bishop’s
poem does not bring to mind any associations with dancing, the Gentleman himself
performs dance-like movements: he walks and runs, clasping his hands, as if doing that
which the ballad form should do.
Let us now see how Bishop’s poem departs from the definition of the ballad
form quoted above. Bishop’s beginning is indeed abrupt (the readers may be puzzled by
the opening questions) and the language is simple but this is a sort of fauf-naïf
simplicity as the poem is in fact loaded with serious philosophical questions; Bishop,
however, manages to posit them in a way that makes the poem light. As for the telling
of the story “through dialogue and action:” there is no conventional story at all, since
there is not much progression in time; it is rather an account of the Gentleman’s
consciousness; action is scarce and instead of dialogue we get something that could be
called an interior dialogue as the speaker imagines himself to be split and doubled. If
taken in all seriousness, Bishop’s theme is tragic though it is treated in a comic manner.
Finally, as far as the refrain is concerned, Bishop decides not to use it; instead,
whenever there is danger of a tedious repetition, she throws in phrases like “etc.” or
“and so on,” giving the impression that going into any details would be superfluous.
The poem’s speaker is half-body and half-reflection (“He felt in modesty / his
person was / half-looking glass”) and he does not know which part is which: “Which
eye’s his eye?” This is also signalled in the phrase “which limb lies / next the mirror,” in
which, if we read only the first line, we get a pun on the word “lie” – one of the limbs
must lie, i.e. it pretends to be real, whereas it is a reflection, or the other way round – it
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is real, but wants to trick us into believing that it is a reflection. For comparison, let us
see how the problem of reflection is treated in “Lady of Shalott” as it seems that
Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott is much more plenary than Bishop’s Gentleman:
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
………………………………..
And moving thro' a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot:
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village-churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.
……………………………….
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights,
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For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
"I am half-sick of shadows," said
The Lady of Shalott.
(22)
Depending on the interpretation we may count as much as four (or even more)
appearances of the Lady: the real figure, her reflection in the mirror, her representation
in the web she is weaving (copying what she sees in the mirror) and, finally, the
reflection of the web with the representation of the pattern she is weaving. When we
take into account the fact that on each of the webs there must be an image of the Lady
of Shalott weaving the web with the image of the Lady of Shalott weaving the web, et
cetera (and the scenes must be in turn reflected in the mirror), the number of the
reflections – even if most of them must remain invisible or even not realised at all – will
be infinite. Of course, the reflections will prove so numerous only if the reader assumes
that the Lady of Shalott is seated in such a way that she may see her own reflection in
the mirror, which is not unambiguously stated in the text (the word “before” does not
have to mean exactly “in front of her in such a way that she might see herself
reflected”):
And moving thro' a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
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The essential difference between the Lady of Shalott and the Gentelman of Shalott lies
in that the former lives surrounded by multiplying reflections and longs to see the
tangible reality (her chamber bears resemblance to Plato’s Cave), whereas the latter
seems overpowered by the pressures of reality and thus engages in a fantasy that makes
him only half-real. This is why the Lady is “half-sick of shadows” whereas the
Gentleman says that “half is enough” (this is actually the only phrase he is reported in
the poem to have uttered).
What in Tennyson’s lyric is dramatised and narrated at great length (the
juxtaposition of reality and reflection) is in Bishop’s poem internalised and made
humbler. The internalisation of the action and the humility of Bishop’s narrative is
reflected in the form – Bishop resigns from narrating a straightforward story, offering
instead a convoluted report of an intellectual adventure full of “ifs” and “buts,” a story
of an ironic mind, a mind that “loves / that sense of constant re-adjustment.” She resigns
from refrains and Tennysonian alliterations and repetitions. The “so on” and “etc.” used
in Bishop’s poem may be interpreted as the poet’s counterparts of Tennysonian
narration: we know what happened and there is no need to narrate all the events. The
use of the devices mentioned above demonstrates the impossibility of telling everything.
Just like in “The Lady of Shalott” – we know the reflections may be there, but even if
they are there, some of them are too minuscule to be seen, and it would be too tedious –
and simply impossible – to represent them in the web the Lady is weaving and to
describe them in the poem. Similarly, Bishop, instead of naming all the body parts of
the Gentleman that are reflected in mirror, puts a “so on” or an “etc.” instead. Apart
from showing the difficulties connected with mimesis, this procedure also stresses the
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fragmentation of the Gentleman – his body is seen as a series of disjointed parts and will
not yield a coherent unity.
Drawing on the analyses of two of Bishop’s poems, along with some drafts, on
can describe the relation between irony and form in her work in the following way. On
the one hand, rigid forms serve Bishop to condense her language and enhance the irony
of her poems (as, for example, in the case of “One Art”). Form is never an obstacle but
rather an ally in Bishop’s ironic strategies. On the other hand, Bishop approaches
ironically the very forms she chooses, changing them at will (as has been demonstrated
above), as if flying in the face of formal constraints (and we assume that such a
deviation from the demands of the form may be interpreted as an instance of the
Bloomian clinamen, and thus an instance of irony).
Moreover, as has been shown in the contrastive analysis of Bishop and Poe,
Bishop’s irony is gentle – rather than emphasizing and enhancing binary oppositions, it
softens them, and infinitely nuances them, showing that there is much more at stake
than sharp contrasts. Most importantly, Bishop’s ironic approach to formal problems is
not destructive, but immensely productive. By making changes and adjustments in
traditional forms, she gives them a personal twist; she makes her home in what could
otherwise be a set of mechanically repeated patterns.
Chapter 3
Bishop’s Irony and the Context of the Work of Marianne Moore and Robert
Lowell.
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In the following chapter, I want to look from the vantage point of irony at
Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship to the work of Marianne Moore and that of Robert
Lowell, the former an important precursor and the latter, an inspiring contemporary.
The importance of Moore and Lowell for both Bishop’s biography and her poetry is
widely acknowledged. For instance, David Kalstone devotes his book-length study to
the analysis of Bishop’s work in the context of Moore and Lowell (Becoming a Poet:
Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell). Reading Bishop’s poems
in relation to the work of Moore and Lowell I will focus on two problems: first, how her
irony is different from the irony of the authors in question and to what uses it is put in
her work. Secondly, how and for what purposes does Elizabeth Bishop read the work of
her fellow poets ironically? I believe that looking at Elizabeth Bishop’s poems in the
context of other poets’ work will help me grasp the singularity and specificity of her
irony and the singularity of her poetics in general. Moreover, in discussing her
relationship with other poets I want to depart a little from Harold Bloom’s theory of
poetic influence and modify the notion of irony understood as an instance of the
Bloomian clinamen. In this respect, I want to follow Bonnie Costello who – discussing
the relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore – argues that the term
“nurture” describes what was happening between the two poets much more accurately
than the Bloomian term “struggle.”
Writing about the poetic and biographical influences of Moore on Bishop,
Bonnie Costello questions the usefulness of Bloomian notions of influence and proposes
instead categories she finds more essentially female and more suited to the complex
relationship between the two poets:
It is tempting to read their relationship within a mother/daughter paradigm.
Twenty-two years older than Bishop, unmarried and childless, Moore may have
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found in her young friend an object of maternal affection and concern… Still,
art and life, aesthetics and morality, are deeply linked for both poets. If the
nouns of family life (mother, daughter, sister, etc.) do not quite fit, the verbs
still do, not the oedipal verb “struggle” which dominates our Bloomian notion
of literary influence, but the centrally female verb “nurture.” Indeed, when the
young Bishop made Moore the present of a paper nautilus shell, Moore’s gift in
return was a poem about mother love and its relationship to writing. While the
poem most directly figures an artist’s creative gesture (perhaps complimenting
Bishop for her care and devotion as a writer), it might also stand for the relation
between mentor and protégée. (“Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop” 130-1)
Although it is true the Bloomian categories are not the most suitable tools for the
description of the relationship between Moore and Bishop, it is necessary to make the
picture Costello proposes more precise. Is it enough to question the mother/daughter
paradigm as a description for the relationship between the two poets and propose
instead the paradigm of mentor and protégée? In order to show the complexities present
in the friendship and literary relations of Moore and Bishop I will briefly discuss the
history of their acquaintance, focusing on literary conflicts and the strategies the
younger poet used to define her place vis-à-vis Moore. I will also look at several poems
– by both Moore and Bishop – that throw light on the changes in their relationship.
Elizabeth Bishop met Marianne Moore for the first time on March 16 1934, “on
the right-hand side bench outside the reading room of the New York Public Library”
(Millier 58). The meeting was arranged by Fannie Borden, the Vassar College librarian,
who – as Bishop had learned – was a childhood friend of Moore. Bishop said that “the
meeting changed her forever” (58). Thus began their friendship that lasted, with varying
degrees of intensity, until Moore’s death. In her memoir of Moore Bishop observes: “It
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seems to me that Marianne talked to me steadily for the next thirty-five years, but of
course that is nonsencial” (CPr 124). The relationship was not exclusively based on
their common interest in literature. In fact, Bishop waited four months before telling
Moore that she was considering a career as a woman of letters (Millier 59). From the
beginning Bishop sent Moore books (e.g. a biography of G. M. Hopkins; also, in her
first letter to Miss Moore she offered to lend her a book on tattooing), and all sorts of
invitations: soon after they met, Bishop invited Moore to the circus and the older poet
decided to go. Later, when Bishop was already living in Brazil, she repeatedly invited
Moore to visit her. Moore never came to Brazil, but the repeated invitation was a sign of
Bishop’s affection towards the older poet; there are no traces in Bishop’s letters that she
felt offended by Moore’s refusal to visit her. I am not going to focus here on the extraliterary side of their friendship but I wanted to pay attention to the invitations offered by
Bishop as they later on found their literary development in Bishop’s poem, dedicated to
Moore, “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (the poem will be discussed later in the
chapter).
As soon as she learned that Bishop wanted to become a poet, Moore provided
constant help and encouragement. As Kalstone observes, “almost from the start Moore
encouraged the young poet’s work, helped overcome her reticence about her verse”
(35). Marianne Moore not only encouraged Bishop to write, sent her poems to literary
magazines and recommended her to editors (of, for example, Life and Letters Today,
New Democracy, The New English Weekly, Poetry), but also offered to type Bishop’s
poems “for submission to magazines, an offer Bishop characterized as not only kind but
‘headlong’” (Kalstone 42).
Although Bishop did admire Moore’s poetry and their friendship had
a considerable influence on her literary work, one must stress the fact that Moore herself
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thought from the start that Bishop is a poet with a recognizable voice and if she spoke of
authors that might have been important for the younger poet, she would rather point to
the methaphysical poets: “One notices the deferences and vigilances in Miss Bishop’s
writing, and the debt to Donne and to Gerard Hopkins. We look at imitation askance;
but like the shell which the hermit-crab selects for itself, it has value – the avowed
humility, and the protection” (qtd. in Kalstone 41). Bishop herself, in her critical
moments, worried that her debt to Moore was too substantial. Kalstone in his turn
suggests that Moore’s influence was not something typical of young poets: ”Moore’s
influence was less a youthful passion to be outgrown – the case with most
apprenticeship – and more a steady slow infusion assimilated into the bloodstream”
(35).
An important turn in their friendship came in the summer of 1936 when Bishop
underwent a writerly crisis. In a way that was typical of her, she let Moore know about
her problems and doubts in “characteristically understated manner” (43). Bishop felt
that she had not achieved anything important in writing; she was convinced at that time
that her poems, as she explained in a letter to Moore, had two main faults: “one being
vague, another an extremely impolite, if true, display of your ‘influence’”(43). She was
considering giving up writing for good and was thinking about taking up medicine or
biochemistry (43). Having heard Bishop’s doubts concerning the value of her writing
and her plans of abandoning it, Moore replied in a tactful and delicate yet sure manner:
I feel you would not be able to give up writing, with the ability – for it that you
have [sic]; but it does disturb me that you should have the feeling that it might
be well to give it up. To have produced what you have – either verse or prose is
enviable, and you certainly could not suppose that such method as goes with
a precise and proportioning ear is contemporary or usual... I hope you will have
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reasons to be glad you allowed the Southern Review and Roger Roughton to
have something. (qtd. in Kalstone 43)
Marianne Moore, urging Bishop to send poems to magazines and to show new
work to her, managed to convince Bishop to continue writing. However, from that
moment on, for several years, “Moore’s interventions become vital” (43). Moore began
suggesting various changes: “And so began a period of four years in which Bishop’s
writing – prose as well as poetry – came under more detailed scrutiny from Moore than
it would ever again” (46).
Progressively, Moore’s remarks and suggestions started generating strong
tensions between the two poets. The general charge that Moore voiced against Bishop
was that of “interiorizing”: “tentativeness and interiorizing are your dangers as well as
your strength” (46). For example, in one of her letters Moore suggested that Bishop
should change a fragment of “Paris, 7 A. M.” In particular, the older poet found the
word “apartment” too “explicit” and rewrote the three initial lines of the poem. Here is
the version Moore received from Bishop (and the one that finally appeared in North &
South):
I make a trip to each clock in the apartment:
some hands point histrionically one way
and some point others, from ignorant faces.
(CP 26)
Moore’s version read as follows:
I go from clock to clock,
From room to room,
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Some hands point one way
Some another, from the ignorant faces.
(qtd. in Kalstone 46)
Bishop replied that to her the word “apartment” suggested “the structure of the houses...
and a ‘cut-off’ mode of existence.” The younger poet felt perhaps that “interiorizing”
was rather her strength than weakness and a trait that, as Kalstone observes, was
“deeply ingrained” in her (46) and decided not to introduce any of the changes
suggested by Moore.
Another controversy arose around Bishop’s sestina, “A Miracle for Breakfast.” I
want to look both at the words and phrases that Moore disliked and at the way Bishop
responded to her criticism (using some typically poetic devices in an ironic manner).
Here is a fragment of the sestina relevant to our discussion:
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
–I saw it with one eye close to the crumb –
and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.
(CP 18-19)
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Moore disliked the expression “gallons of coffee” (in her reply to the older poet
Bishop wrote about its “boisterousness”) and found the repeating words “crumb” and
“sun” too similar in sound, for, as Kalstone notices, Moore resisted “clashing sounds.”
Even though Bishop accepted some of Moore’s suggestions and got rid of the adjective
“bitterly” that was too close to “buttered” in the second stanza, she decided to keep most
of the elements Moore did not like. It is particularly interesting to look at the tone she
adopts in her letter to Moore. Informing the older poet that she would not follow the
majority of her suggestions, and in particular that she would not get rid of the off-rime
“crumb” and “sun,” Bishop, first of all, assumed a tone of delicate self-denigrating
irony: “You are of no comfort to me, at all, Miss Moore, the way you inevitably light on
just those things I knew I shouldn’t have let go.” Secondly, Bishop boldly used
alliteration (“I must be unusually insensitive to be able to bear being brought face to
face with my conscience over and over again”) (Kalstone 48) that clearly demonstrated
her preference for similarly sounding words and challenged Moore. Moreover, Bishop
justified her choices referring to – among other things – Philip Sidney’s double sestina
“Ye Goatherd Gods.” She argued that there are “two ways possible for a sestina – one is
to use unusual words as terminations, in which case they would have to be used
differently as often as possible – as you say, ‘change of scale.’ That would make a very
highly seasoned kind of poem. And the other way is to use as colorless words as
possible – like Sydney [sic], so that it becomes less of a trick and more of a natural
theme and variations. I guess I have tried to do both at once” (Kalstone 48-49).
Let us look at the way Bishop defended her choices against Moore’s charges.
First of all, she made a reference to tradition (Sidney’s sestina). And what could be the
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importance of weight of tradition for the young poet? In his essay about metaphysical
contexts in Bishop’s poetry Jacek Partyka quotes a letter in which Bishop dreamed
about a conversation with George Herbert. They talk about versification and conclude
that Marianne Moore is better than John Donne but not as good as Herbert himself.
Finally, Herbert says that he could be “useful” to Bishop. Partyka observes that the fact
that Bishop locates herself in the company of such distinguished poets as John Donne,
George Herbert and Marianne Moore is a typically modernist gesture, a gesture that
uses the tension between the heritage of the masters and the desire for avant-garde
understood as a necessary stage on the road to one’s own unique style (Partyka 52).
Indeed, and this is the other facet of Bishop’s strategy, in her justification of her choices
one finds both the necessity to refer to tradition (using, in Sidney’s fashion, “colorless”
words) and the strife to add something that is really her own (both the choice of the
“highly seasoned” expressions and the very idea of combining the plain words with the
unusual ones in her sestina). And once again, in the phrase “I guess I have tried to do
both at once” one can hear a note of self-denigration, self-effacement, as if Bishop was
saying that all the possible shortcomings of the poem are the result of her lack of
experience and of a typically juvenile urge to do everything at once. Finally, Bishop
seems to challenge Moore once more when she writes: “sometimes I think about certain
things that without particular fault they would be without the means of existence.” Even
though Bishop gained the opinion of a perfectionist (e.g. Robert Lowell in “For
Elizabeth Bishop 4” called her an “unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect” –
Schwartz, Estess 207), the same is true about Moore. Here, Bishop’s suggestion that
a thing should be somehow faulty could be read as her attempt to distance herself from
Moore’s aesthetics. Namely, the perfection Bishop opts for is a perfection on a human
scale (once again, as Lowell notices – Bishop deals with “the casual;” Moore is rather
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interested in the peculiar and idiosyncratic), one that could be oxymoronically called an
imperfect perfection. Costello argues that Moore, contrary to Bishop, “approaches
vision from the point of view of values” (132) and that her “surfaces and styles of
behaviour are the outward shows of inner attitudes. Manners express the rock
foundation of an ethical system, and aesthetics are rooted to morality. Moore’s
evaluative turn of mind pervades every aspect of experience, from social etiquette to
modern warfare” (“Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop” 133). Moore’s perfect
surfaces are there to signal the perfection of what is hidden underneath. Costello goes
on to say that “the poetic gestures which accompany this preoccupation [i.e. Moore’s
urge to evaluate] are those of praise, condemnation, selection, purification,
transformation. She insists on these attitudes at a cost of course, the cost of
comprehensive vision” (133). Bishop’s vision, in contrast, is not informed by the need
to judge. Costello puts it the following way: “If Moore is the poet of ethics and
aesthetics, Bishop is the poet of epistemology and ontology, asking what we know and
who we are rather than what we should do and what we should admire or condemn”
(133). The critic adds that in fact Bishop looks for the true, and the truth, even an ugly
one, is more important than any kind of flawlessness: “The partnership between Moore
and Bishop is in part that between the gentlewoman and the seeker. I mean no value
judgement here, for the gentlewoman looks after the good and the beautiful (or the good
as the beautiful) while the seeker looks after the true” (132).
To the disagreements discussed above concerning poetics one should add the
personal problems and tensions resulting from ambition. On the one hand, Bishop, who
was trying to publish her first book at the time and was rejected by several publishers,
was “feeling abjectly dependent” on Moore (Kalstone 78). On the other hand, in 1940
Bishop published “Cirque d’Hiver” in The New Yorker and thus began her life-long
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collaboration with the magazine. Soon after the publication of Bishop’s poem, Marianne
Moore sent her own poems to the magazine and her work was rejected. Although the
older poet did not let Bishop feel how disappointed she was, Bishop felt “angry and
embarrassed,” and the issue did threaten their already strained friendship (in the early
1950s Moore’s work did finally appear in the magazine).
But the episode that destabilized their relationship and that was, as Kalstone puts
it, “part farce and part release of the energy that had been building up in her [Bishop’s]
exchanges with Moore” (Kalstone 79) took place in October 1940. Encouraged by
Moore who helped her overcome the writerly crisis, Bishop sent the older poet her
poem “Roosters,” a piece she considered her most ambitious one up-to-date, hoping to
win Moore’s approval. The result was quite contrary to Bishop’s expectations. The day
after Moore received the poem in mail, she telephoned Bishop to say that she, together
with her mother, revised the poem. Soon, the revised version, along with a letter from
Moore, reached Bishop. Moore’s letter, as Kalstone observes, mixed “criticism with
parental archness” (79). Even though it began with praise, one could discern in it a note
of condescension and towards the end of the letter the tone changed to unambiguously
poignant and critical:
Dearest Elizabeth, the Pope-ian sagacity, as I was just now saying to you, and
your justice to “Peeter,” and such a crucially enviable consummation as
From strained throats
A senseless order floats,
are like a din of churchbells in my ears, I am so excited (A little girl whom
Mother had been teaching about the apostles said in one of her answers to a
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little written examination, “And don’t forget Peeter.”) “Flares begin to catch” is
so precise and the rhyme with “patch,” so perfect. I question as a desirable
discord “v” and “s,” and therefore suggest omitting “the many wives”:
The crown of red
Set on your little head
is a notable condensation of overtones and the sound is ideal. (Kalstone 79)
However, as the attached revised version of the poem showed, there was much
more in it that Moore and her mother did not like: they not only ignored Bishop’s form
(the three-line stanzas), but also changed the poem’s title to “The Cock,” being
apparently ignorant of its explicit erotic meaning. Even before sending the letter, when
she telephoned Bishop, Moore expressed her dislike of phrases like “water-closet” and
“dropping-plastered,” labelling them as “sordidities” (Kalstone 80-81). As Kalstone
observes, even the aspects of the poem that Moore did like proved to be the ones Bishop
was least satisfied with. Their discussions concerning “Roosters” turned out to be
a series of misunderstandings. From Moore’s version of the poem one can gather that
the “sordidities” were not the major problem: generally Moore tried to get rid of
expressions that sounded violent, brutal or crude (like “cruel feet,” “stupid eyes,” “tornout, bloodied feathers”). Moore also wanted to cancel all the possibly erotic
connotations, as well as phrases that could be interpreted as criticising the patriarchal
order (“A rooster gloats / over our beds”), and generally make the whole smoother, less
vulgar and more refined aesthetically (e.g. she went as far as to change the tin rooster on
the top of the church to a gold one).
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Bishop knew how to react against Moore’s charges of “vulgarity” in the poem:
she wanted to keep the explicit words and phrases because they “emphasize[d] the
essential baseness of militarism” (Kalstone 81). She also wanted to keep the images that
stressed poverty and misery:
In the 1st part I was thinking of Key West, and also of those aerial views of
dismal little towns in Finland & Norway, when the Germans took over, and
their atmosphere of poverty. That’s why, although I see what you mean, I want
to keep “tin rooster” instead of “gold,” and not to use “fastidious beds.” And for
the same reason I want to keep as the title the rather contemptuous word
“Roosters” rather than the more classical “Cock”; and I want to repeat the “gunmetal” (I also had in mind the violet roosters Picasso did in connection with his
“Guernica” picture). (qtd. in Kalstone 81)
Although the controversy around “Roosters” threatened their friendship, it also helped
liberate Bishop and made her a more self-dependent poet. In “Efforts of Affection: A
Memoir of Marianne Moore,” written around 1969, Bishop remembers Moore’s
interventions in a rather light-hearted manner: “I published a very bad short story a year
or two after I first knew the Moores and I was reprimanded by both of them for having
used the word ‘spit.’ (Two or three years later I was scolded for having used “water
closet” in a poem, but by then I had turned obstinate)” (CPr 130). She also tries to
lessen the importance of Moore’s suggestions and interventions: “I obstinately held on
to my stanzas and rhymes, but I did make use of a few of the proffered new words. I am
sorry to say I can’t now remember which they were, and won’t know unless this
fascinating communication should turn up again” (CPr 145-6).
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During the years that followed, both poets tried to define the nature of their
relationship. In 1941 Marianne Moore published “The Paper Nautilus” (in What Are
Years), her gift to Bishop, a poem that is both a metaphor of the mentor/protégée
paradigm and a metaphor of an artist’s relation to her work (“the watchful / maker of it
guards it / day and night; she scarcely // eats until the eggs are hatched”):
For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters’ comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.
Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smoothedged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely
eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devilfish, her glass ramshorn-cradled freight
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is hid but is not crushed.
As Hercules, bitten
by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
the intensively
watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed, –
leaving its wasp-nest flaws
of white on white, and close-
laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
is the only fortress
strong enough to trust to.
(122-3)
Although the poem borrows some characteristic phrases from Bishop’s “Jeronimo’s
House” (the “wasps’ nest” and the adjective “perishable”), the tone is completely
different than Bishop’s. The slightly over-aestheticised first stanza, with its image of the
artists “entrapped by / teatime fame,” is very much in the spirit of Ezra Pound’s “E. P.
Ode Pour l’Election de Son Sepulchre”: “The tea-rose tea-gown etc. / Supplants
mousseline of Cos, The pianola “replaces” / Sappho’s barbitos” (186).
This poem is not only a present for Bishop, but also an expression of Moore’s
realisation that the two poets are following two different paths: “the intensively /
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watched eggs coming from / the shell free it [the nautilus – A.Z.] when they are freed.”
Bonnie Costello observes: “[t]hat mutual freedom meant an acknowledgement of and
respect for difference (132).” The critic also argues that the love Moore talks about is
neither possessive nor narcissistic (“love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust
to”). The image of the egg “[b]uried eight-fold in her eight / arms,” however, suggests
not only care and safety, but also a sort of overwhelming and nearly suffocating
presence. The contrast between “fortress” (of love) and “perishable / souvenir of hope,”
the almost oxymoronic juxtaposition is suggestive of a struggle to make the love not
possessive (in the end, the egg “is hid but is not crushed”).
In her second collection of poetry, A Cold Spring (1955), Elizabeth Bishop
published a poem that is partly tribute and partly – a gently ironic response to Moore’s
influence on Bishop. “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” portraits Moore with
undeniable warmth, but, at the same time, it contains delicate hints of irony, or even
spite, discernible throughout the poem. From the very beginning the reader cannot be
sure whether Marianne Moore is a good fairy or an evil witch: “In a cloud of fiery pale
chemicals, / please come flying” (CP 82). In this fragment Moore’s figure seems rather
ominous. Later stanzas also make us think of a mock image of evil; the hint that we are
in fact reading a description of a person that is only half-real (and only half-good) is
strengthened by the use of a meter and internal rhymes that bring to mind nursery
rhymes: “Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe / trailing a sapphire highlight, /
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots” (CP 82).
Although as a whole the poem has a light tone, a tone of friendly invitation
(even if it has something of an amical reprimand in it), Bishop seems to criticize Moore
on at least two points. Firstly, referring to Moore’s “slight censorious frown” Bishop
disapproves of and mocks Moore’s somewhat patronizing attitude towards the writing
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of other poets. This fragment can be read along personal lines – as Bishop’s
reminiscence of the arguments she had with Moore around Bishop’s early poems, and
most notably – “The Roosters.” The second charge is connected with Moore’s tendency
to moralize. Bishop writes that “Manhattan / is all awash with morals this fine morning”
as if the mere presence of Moore had the power to change the landscape into an
Audenesque paysage moralisé and to invest it with moral meaning. Moore is supposed
to “come flying” as if above everything: “above the accidents, above the malignant
movies, / the taxicabs and injustices at large.” This bird’s eye view suggests a lack of
engagement with ordinary experience. Also, the slightly humorous juxtaposition of
“taxicabs” and “injustices at large,” the two phrases having been placed by Bishop next
to each other and connected by the conjunction “and” as if they both belonged to the
same category, is a humorously critical gesture towards Moore. By placing abstract
terms (injustices at large) next to concrete objects (taxicabs) in a poem that refers to
Moore’s work Bishop makes fun of the older poet’s tendency to give priority to moral
judgement questions over faithful representation of reality. Moreover, Moore’s eye, an
eye that privileges principles over facts, transforms everything she describes into
a moral landscape, a parable or a fable (as in La Fontaine’s fables that Moore
translated). One can easily agree with Costello that Moore is the poet of ethics and
aesthetics, whereas Bishop is more concerned with epistemology and ontology
(“Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop” 133).
Mocking the poetic strategies of Moore, Bishop shows New York miraculously
transformed, enchanted by the presence of the poet (a fairy-poet or a witch-poet), or
even by the mere expectation of the poet’s visit: “[w]histles, pennants and smoke are
blowing. The ships / are signaling cordially like birds all over the harbor.” Moore is
depicted not only as a sorcerer (for her “the grim museums will behave / like courteous
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male bower-birds”) but also as a lion tamer (“[f]or whom the agreeable lions lie in wait /
on the steps of the Public Library”) or, as the next line reveals, a fairy that has the power
to change the stone lions into live animals and lead them into the library (the lions are
“eager to rise and follow through the doors / up into the reading rooms”). The New
York of “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” is described as if no other real city
existed, as if everything in it was dependent on Moore’s presence. Comparing Moore’s
“The Steeple Jack” with Bishop’s “Little Exercise” Bonnie Costello writes: “Moore’s
poem depicts elements dangerous elsewhere but tamed and aestheticized in this holiday
world. She describes, to use William Empson’s concept of pastoral, a partial world as if
it were a whole world” (“Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop” 145). That is precisely
the quality of her poems that Bishop both admires and laughs at in “Invitation to Miss
Marianne Moore,” the difference being that in Bishop’s poem we deal with a city
pastoral. Moore’s tendency to aestheticize her images and Bishop’s tendency to focus
on truth – be it an ugly one – will be better seen in further contrastive analyses of the
two poets’ work.
Even though in “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” Bishop neatly grasps some
crucial differences between her own poetics and that of Moore, the poem focuses on the
biographies of both poets, on the years of their friendship and conflicts. To better
describe the differences between the two authors, and especially their different
approaches to irony, and the different uses to which they put this device, I propose
a comparative reading of Moore’s “The Steeple Jack” and Bishop’s “At the
Fishhouses”.
Both poems are set in fishing towns. However, the tone and the approach to time
in both lyrics are very different. Here is how Moore describes a fragment of the fishing
town landscape: “You can see a twenty-five- / -pound lobster and fish-nets arranged / to
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dry” (13). This matter-of-fact report is followed by a passage that places it, although not
without some ironic distance – in the context of theology and ethics: “The // whirlwind
fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt / marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and
the / star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so / much confusion” (Moore 13).
Although equating the stars in the sky with the star on the steeple is clearly a mocking
gesture satirizing perhaps the importance a small-town community may attach to such
events (unimportant in the broad scheme of things) as gilding the star on the church
steeple, designating the events described by the phrase “much confusion” goes beyond
description; it is a gesture of judgement. (Bishop, describing a harbor scene in “The
Bight” calls what she sees “untidy activity,” showing much more acceptance of the
ordinary than Moore does, CP 61). Moore does not explicitly condemn what she sees
but she writes that watching the scene is a “privilege.” Thus, she opts for a word that
refers to social relationships, rather than for one that would express personal and
emotional reaction to the events (like, for example, “pleasure”).
In contrast, Bishop describes the fishhouses with a mixture of horror,
excitement, playfulness and down-to-earth precision, refraining from judgement:
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
(CP 64)
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Bishop is more personal, although not ostentatiously so – even the too
emphatically impersonal pronoun “one” in “[t]he air smells so strong of codfish / it
makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water” cannot camouflage the fact that the
observations are implicated in personal reactions and that the watering of the eyes may
be caused by something else than the air. One can argue that it is the personal look that
makes it possible for Bishop to call the herring scales “beautiful,” even though the
scales and the described surroundings are rather repulsive (dead fish with flies on them):
“The big fish tubs are completely lined / with layers of beautiful herring scales / and the
wheelbarrows are similarly plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail, / with small
iridescent flies crawling on them.” In contrast, Moore’s speaker, even though she
mentions “eight stranded whales,” does not give any possibly revolting details and only
compares the waves to “scales on a fish” (13), probably a live one.
In their descriptions both poets try to be as precise as possible; the effects,
however, are very different. As David Kalstone observes “Bishop once said of herself
that having no family to rebel against had made her passive. In a curious way, her
identification with Moore helped liberate her; she adopted Moore’s methods but learned
to use them in different ways (11).” What are Moore’s methods and what are the
different uses Bishop puts them to? In trying to answer these questions I would like to
concentrate on the way Moore describes the scenery of the fishing town and contrast it
with the way Bishop does it. Then I will try to draw some general conclusions
concerning the differences in their use of irony.
As water can be viewed as the epitome of constant flux and thus, the epitome of
irony, let us start with a comparison of the ways the two poets describe this element.
This is how the sea is described in Moore’s “The Steeple-Jack”: “a sea the purple of the
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peacock’s neck is / paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed / the pine green of the
Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea / grey” (13). The description is extremely precise, and
slightly extravagant. What is interesting here is that in Moore’s description art precedes
nature – the changes in the colour of the sea are compared to the way Dürer changed
natural colours when he was painting a picture. In Moore’s poem reality mimics art;
aesthetics precedes reality as, in her poetry, her moral import precedes or even – in her
less successful pieces – overwhelms the poem.
In contrast, Bishop in “At the Fishhouses” calls water “[c]old dark deep and
absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal” (CP 65) – her choice of adjectives
does not point to aesthetics but rather to psychological and existential depths. Also,
paradoxically, describing the ever changing element, Bishop uses the same list of
adjectives twice in the poem (“[c]old dark deep and absolutely clear, / the clear gray icy
water,” CP 65). The repetition only stresses the fact that it is impossible to describe
water precisely, to pin it down. The lack of comas separating the adjectives points to the
fluid and elusive nature of water.
Whereas Bishop emphasizes the constant change and flow, Moore’s “The
Steeple-Jack” – even though it describes a precise activity, the moment of gilding the
steeple – reads like a description of a painting (the references to Dürer deliberately
intensify such impression). Moore’s descriptions are in fact pretexts for speculation on
art, politics and society – the town could be a “fit haven for / waifs, children, animals,
prisoners, / and presidents who have repaid / sin-driven // senators by not thinking about
them” (14) or a place where Dürer might have wanted to stay. In comparison, Bishop’s
poem ends with a reflection on the nature of our knowledge (the description of water,
carefully built and expanded upon throughout the poem serves as the metaphor of
knowledge), “flowing and flown” (CP 66), constantly changing and elusive. Bishop’s
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ironies serve to probe the nature of knowledge and history. Good examples are: “The
Map,” where she explores the paradoxes of representation and their connections to
history and geography; “The Monument,” where she attempts several times in the
course of the poem to capture the nature of an enigmatic monument8, apparently linked
to an unknown political design; “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” where Bishop uses irony to
unmask the historical complexities that both the Conquistadors and contemporary
tourists try to overlook; and many others. Moore’s ironies judge and try to change the
world, through aestheticizing it. Bishop’s ironies are supposed to help the subject
understand herself and the world, to come to terms with her predicament, even if this
understanding is barely possible.
In the ending of “The Steeple-Jack” Moore performs a completely different
gesture than the one from Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” Everything is brought to
a standstill, and an ironic statement is pronounced: “[I]t scarcely could be dangerous to
be living / in a town like this” (14). Here, one can see a classic example of irony, i.e.
saying the opposite of what one thinks. In other words, we have no reason to believe
that life in such a town is safer than life elsewhere. But if this is true, if Moore is
actually saying that living in a town like this is equally dangerous and uncanny as life
elsewhere, then the important question is: who is the addressee of her ironies? Whereas
in Bishop’s poetry irony is supposed to help the subject, Moore uses irony to change the
outside world, or at least to pass her judgement.
To capture more precisely the differences in the way Bishop and Moore apply
irony, let us look at yet another pair of poems – Moore’s “The Frigate Pelican” and
8
The need to constantly begin anew is a typical feature of irony. Anthony Whiting observes that
according to Schlegel irony “repetitively begins. As the ironist repeats the process of self-creation and
self-destruction, older conceptions of self and world are destroyed and new ones are continuously
created” (29).
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Bishop’s “The Sandpiper.” “The Frigate Pelican” first appeared in 1935 in T. S. Eliot’s
The Criterion, and then, in a shortened and revised version, in Moore’s Collected
Poems in 1963. Here, I will refer to the later version. Bishop’s “The Sandpiper” comes
from her third collection of poetry, Questions of Travel, published in 1965.
Both lyrics feature marine birds that can be interpreted as allegories of an artist.
Here, one can think of Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros;” the French poem, however, despite
the irony that can be discerned in the depiction of the poet as someone laughing at the
tempest, but unable to find his place in the mundane reality, presents in the end a rather
conventional vision of the artist as an individual who can only be truly himself in his
art.
In the poems of Moore and Bishop the picture is more nuanced and complicated.
This time, Bishop too (like Moore in “The Steeple Jack”) chooses art as her point of
reference in describing nature. In fact, however, writing about nature Bishop says
something important about art at the same time. The sandpiper’s state of “controlled
panic” makes her call the bird “a student of Blake” (CP 131). Thus, Bishop provides us
with a tentative definition of the act of poetry writing: writing poetry is controlling
panic and poetry is panic controlled. The image of the bird watching “the spaces of
sand” between his toes in the third stanza and the careful description and enumeration of
the grain types given in the two last lines of the poem continue and expand the
references to William Blake: “The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, /
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst” (CP 131). The allusions point to William
Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven
in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”
(431). The fact that Blake uses indefinite articles (a World, a Heaven) makes Blake’s
program rather modest (one can only see one of many possible worlds) and places the
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artistic vision in the context of a potential infinity of worlds possible to see. Bishop is
even more modest. She constantly changes focus, starting from an observation of the
ocean but dismissing it lightly as if it was too vast a subject for a sandpiper (“[t]he
roaring alongside he takes for granted,” CP 131), then just mentions the beach (it
“hisses like fat,” CP 131), and finally concentrates on the grains of sand. The change of
focus is Blakean; one can also say that this constant change and readjustment is the
essence of romantic irony, a recording of a never-resting mind at work.
The fact that the sandpiper finally focuses on what he has literally beneath his
feet, constitutes an important difference between Bishop, on one hand, and Blake and
Moore, on the other. The sandpiper-artist does not look for the material of his art far
away, but makes do with whatever he has at his disposal. The approach to art is similar,
for instance, to what Bishop describes in her autobiographical short story “In the
Village” – her aunt makes a quilt from bits and pieces of clothes that belonged to family
members. Instead of looking for a sophisticated or exotic material for her art, she resorts
to whatever she can find in her immediate surroundings (CPr 251-274).
The change of focus and of scale brings to mind associations with Emily
Dickinson’s “A bird came down the walk” (328). Dickinson starts with observing the
bird’s habits (“And then he drank a Dew / From a convenient Grass,” 328) as if he was
a gentleman who sometimes abandons his role and behaves in an uncivil or shocking
way (“He bit an Angleworm in halves / And ate the fellow, raw,” 328). Towards the end
of the poem the scale changes and the lyric opens to infinity: “And he unrolled his
feathers / And rowed him softer home - // Than Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a
seam – Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap, plashless as they swim” (328). In
Bishop’s “The Sandpiper” we move in the opposite direction – from the vast to the
minute.
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Marianne Moore, in “The Frigate Pelican,” describes the bird as if he was
a gentleman as well (“Be gay / civilly,” 32) but also, in the first place, an artist:
“a marvel of grace” (31), “the unconfiding frigate-bird hides / in the height and in the
majestic / display of his art” (32). Even though Moore describes his hunting habits with
a tinge of irony or even sarcasm (after all, the bird is a thief – instead of hunting he
prefers to steal the fish other birds catch), she implies that we should forgive him
because he is a genuine artist. Moore writes that he “should be seen / fishing, although
oftener / he appears to prefer // to take, on the wing, from industrious crude-winged
species / the fish they have caught, and is seldom successless“ (31). Robin G. Schulze,
writing about the connections between the poetry of Moore and that of Wallace Stevens,
observes that Moore’s frigate pelican is a manifestation of creative power, and the fact
that the bird would not be able to tell Hänsel from Gretel means that he is above the
social conventions that limit the artist (in Grimm’s tale birds ate the crumbs that Gretel
threw behind her and thus made it impossible for Hänsel and Gretel to find their way
back home). Schulze argues:
“This is not the stalwart swan that can ferry the / woodcutter’s two children
home; no,” Moore insists. While the frigate soars in original creative splendor,
less limber minds content themselves with the stale conventions of Grimm’s
fairy tales – an institutionalized cultural romanticism borrowed from Europe
that domesticates nature, sapping its vitality in a set of solidified tropes. The
mind co-opted by such ideas loses all power and becomes a ferryboat rather
than a frigate, a mind at the service of the thoughts of others that merely
transports old ideas, never getting off the ground on its own. (93)
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Moore’s frigate pelican differs from Bishop’s sandpiper in at least three respects.
First of all, he knows very well what he wants, whereas Bishop’s bird is obsessively
looking for “something, something, something” (CP 131), not knowing beforehand
what it may be. Secondly, the frigate pelican is not satisfied with whatever the sea can
offer him, but resorts to violence to get what he wants. Finally, the frigate-bird’s
universe is clearly and hierarchically structured: catching other birds’ prey is his art, but
after a day filled with marvelous artistic feats, “this most romantic of birds” (32) “flies /
to a more mundane place, the mangrove / swamp to sleep” (32). Bishop’s sandpiper is
much more confused and the enumeration at the end of the poem suggests that in his
universe, like in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” everything is
“only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’” (CP 58).
Analysing Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” and Marianne Moore’s “The
Steeple-Jack,” I started by comparing the ways the two poets describe water. From the
observation of their different approaches towards this ever changing element I tried to
draw some conclusions concerning their approach to irony. In contrasting Bishop’s
poetics with that of Robert Lowell, I will proceed in a similar way: trying to pinpoint
the essential differences in Lowell’s and Bishop’s uses of irony, I will once more start
my analyses with a comparison of two poems where water is an important element of
imagery – Lowell’s “Water” and Bishop’s “The Bight.” The analyses of the ways the
two poets approach water will only be a starting point as I will concentrate on all the
elements that can help grasp the differences in the ways Bishop and Lowell use irony.
Following Bishop’s references to Baudelaire present in “The Bight,” I will demonstrate
her affinity with the French poet, especially in their understanding of irony, and then I
will contrast Bishop’s and Baudelaire’s use of irony with the way Lowell uses this
device in “Water.” The comparison of Bishop’s and Lowell’s ironic strategies will
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conclude with a reading of two poems that – rather than examining nature – focus on the
writers’ immediate surroundings – the writer’s room filled with bookcases in Lowell’s
“Myopia: a Night” and the writer’s desk in Bishop’s “12 O’Clock News.”
Although I want to avoid going into biographical details (since they were
thoroughly covered in, for instance, Brett C. Millier’s Elizabeth Bishop. Life and the
Memory of It and David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne
Moore and Robert Lowell), it is worth noting first that Lowell’s “Water” is
a reminiscence of a visit in Stonington in July 1948.9 At the time, Lowell was about to
split up with Carley Dawson and Bishop came there with Tom Wanning, a friend and,
as Millier suggests, a lover. Amidst substantial emotional and amorous turmoil, Lowell
considered proposing marriage to Bishop but he revealed his intention to her only much
later, in a letter, in which he tried to account for his amorous advances towards Bishop
that took place during Bishop’s and Lota de Macedo Soares’ visit in Castine, in 1957
(Millier 202-205). On August 15, 1957 Lowell wrote Bishop: “But asking you is the
might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been
had. It was that way for these nine years or so that intervened. It was deeply buried, and
this spring and summer (really before your arrival) it boiled to the surface” (WIA 226).
Although Lowell’s poem is entitled “Water,” the poet does not devote much
space to the description of the eponymous element. It seems that Lowell is using water
instrumentally, as a metaphor for the instability of human life. Of course, since such
meaning of water is conventional enough, Lowell adds a personal dimension. He is
mainly interested in what water can do to the speaker and to the addressee of the lyric.
From the very beginning, water is a source of danger: “the sea lapped / the raw
little match-stick / mazes of a weir, / where the fish for bait were trapped” (99). The
9
In the 1973 volume History, Lowell published four sonnets for Elizabeth Bishop, the first of which is
a fourteen-line compression of “Water.”
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only epithets directly referring to water appear at the end of the poem: “In the end, / the
water was too cold for us” (100). The last two lines of the poem with the statement
about the excessively cold water sound rather like a charge against the world that
proved less welcoming, sympathetic and becoming than the speaker had expected. The
emphasized words in the ending of the poem are: “water,” “cold” and “us” (100). This
is not a poem about water but rather – about a disillusionment, about blasted hopes. The
fact that it ends with the pronoun “us,” as the final, heavily stressed word, makes the
ending of the poem almost confessional and adds to it a tinge of self-pity.
Despite the poem’s title, the central image is not water alone, but the pair
water/rock. It is the tensions and struggles between the two that propel the poem:
Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time,
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,
but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.
(99)
Lowell is interested in the way water and rock interact. Apparently, water is only
changing the colour of the stone: from iris to “rotting and turning purpler” (“the color
of iris” may refer both to the flower and to the part of the eye). The description,
however, is emotionally charged. If the rock is turning “purpler,” it must have been
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purple from the start, and the colour may bring to mind blood, especially in the context
of “rotting.” Blood and rot (a rotting flower or even a rotting body part) send us into
morbid regions and make us reconsider the phrase “[we] sat on a slab of rock.” “Slab” is
not only “a thick, flat piece of a solid substance, such as stone, wood, metal, food, etc.,
which is usually square or rectangular” (“Slab” 1348), but also, though especially in
British English, an operation table or a table in a morgue (“Slab,” The Free Dictionary).
If we read it this way, we can see a classic example of irony, similar to the one quoted
by de Man “The Concept of Irony,” in his discussion of Friedrich Schlegel’s roman à
clef “Lucinde” (1997, 167-169). Apparently, the author is describing one thing, but in
fact he is constantly referring to something else altogether. While apparently describing
the colour of the stones, when dry or wet, Lowell is in fact talking about death all the
time. It seems, however, that what happens in the two stanzas quoted above, does not
entirely support de Man’s observations on irony. De Man claims that irony cannot be
controlled, yet in the two stanzas of Lowell’s poem the poet seems perfectly in control
of his lyric. The stanzas begin with a question: “Remember?” What follows is thus a
description of the rock and the water not as they really were but as they are when
reshaped by memory. And death, made present through irony, is there to communicate
to us something about the mechanics of memory, and, more precisely, about the
working of memory that wants to poeticize, glorify and ameliorate the past. Thus, a
mythopoeic memory is in fact the domain of death. Eventually, in the second stanza (of
the two stanzas quoted), Lowell claims to describe the rock as it really was: we witness
a transition from “[f]rom this distance in time, / it seems” to “but it was only.” After he
has disclosed the distortions of a certain type of memory, he juxtaposes it with what the
situation was really like.
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A tendency to gild the past is a trait for which Bishop reproached Lowell many
years later. This is how, in a letter to Bishop, written on December 18 1974, Lowell
described their first encounter: “I see us still when we first met, both at Randall’s and
then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired, shy but full
of des. and anecdote as now” (WIA 776). Bishop responded to Lowell’s letter,
amending the distortions the past had been subjected to in the poet’s memory (a letter
from January 16, 1975):
However, Cal dear, maybe your memory is failing! – Never, never was I “tall” –
as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft 4 and ¼ inches – now shrunk
to 5 ft 4 inches – The only time I’ve ever felt tall was in Brazil. And I never had
“long brown hair” either! – It started turning gray when I was 23 or 24 – and
probably was already somewhat grizzled when I first met you. I tried putting it
up for a very brief period, because I like long hair – but it never got even to my
shoulders and is always so intractable that I gave that up within a month or so. I
think you must be seeing someone else! (WIA 778)
As if aware of this tendency of his, in the next stanza of “Water” Lowell tries to
refrain from mythologizing and idealising the past. However, the words he uses in the
description are even more emotionally charged than those in the previous stanza: “it [the
rock] was only / the usual gray rock / turning the usual green.” We expected so much,
Lowell seems to be saying, but everything turned out to be “only,” as ever, very
ordinary: the dry rock was “the usual grey,” the wet rock turned “the usual green,” and
the very process of colour change was most usual as well. It seems that in this stanza,
irony works to the disadvantage of the poem. We do not get far beyond some platitudes
– life is always a disappointment, our hopes are always frustrated by the harsh reality:
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The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.
………………………
We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.
(99-100)
Their souls wanted to get back to the rocks but in order to do it, they would have to
swim through the excessively cold water and, as their souls are not gulls and cannot fly,
getting back to the rocks proved unfeasible.
The irony of the fragment resides in the fact that, metaphorically speaking, what
is cold and ever-changing proved to them more overwhelming than that which is
supposed to be strong, stable and lasting (the rock). In other words, pure flux prevented
them from finding a stable footing. What was to be strong and stable kept losing “flake
after flake,” and what is an epitome of sheer flux and constant change proved
unambiguously “cold.” Lowell uses situational irony (the world inspired some hopes in
the speaker that were later blasted) to show the clash between the speaker’s expectations
and the actual outcome. The simple reversal of the symbolism of the binary opposition
of water (standing for change) and stone (standing for stability) produces a flat and
predictable effect. In fact, this is where Lowell loses control of his irony: first, he is
apparently describing the stones whereas in fact he is constantly evoking death showing
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that a mythopoeic memory is death at its purest. But then, when he tries to curb his
mythologizing predilections, and talk about reality as it in fact was, he falls prey to
irony. Trying once more to describe the stones and the water as they really were, he is
simultaneously talking, not about death this time, but about life’s discontents. Giving
vent to self-pity makes Lowell lose control of his irony. And the irony, instead of
making the poem more nuanced and multidimensional, pushes it in the regions of
biography, making it too explicit and sentimental.
For contrast, let us look at the ways in which Bishop uses water in her poem
“The Bight.” The first thing that strikes the reader is the fact that, similarly to Lowell,
Bishop writes about water as if it was something else: “At low tide like this how sheer
the water is” (CP 60). The poem begins in medias res. We do not know how low the
tide is and the phrase “like this” refers to something that only the speaker can see. Such
an opening suggests that the reader will not get an easy introduction into the subject,
there will be no well-tailored answers. And the adjective “sheer” that one would not
normally use to describe water, confirms these suggestions: “sheer” is an adjective that
would more readily fit the description of a solid body. And soon it turns out that water
in the harbour does not behave like any liquid should: “the water in the bight doesn’t
wet anything” (CP 60). One cannot say whether it is because the water level is so low or
because the water does not behave as water usually does. We might suspect that
Bishop’s water behaves like a solid substance, but the poet instantly undermines these
expectations by comparing water to gas: the water is “the color of the gas flame turned
as low as possible” (CP 60). Not only is the colour of water similar to the colour of
a gas flame but also the water smells like gas: “[o]ne can smell it turning to gas” (CP
60). And, several lines further, the water not only smells like gas, but actually becomes
gas, that, quite unexpectedly, behaves like solid substance: “The birds are outsize.
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Pelicans crash / into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard, / it seems to me, like pickaxes,
/ rarely coming up with anything to show for it, / and going off with humorous
elbowings” (CP 60). Pelicans are like miners, and water is like solid rock. Water, this
“peculiar gas,” changes into a solid body in the process of deposition (also called
resublimation), or at least this is what it looks like to the viewer.
Bishop’s reference to water, gas and Baudelaire is not accidental and out of
place. Marshall Berman, writing about Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern
Life,” observes:
First, the wide range of Baudelaire’s sympathy and generosity, so different from
the standard image of an avant-garde snob who exudes nothing but scorn for
ordinary people and their travails… Finally, it is crucial to note Baudelaire’s use
of fluidity (“floating existences”) and gaseousness (“envelops and soaks us like
an atmosphere”) as symbols for the distinctive quality of modern life. Fluidity
and vaporousness will become primary qualities in the self-consciously
modernist painting, architecture and design, music and literature, that will
emerge at the end of the nineteenth century. (144)
Although Bishop’s poem is not set in the city, it can be read as a commentary on
Baudelaire. Bishop’s “The Bight” has its source in Bishop’s letter to Lowell of January
1, 1948 where she describes a harbour in Key West: “The water looks like blue gas –
the harbor is always a mess, here, junky little boats all piled up, some hung with
sponges and always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane. It
reminds me a little of my desk” (OA 154). If the untidiness of the harbour brings to
Bishop’s mind her desk, then she can compare the boats to “unanswered letters,” that is,
as she writes in the next line, “old correspondences” (CP 60). The word
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“correspondence” is perfectly Baudelaireian and corresponds to the references to the
French poet that appear at the beginning of “The Bight.”
Whereas in Lowell’s “Water” we have clear-cut boundaries between bodies and
substances, in Bishop’s poem the boundaries are blurred. In Lowell’s poem, even if the
described bodies and substances behave contrary to our expectations, even if they take
our perception by surprise, everything is still arranged into strong binary oppositions. In
“Water” Lowell is a poet of autobiography and psychology. In contrast, Bishop in “The
Bight” once again proves to be a poet of epistemology and ontology. There are no
orderly oppositions or clear hierarchies in her poem. Rather, in “The Bight” we witness
a perceptive vertigo; a vertigo of the senses. One substance changes into another, and
behaves as if it was yet something else (water looks, and smells, like gas, and air
behaves like a solid body). Unlike in Lowell, the changes and oppositions are not
binary; rather, they constitute a tangled chain of metamorphoses. The nature of anything
that appears before the viewer’s eyes eludes the viewer.
To further elaborate on the differences in Bishop’s and Lowell’s uses of irony, I
will look at yet two pieces by both authors: Lowell’s “Myopia: a Night,” a poem where
the speaker meditates on his past lying in a room full of books, and Bishop’s prose
poem “12 O’Clock News,” which presents a bird’s eye view of the writer’s desk
described as if it was seen by a member of a foreign civilization. Here is the fragment of
Lowell’s “Myopia: a Night” relevant to our discussion:
… Here
are the blurred titles, here
the books are blue hills, browns,
greens, fields, or color.
This
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is the departure strip,
the dream-road. Whoever built it
left numbers, words and arrows.
He had to leave in a hurry.
I see
a dull and alien room,
my cell of learning,
white, brightened by white pipes,
ramrods of steam… I hear
the lonely metal breathe
and gurgle like the sick.
(114)
At first, the objects appear similarly defamiliarized as in Bishop’s “12 O’Clock News.”
Books are like hills or airstrips and the indiscernible titles and names are like the
mysterious signs left by a member of a foreign culture, or, as the description may
prompt one to think, an alien. There is also a suggestion of a sort of turmoil, perhaps an
impending war: “[h]e had to leave in a hurry.”
However, in the very beginning of the second stanza the focus shifts from the
books to the speaker, the pronoun changes from “he” (the one who left the signs) to “I.”
The speaker sees a “dull and alien room” as if all the books have suddenly become for
him dead and devoid of meaning. The defamiliarization from the first stanza had
a surprising effect – instead of refreshing the familiar objects for the viewer, it made
them meaningless; now, the whole room has become a cell, and a cold one at that (it has
become alien, both unfamiliar, uninteresting and perhaps somewhat terrifying). Is it just
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because the speaker has taken his glasses off? It seems that there is more to it than that –
the speaker questions the meaning of his past and avoids confronting it: “And yet my
eyes avoid / this room.” In the case of Bishop, the defamiliarization of the writer’s desk
provides her with a possilbility of distancing herself from her fears. For Lowell, the
defamiliarized books, defamiliarized because seen without glasses, are terrifying, the
speaker turns his eyes away, as if in fear of confronting his life’s losses. Of course, there
is much more at stake than the loss of good eyesight. The title lends the poem a tone of
regret. The speaker is passive, as if he had already given up.
Even though deadness is pervasive in both poems, in Bishop’s “12 O’Clock
News” we have evidence of fighting – if the “indigenes” finally lie ”in hideously
contorted positions, all dead” (CP 175), they did not surrender without a fight. In
Lowell’s poem there are no traces of life other than the speaker’s and the poem is a
record of resignation, guilt, regret and anxiety: “What has disturbed this household?”
(115) It is interesting to watch the chain of associations that leads the speaker from the
act of observing the blurred book titles to the musings on Satan. First, the impossibility
to see clearly in the dark, with the glasses off, leads him to consider his eyes. Then, the
“eye” becomes the Biblical “eye of the needle.” Here, the unspoken self-centred
question – “Am I the chosen one?” – lurks in the background. Finally, one Biblical
scene leads to another and the speaker considers Satan triumphant in the Garden:
“Think of him in the Garden, that seed of wisdom, Eve’s / seducer, stuffed with man’s /
corruption, stuffed with triumph” (115). Are the books in his “cell of learning” being
compared to “the seed of wisdom” from the Garden? It seems indeed that the speaker
compares the books he has read, or written, and the knowledge he has gained, to the
bitter knowledge that was the reason of mankind’s downfall, of the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from Eden. In the poem everything is blown out of proportion – associating
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myopia with the Gospel parable of the camel and the eye of the needle or comparing the
unhappiness of an ageing man to the expulsion from paradise lacks any ironic distance
and implies an overwhelming sense of guilt and regret the speaker experiences (as if he
was asking whether his choices where wrong from the start or whether he is to blame
for the misery and dissatisfaction he experiences).
Bishop’s “12 O’Clock News” is, in a sense, the negative of “The Bight”: there,
the described harbour brought associations with the poet’s desk; here, the desk is
described as if it was a foreign land.10 At first sight, it may seem that the hyperbole –
looking at a writer’s desk as if it was a battlefield – is used to help the speaker to
distance herself from the anxiety that accompanies writing; that it is a way of coping
with fear caused by a blank sheet of paper on the writer’s desk. Such concentration on
private anxieties is, however, more typical of Lowell. Bishop is not prone to dwelling
extensively on these matters. In “12 O’Clock News” two important questions are
foregrounded. First, as the object described is a writer’s desk, the poem touches upon
questions of literary practice, inspiration and the writer’s position in the society. In
considering Bishop’s answers to these questions one should look once more at her
affinities with Baudelaire and at her relationship with the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
Second, it is important not to overlook the importance of war imagery in the poem. The
piece of news that Bishop provides us with seems to be one written by a war
correspondent – describing an ashtray, she calls it a “’nest’ of soldiers” (CP 175): “They
lie heaped together, wearing the camouflage ‘battle dress’ intended for ‘winter warfare.’
10
In the context of Bishop’s prose poem, one can also think of a later poem by Craig Raine, “A Martian
Sends a Postcard Home” (from Raine’s 1979 volume, under the same title – Raine, 1-2). Contrary to
Raine, however, Bishop explains on the margins what object is being described in each paragraph.
Whereas in Raine’s poem defamiliarization aims at seeing everyday world in a new light, in Bishop’s “12
O’Clock News” defamiliarization functions as a sort of defense mechanism.
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They are in hideously contorted positions, all dead. We can make out at least eight
bodies. These uniforms were designed to be used in guerrilla warfare on the country’s
one snow-covered mountain peak” (175). It is not enough to interpret the presence of
the war imagery as saying that writing is a war and a blank sheet – a battlefield.
Obviously, such an assertion is there, though immediately undermined by a distancing
and slightly humorous passage: “The fact that these poor soldiers are wearing them [the
‘camouflage’ battle dresses - A.Z.] here, on the plain, gives further proof, if proof were
necessary, either of the childishness and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable
people, our opponents, or of the sad corruption of their leaders” (175). More
importantly, however, the use of war imagery and vocabulary is motivated by Bishop’s
social and political views (the question will be discussed below in connection to
Stevens).
In the context of Bishop’s “12 O’Clock News” one can think of Wallace
Stevens’ late poem, “The Planet on the Table.” Stevens’ poem is an attempt at
summarizing one’s poetic oeuvre, an attempt at a reconciliation of conflicting forces
that moved Stevens’ poetry from the very beginning. Adam Lipszyc observes that,
although “The Planet on the Table” is one of the last poems in which Stevens explores
the relationship between the sun and the poet, it is not the most interesting one. There is
no tension between the sun and the poet, there is only a reconciliation, a quiet
acquiescence (Lipszyc 157-8):
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
(Stevens 532)
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In Bishop’s poem, however, we can see no attempts at a peaceful reconciliation
of conflicting forces. For all its distance and playfulness, the poem is full of war
imagery, and images of lifelessness: a typed sheet is presented as a mysterious field that
might be an airstrip or a cemetery; and the typewriter eraser is likened to a dead person:
“He appears to be – rather, to have been – a unicyclist-courier, who may have met his
end by falling from the height of the escarpment because of the deceptive illumination”
(CP 175). Everything is dead and motionless. There is no sunlight, and the gooseneck
lamp is presented as a motionless moon. Writing about the ink-bottle, Bishop observes:
“Its presence was revealed only because its highly polished surface catches such feeble
moonlight as prevails” (CP 174-5).
Whereas for Stevens the source of poetic energy is the sun, for Bishop it is rather
the moon. But also, since what in the dark, and from an aerial perspective, looks like the
moon is in fact a lamp, we can say that the source of poetic force is a man-made object.
In other words, apart from the natural, lunar sources, Bishop points to culture, stressing
the fact that poetry is something that is made. The table is poorly illuminated, and the
described objects are quotidian. Finally, they are described in well-known, journalistic
convention. In other words, Bishop seems to be showing that writing is possible –
indeed, it can flourish – in the poorest and most unbecoming conditions. Reluctant to
wait for solar inspiration, Bishop writes by the dim lunar light, constructing her poems
out of everyday objects, seen from an aerial perspective that produces the effect of
defamiliarization.
Bishop’s dismissal of both solar and lunar (as her moon is in fact a lamp)
energies as sources of poetic inspiration is a way of distancing herself from the
Romantic and melancholic (in case of the moon) traditions. And “12 O’Clock News” is
not the only poem where Bishop deals with the problem. For instance, Harold Bloom,
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contrasting Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” with Bishop’s
“The End of March” observes that the “somewhat Stevensian lion sun” from Bishop’s
poem has “something better to do than standing potent in itself” (Schwartz and Estess
XI), which is what the sun does in Stevens’ poem, being an epitome of the Nietzschean
will-to-power. Bloom observes Bishop’s urge to distance herself from her forebears –
he argues that Bishop, together with Dickinson and Moore “resembles Emerson, Frost,
and Stevens, “with a difference due not to mere nature or mere ideology but to superb
art” (Schwartz and Estess XI). Even though Bloom clearly groups Bishop with other
women poets, he does not mention either sex (unless the term “nature” is to include sex
as well) or gender as factors important in poetic practice. Joanne Feit Diehl, in her essay
“Bishop’s Sexual Politics” reproaches Bloom for overlooking Bishop’s “genderinflected imagination” (Lombardi 45).
Already in her first book, in the slightly surrealist poem “The Man-Moth”
Bishop questions lunar inspiration. There, all the scenery is lunar – although the ManMoth “does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties” (CP 14) – but the
moon is for the Man-Moth mainly a source of danger: “He thinks the moon is a small
hole at the top of the sky, / proving the sky useless for protection” (CP 14). Not only is
the moon a source of danger, but it is also a sign of lack, of the insufficiency of lunar
inspiration, or – perhaps – of the insufficiency of the poetics of Bishop’s precursors.
Also, the moon can be understood here as the emblem of the Kierkegaardian pure irony,
that is, negativity at its purest. And as the Man-Moth’s attempts to “push his small head
through that round clean opening / and be forced through, as from a tube, in black
scrolls on the light” fail, he “returns / to the pale subways of cement he calls his home,”
(CP 14) where, as we can guess, not even moonlight can enter. Although a new poetics
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may not have been established yet, Bishop has managed to distance herself from her
poetic precursors.
Bishop rejects both lunar and solar inspiration and opts for the common and
quotidian just like the speaker of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Perte d’auréole.” In
Baudelaire’s poem, the poet loses his halo and in consequence, he can walk the streets
unrecognized, mix with ordinary people, and visit all kinds of bad places. He is also
glad that the halo will be found by a bad poet who would be happy to separate himself
from ordinary people and in consequence would become a laughing stock for the poet
who had lost the halo. This is what Marshall Berman writes about the poem, in the
context of the experience of modernity:
But when Baudelaire’s poet lets his halo go and keeps moving, he makes a great
discovery. He finds to his amazement that the aura of artistic purity and sanctity
is only incidental, not essential, to art, and that poetry can thrive just as well,
and maybe even better, on the other side of the boulevard, in those low,
“unpoetic” places like un mauvais lieu where this poem itself is born. One of
the paradoxes of modernity, as Baudelaire sees it here, is that its poets will
become more deeply and authentically poetic by becoming more like ordinary
men. If he throws himself into the moving chaos of everyday life in the modern
world – a life of which the new traffic is a primary symbol – he can appropriate
this life for art. The “bad poet” in this world is the poet who hopes to keep his
purity intact by keeping off the streets, free from the risks of traffic (160).
The speaker of Lowell’s “Myopia: a Night” separating himself from others in his “cell
of learning” is like Baudelaire’s bad poet, putting on the found halo and not wanting to
be connected with ordinary people. Bishop is closer to ordinary people not only by
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virtue of writing about everyday objects. Her Baudelairian mauvais lieu is not so much
her desk but war that is constantly at the back of the speaker’s mind, present in the
poem’s imagery and vocabulary. In her own manner Bishop follows Stevens’ advice
voiced in “Of Modern Poetry”: “It [i.e. “the poem of the mind”] has to think about war /
And it has to find what will suffice” (240). Writing about the writer’s immediate
surroundings would not suffice. Writing about the war in a straightforward way would
not agree with Bishop’s indirect way of approaching problems. Talking about the two
spheres – the writerly and the martial – at the same time is what Bishop opts for. And
the simultaneity is made possible thanks to irony. Stevens’ phrase is particularly apt
here: Bishop’s poem speaks about the writer’s desk but it “think[s] about war.”
Camille Roman writes that when “12 O’Clock News” was published in The New
Yorker in 1973 “it was immediately regarded as an anit-Vietnam poem, although Bishop
never explicitly said it was set there” (142). Bret C. Millier relates that, towards the end
of the 1930s, after a lunch with writers associated with the Partisan Review, Bishop’s
anxiety about writing increased and she began having nightmares: “In her notebook she
recorded a series of transparent dreams that link the tools of her trade, particularly
typewriters, with images suggesting war. In one dream, she is at a cocktail party and
suddenly has an idea for a short story. The room itself becomes her page, which she is
afraid to turn because the story will disappear, and it does” (1993: 134).
Roman suggests that the dreams inspired the eventual poem. The critic also
provides the titles of earlier drafts of the piece: “Little Exercise,” “Desk & Moonlight”
(here, one can already see Bishop’s interest in the questions of lunar inspiration) and
“The Desk at Night” (142-144). It is true that the very fact of tackling the question of
war makes Bishop closer to ordinary people. The war rhetoric in the United States was
on everybody’s mind from the 1930s, when Bishop began to think about the poem,
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continued to be present during World War II, and found its culmination in the Cold War
rhetoric (in her study, Camille Roman skillfully and convincingly traces Bishop’s
responses to the World War II-Cold War rhetoric). Roman observes that the twocolumn format of the poem, apart from creating the effect of defamiliarization,
“discredits the news commentator and the Cold War rhetoric of quagmire rather the
country or the dead soldiers and unicyclist-courier” (147). Because there seems to be no
logical relationship binding the paragraphs with the explanations on the side, the critic
compares the explanations to the colonial discourse imposed on the main body of the
poem by the “Cold War-invested and infested narrator” (148). Using the war rhetoric
ironically, against the grain and thus questioning its value, Bishop places herself on the
side of those who felt oppressed by this kind of language and politics.11
In his “Myopia: a Night” Lowell presents a completely different stance. Whereas
Bishop stresses the importance of belonging to a community, Lowell underscores his
isolation, from other people (he calls his study his “cell of learning”) and from his own
past (the room is “dull and alien”). Presenting the objects on the writer’s desk as if they
were something else is an invitation to participate in Bishop’s play of imagination. The
vision Bishop presents does look rather grim, yet the speaker’s predicament is easier to
bear just because Bishop is not isolated – she belongs to the community of writers and
she makes an including gesture towards readers who are invited to play. Here, one can
refer to Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony. Whereas pure irony is sheer and endless
negativity, mastered irony gives the writer a possibility to maintain distance without
losing control of her work. I want to argue that for Bishop mastered irony is almost a
saving grace, a device that lets her enter a community (a community of writers as in “12
11
Camille Roman observes that one of the main problems of the “containment” culture was its “inability
to separate the military from the civilian population,” an inability that is criticised in “12 O’Clock News”
(145-148).
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O’Clock News” or her family as in “Poem”). In contrast, Lowell is likely to lose control
of his irony, he cannot master it and in consequence his irony only strengthens the
feeling of the subject’s isolation and loneliness. Brad Frazier, writing about
Kierkegaard’s mastered irony observes: “mastered irony, as Kierkegaard conceives it,
cannot have the critical role that Kierkegaard attributes to it, if those who employ it are
not in community with other persons. In other words, there is a kind of sociality implicit
in the irony of mastered irony, which is easy to overlook” (Frazier 146). Bishop
participates in communities: of ordinary men, by using the language and imagery of
war, so strongly present in the public discourse, of readers who are invited to play with
the poem, to decipher its double code, and of writers, by conducting a discussion with
Lowell and Stevens (following his advice from “Of Modern Poetry”). At the same time,
she disagrees with Stevens in questions pertaining to poetic inspiration. The
disagreements with her forebears do not exclude her, however, from the community of
writers. For Bishop, the source of poetic inspiration does not lie in abstract forces
epitomized by the sun or the moon but – as “12 O’Clock News” clearly shows – in
culture, in the society and in the membership in the community of writers. Her irony,
rather than isolate, connects her to others:
The beneficial effects of mastered irony cannot be obtained by persons who
employ it in isolation, according to Summers… “All these actions, however,
require the involvement of other people for their accomplishment: individuals
cannot realistically do them for themselves on the basis of simple selfreflection. Controlled irony is thus necessarily intersubjective.” We can add that
the refreshment and critical distance that occasional “irony baths” provide also
cannot be procured in isolation. It is important not to overlook this implicit
sociality of mastered irony not least because it helps to offset the tendency to
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understand the employment of mastered irony as a highly individualistic
activity. (Frazier 146)
To place Bishop’s irony vis-à-vis the irony of Moore and Lowell, one can start with
Bonnie Costello’s contention that Bishop is the poet of epistemology and ontology,
whereas Moore is the poet of ethics and aesthetics (1984:133). In such a configuration,
Robert Lowell could be called the poet of autobiography and psychology. For Moore,
irony is a tool of criticizing and ameliorating the world as well as aestheticizing the
reality that cannot be changed in any other way. Moore’s irony tells us what to do
(ethics) and what to admire (aesthetics). In some cases, aesthetics overrides ethics, as in
“The Frigate Pelican,” where the bird’s theft is forgiven because the frigate pelican is
a genuine artist. For Lowell, irony is a tool for expressing self-pity as well as an
instrument for criticizing the world for having inspired hopes that were later frustrated.
Thus, the harsh reality is blamed for the deeds that are strictly connected to the
speaker’s autobiography (as in “Water”).
In both Moore’s and Lowell’s poetry irony has binary structure. For example, in
Moore’s poetry, the morally imperfect world is juxtaposed with the world of moral
perfection one should strive at. The imperfect picture – of a small fishing town, for
instance, in “The Steeple Jack” – is covered by the image of Dürer’s artistic
impeccability. Not only is Moore’s irony binarily structured but also it is stable. In her
writing, Moore stops the world to pass a judgement on it, her images resemble still lifes,
her frigate pelican feels like caught and frozen in mid-flight. In Lowell’s poems, binary
oppositions are also foregrounded – the ego is opposed to the world (as in “Water” and
“Myopia: a Night”), the speaker’s hopes are juxtaposed with the bitter outcome and
even if some binary oppositions are questioned they are reconfigured to form a set of
newly defined binary oppositions. An example of such reconfiguration is to be found in
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“Water.” Water and the stones are opposed to each other, the former standing for
fluidity and change, the latter – for stability. Then, in the course of the poem, water
turns out to be the stable element, whereas the stones prove to be unstable. Their
qualities change but they remain in opposition.
In contrast, Bishop undermines and abolishes binary oppositions. Her irony is
used to underscore the endless changes of meaning (like the meaning of water in “The
Bight”) and foreground the dynamic and elusive nature of our knowledge as well as the
impossibility of stopping interpretation and arriving at a fixed formula (like in the
ending of “At the Fishhouses”).
Because of their different approaches to irony, the three poets take completely
different positions vis-à-vis the society. Moore’s irony, because of its tendency to judge
and admonish, places Moore’s speaker as if above the society. Lowell’s irony, because
it so strongly separates the speaker from the world, condemns him to solitude. It also
isolates Lowell’s speaker from his past, alienating him completely. In contrast, Bishop’s
controlled irony, as it has been argued above, integrates her with the society and with
the community of writers.
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Chapter 4
Bishop’s Irony as a Stylistic Counterpart of her Expatriation and Homelessness.
Irony as a Connecting Device.
As we have seen in the previous chapters Bishop would rarely confront key
problems directly. In dealing with her losses and traumas she resorts to irony and
understatement, she decides, to use Emily Dickinson’s formula, “to tell it slant.” (1129).
In the relationships with her precursors and contemporaries, Bishop opts for negotiation
or mentorship rather than struggle. She adopts a similar strategy when tackling the
questions of home and homelessness, the sense of belonging and the plight of an
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expatriate. In her discussion of these issues, Bishop needs a sort of double mediation:
firstly, her art, the very fact that she writes and, secondly, a sort of insulating device in a
given poem or piece of prose, something that isolates the speaker from the subject and
lets him or her approach the problem in an indirect way inscribing the issue into
a broader context. In some poems, the role of the intermediary device is played by
a picture (as in “Large Bad Picture” and “Poem,” in which Bishop describes paintings
and only later and casually remarks that the depicted surroundings are related to her
childhood). And in “Crusoe in England” she uses the literary character, with a real-life
model (Alexander Selkirk), to write a gloss to Defoe’s novel in which she considers the
questions of expatriation and deracination, fills in the gaps left in Defoe’s story and,
metaphorically speaking, writes on the margins of his narrative.
I will start with an analysis of “Large Bad Picture,” a poem from Bishop’s first
book, which I will compare and contrast with two other ekphrastic poems – W. H.
Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts“ and William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus.” Then, I will contrast the reading of “Large Bad Picture” with an analysis
of “Poem,” another of Bishop’s ekphrastic lyrics, describing a family souvenir,
a companion piece to “Large Bad Picture,” coming from Bishop’s last volume of
poetry, Geography, III. Finally, I will read “Crusoe in England,” as it provides probing
insights into the problems of home and homelessness, on the psychological and political
levels. As far as politics is concerned, I will look more closely at the question of gender
and sexuality. Since, being a woman and a lesbian makes Bishop marginalised and
decentred and, metaphorically, homeless. Choosing a male figure, Robinson Crusoe, for
the speaker of the poem, provides her with a sort of disguise or mask; thanks to this
device Bishop can create a safe niche from which she can talk about her own
predicament.
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Juxtaposing Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” with William Carlos Williams’
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts“ may
yield interesting results as Williams and Auden provide a less typically acknowledged
context for Bishop’s work than Moore and Lowell (for instance, David Kallstone
devotes his book on Bishop to the analysis of her work exclusively, in the context of
Moore and Lowell). Yet, even though Williams and Auden were somewhat less
important to Bishop’s writing and life than Moore and Lowell, she did acknowledge
both their importance and the possibility that they might have influenced her. In this
chapter, however, I will not focus on the issues of poetic influence; rather, I want to
place Bishop’s poetry side by side with Williams’ and Auden’s work and see how the
three poets handled irony and how they approached moral and autobiographical issues.
Moreover, in the case of the comparative analysis of Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” and
Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” any direct influence of the older poet’s
lyric on Bishop’s poem is out of question, since Williams’ poem is later than Bishop’s –
it comes from Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems from 1962 whereas Bishop’s
poem was published in North & South in 1946. I will start by presenting Bishop’s
attitude towards Williams and Auden and then I will proceed to the analysis of Bishop’s
“Large Bad Picture,” placing it in the context of Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus” and Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
Bishop’s attitude towards Williams seems a bit ambivalent. In a letter to Robert
Lowell (October 30th, 1958) one can discern in Bishop’s voice a sense of boredom and
a need for something new: “However, I’m getting so I can’t judge the poets we know so
well any more at all – I was craving something new – and I suspect that the poetryaudience is, too, and will like these poems very much. I just got Cummings’ latest, and
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a lot of it is very good Cummings – I’ve been reading Dr. Williams and a lot of it is
awfully good Williams but one does need a change” (LA 824).
Four years later though, in a letter to Anne Stevenson (March 20 th (?), 1963) who
was at the time gathering materials to write a biography of Bishop the poet
acknowledges the influence of the entire Marianne Moore’s generation, including
Williams: “Of course I read all Miss Moore’s generation from about 1928 on and
undoubtedly learned enormously from them. I think of Marianne, Cummings (we shared
the same maid in N.Y. for several years), Dr. Williams, Crane, Frost, as Heroes” (LA
845).
Finally, when asked by Stevenson about the details concerning her stance on
William Carlos Williams, Bishop responds (January 8th, 1964):
You mention Williams. I may have been influenced by him. I’ve read him
always, of course, and usually like his flatter impressionistic poems best, not
when he’s trying to be profound. (Of his late poems I do like Asphodel.) But
that diffuseness is exhausting (like Pound’s). Williams had that rather silly
language theory – but it has just occurred to me (I’ve been listening to some
contemporary music on the hi-fi) that perhaps he really made some sort of
advance like that made by composers around 1900 or so, and that a new set of
rules & regulations might appear, to go on from there, that could make his kind
of poetry more interesting and satisfying – like “serialization” in music. This
isn’t exact at all – but I feel that both he & Pound, and their followers, would be
vastly improved if one could lean on a sense of “system” in their work
somewhere… (After an hour of W. I really want to go off and read Houseman,
or a hymn by Cowper. – I’m full of hymns, by the way – after church-going in
Nova Scotia, boarding-school, and singing in the college choir – and I often
catch echoes from them in my own poems.) (LA 862)
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Bishop begins her statement by tentatively acknowledging her debt to Williams (“I may
have been influenced by him” – emphasis mine – A.Z.), and it seems that she is trying
to avoid giving Anne Stevenson a straightforward answer.
Also, although she acknowledges a debt to Williams, a substantial part of the
quoted paragraph consists of criticism of his poetry and his approach to language. The
fact that Bishop dislikes the poems in which Williams is “trying to be profound” may
shed light on the comparative analysis of Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” and Williams’
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” since in the latter poem Williams may be, in
Bishop’s eyes, “trying to be profound,” whereas Bishop, in her poem, is desperately
trying to avoid “profundity.” In the case of Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” the avoidance
of depth may be understood literally, since she concentrates on a faithful description of
what can be seen on the canvas, including the way the paint was laid.
Writing about her attitude towards the work of William Carlos Williams Bishop
resorts to a strategy of ironic self-effacement, i.e. instead of saying that she does not like
everything he does, she says that maybe she just does not understand him well enough
and that perhaps, in the future, it may turn out that he had opened entirely new paths:
“perhaps he really made some sort of advance..., and that a new set of rules &
regulations might appear, to go on from there, that could make his kind of poetry more
interesting and satisfying.” Her approach to Williams is similar to the attitude she
adopted towards John Berryman. David Kalstone reports that it is Robert Lowell who
“prepared” Bishop for the discovery of Berryman (Kalstone observes that Lowell was
all the time “countering [Bishop’s] ingrained resistance to most new poetry,” 223).
When Berryman’s Dream Songs appeared, Bishop asked Lowell for a copy and this is
what she wrote after reading the book: “I’m pretty much at sea about the book – some
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pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely. I am sure he is saying something
important – perhaps sometimes too personally? I also feel he’s probably next-best to
you” (qtd. in Kalstone 224). In a tone that is very characteristic of her, Bishop observes:
“one has the feeling a 100 years from now that he may be all the rage – or a ‘discovery’
– hasn’t one?” (qtd. in Kalstone 224). Once again, she tries to shift the responsibility of
judgment to somebody else (here: to future readers) and, if she is not able to fully grasp
and appreciate Berryman’s import, somebody else will surely be able to do so.
Bishop applies a similar strategy of not voicing her criticism directly but rather
blaming herself or somebody else (but not the author) for the aspects of a given poem
she does not like when she discusses the work of W. H. Auden. In a letter to Robert
Lowell (September 8th, 1948) she comments on the following passage from Auden’s
“Musée des Beaux Arts”:
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(179)
This is how Bishop criticizes the passage in a letter to Robert Lowell: “What I really
object to in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” isn’t the attitude about suffering – you’re
probably right about that – it’s that I think it’s just plain inaccurate in the last part. The
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ploughman & the people on the boat will rush to see the falling boy any minute, they
always do, though maybe not to help. But then he’s describing a painting so I guess it’s
all right to use it that way” (OA 171).
Bishop starts by criticizing Auden for inaccuracy – one must remember that
accuracy was for both Bishop and Moore a key aesthetic criterion. For example, in
a short review of Bishop’s North & South entitled “A Modest Expert” Marianne Moore
refers to accuracy several times: “Elizabeth Bishop is spectacular in being
unspectacular. Why has no one ever thought of this, one asks oneself; why not be
accurate and modest?” (Schwartz and Estess, 177). And then we read that Bishop has
the ability to use “always the accurate word” (178) or that she would sacrifice “dignity”
to “exactness” (179). In the light of Moore’s opinion about Bishop, a charge of
inaccuracy seems a serious one. But then Bishop goes on to say that in fact Auden is
just describing Breughel’s painting (so, in fact, it is Breughel whom she blames for
inaccuracy). Auden’s reputation remains apparently intact, although one might say that
it was his choice to pick an inaccurate painting as the inspiration for his ekphrastic
poem. In consequence, the moral conclusions Auden draws on the basis of the painting
may be false since he grounds his reasoning on false premises. Thus, in the end, Bishop
does criticize Auden only in a covert and convoluted manner.
Apart from the disagreements she might have had with Auden about this
fragment, one should remember that Auden was an important influence on young
Bishop. This is how Elizabeth Bishop testifies to the importance of Auden for her
(early) writing: “[W]hen I was in college, and all through the thirties and forties, I and
all my friends who were interested in poetry, read him constantly. We hurried to see his
latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to”
(LA 729). It is also interesting to note that Elizabeth Bishop was virtually unable to deal
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with the poetry of Wystan Hugh Auden in a piece of critical writing. When asked to
write about Auden, she submitted a text (“A Brief Reminiscence and a Brief Tribute”)
that consisted of not much more than the statement quoted above. Then, she only quoted
extensive fragments Auden’s poems (e.g. “Spain” and “Refugee Blues” – the first from
1937, the latter from 1974, which indicates that Bishop’s interest in Auden’s work was
long lasting) and ended with the following phrase: “These verses and many, many more
of Auden’s, have been part of my mind for years – I could say, part of my life” (LA
731). Not only was she unable to critically respond to Auden’s work as a whole, but
also she was only capable of producing a fairly conventional note. If she was unable to
face Auden in critical writing, maybe she could do it in her poems, then? Thus, it is all
the more tempting to read “Large Bad Picture” as the younger poet’s response to one of
her precursors. Later on in the chapter I will argue that it is possible to read Elizabeth
Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” as her polemics with Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
Before placing Elizabeth Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” in the context of William
Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and Wystan Hugh Auden’s
“Musée des Beaux Arts,” I would like to offer a detailed analysis of Bishop’s lyric:
Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or
some northerly harbor of Labrador,
before he became a schoolteacher
a great-uncle painted a big picture.
Receding for miles on either side
into a flushed, still sky
are overhanging pale blue cliffs
hundreds of feet high,
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their bases fretted by little arches,
the entrances to caves
running in along the level of a bay
masked by perfect waves.
On the middle of that quiet floor
sits a fleet of small black ships,
square-rigged, sails furled, motionless,
their spars like burnt match-sticks.
And high above them, over the tall cliffs’
semi-translucent ranks,
are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds
hanging in n’s in banks.
One can hear their crying, crying,
the only sound their is
except for occasional sighing
as a large aquatic animal breathes.
In the pink light
the small red sun goes rolling, rolling,
round and round and round at the same height
in perpetual sunset, comprehensive, consoling,
while the ships consider it.
Apparently they have reached their destination.
It would be hard to say what brought them there,
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commerce or contemplation.
(CP 11-12)
The first word of “Large Bad Picture” (“remembering”) signals that we will be
dealing with a poem about memory. Moreover, the reader may automatically assume
that the memories will be the speaker’s. It is only in the third line that one learns that the
speaker is talking about somebody else (“before he became a schoolteacher” – emphasis
mine – A.Z.). Only then one can go back to the mysterious ending of the first line
(“remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or”) and retroactively interpret the conjunction
“or” as a sign that the speaker is in fact talking about somebody else’s memories since
she does not know what it is exactly that the person who became a schoolteacher
remembered. Finally, it is as late as in the fourth line, the last line of the first stanza, that
the reader learns the identity of the person (“a great uncle”). The first stanza is full of
hints that suggest – or try to trick the reader into believing – that both the picture and the
poem we are reading, are trivial. We learn that painting the picture was an insignificant
episode in the great-uncle’s life since later on he became a schoolteacher and not
a painter. In other words, we should not expect that a typical narrative of growth, a sort
of Bildungsroman in verse, will follow to tell us how, for example, the uncle showed
signs of talent at an early age and then became a great painter. Moreover, even the uncle
himself seems unimportant for the speaker – she does not call him “my great-uncle” but
“a great-uncle” [emphasis mine – A.Z.]. The fact that the speaker does not know
whether the picture draws on a memory of “the Strait of Belle Isle” or “some northerly
harbor of Labrador” testifies to the fact that the uncle may not have been a very
prominent figure in the speaker’s life. She does not know the details of his biography
(we do not know if the speaker knew the uncle at all). It may also imply that the
painting is so bad – or substantially reshaped by memory and art – that it is impossible
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to recognize the place. One can almost say that the phrase “the Strait of Belle Isle or /
some northerly harbor of Labrador” means as much as “anywhere” or “wherever.” Such
an interpretation does not have to mean that the place is of no importance but rather
that, through the description of the painting, the poem moves, even though it sticks to
the particular, from the personal towards the general and is not only a description of
a specific painting but a meditation on the relationship between memory, art, and
personal history. As Susan McCabe observes: “Bishop does not write about her uncle’s
paintings because she thinks them flawless masterpieces, but takes them up as would
a collagist: they are the ‘found objects’ that refer to the life lived and being lived and are
not set up as reified or perfected forms” (21). Still, at first glance it seems that what we
get in the poem is a very precise description of a scene that could be placed anywhere,
one that could have been remembered and painted by almost anybody. Is this really the
case?
The whole issue seems more complicated. Both the painting and the poem are
not as simple as they appear to be. The picture is not just an example of unsuccessful
and accidental painting, a vagary of the speaker’s uncle, but rather a work issuing from
a long tradition of American folk art. Barton Levi St. Armand observes that what a folk
artist usually does is “adapt innovative ideas to prescribed conventions” (159). The
latter can be said not only about the painter, but also about the poet – Bishop uses
a seemingly naïve form, with exact rhymes, and fills it with new and personal content.
The naïvete of the form, however, is only apparent. The rhyme scheme of the poem is in
fact extremely complex: Bishop uses rhymed couplets in the first stanza (with a skillful
mosaic rhyme “Belle Isle or”/”Labrador”) and single rhymes (side/sky/cliffs/high) or
cross-rhymes (light/rolling/height/consoling) in the rest of the stanzas. She also makes
use of run-on lines and chooses the rhymed words in a way that foregrounds the ironical
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potential of the juxtaposed pairs. In other words, although her poetic craft owes much to
folk tradition and hymns (she alludes to her knowledge of, and attachment to hymns in
a letter to Anne Stevenson, LA 862), Bishop only begins in this tradition to further
reshape it and refine it, and emerges as a conscious, full-blown artist already in her first
book. Such an approach to traditional poetic forms makes Bishop a perpetuator of the
Dickinsonian tradition.
The sharp contrast between the stated banality of the subject matter and the poor
quality of the painting on the one hand and the intricate form of the poem, with its
subtle rhyming scheme on the other, creates an ironic effect. In other words, Bishop
approaches such important and grandiose subjects like mimesis, memory and – most
importantly perhaps – her family history through ironic understatement. Moreover, the
fact that the scene is set in “the Strait of Belle Isle” or “some northerly harbor of
Labrador” does not have to mean that it is placed anywhere (even if the speaker is not
sure which of the two places is depicted in the painting) but rather that it is set in the
places where Bishop spent her childhood. And writing about these places as if they were
unimportant may be part of Bishop’s strategy that aims at lowering the weight of
childhood memories.
Thus, “Large Bad Picture” can be read as an autobiographical poem. In an
interview with Derek Attridge, trying to define the genre his writing belongs to, Jacques
Derrida pointed neither to literature nor to philosophy, but to autobiography. He also
observed that at a certain stage of the pursuit of autobiographical desire, the
autobiographical temptation cannot be separated from the encyclopedic temptation, the
two temptations become one (Derrida 1998, 180). I believe that, similarly, one can treat
Elizabeth Bishop’s work as an attempt to combine the encyclopedic and the
autobiographical or as an attempt to transform the former into the latter. Are not her
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catalogues and descriptions, her prose pieces about her favourite writers and her travels,
her translations of poetry from the French, Spanish and Portuguese, the translation of
The Diary of Helena Morley, the travel book on Brazil, and numerous other projects, an
attempt to write some kind of – intellectual and emotional – autobiography? However,
one must notice that Bishop’s encyclopedic temptation is – characterisctically of her –
modest. Her poems, stories and translations, including “Large Bad Picture,” though
exact and detailed, constitute a very private and humble encyclopedia, full of elisions
and understatement.
To better see how Bishop approaches the questions of autobiography and
memory, let us look closely at the way she introduces new information in the beginning
of “Large Bad Picture.” In the first two stanzas, especially from line 1 to line 7, Bishop
postpones full disclosure of information or gives information in such a way that the
reader may feel mislead; even though the title states that the poem will be about
a picture, the initial three lines of the first stanza may make one doubt whether it will
really be the case. Only in the fourth line do we get the confirmation that this is indeed
a description of a picture and only then do we learn that it was painted by an uncle. The
transition from the background information about the picture to its description is both
neat and striking, signalled beforehand and at the same time withheld. The ending of the
first stanza prepares the reader for the discussion of the picture but the beginning of the
second once more creates uncertainty as to whether “receding” will refer to any of the
elements of the painting. Both stanzas start with a gerundive form. And their opening
words (“remembering,” “receding”) start with the prefix “re” and echo each other in
assonances and the rhyming ending. The parallel beginnings of the stanzas emphasize
the two words which on closer look seem nearly antonymous. “Receding” refers to the
movement of going back, leaving the present position, whereas “remembering” refers to
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a movement in the opposite direction. It is a bringing back, restoring, in the mind, of the
things that have receded, disappeared. However, the clear-cut opposition between
“receding” and “remembering” becomes problematic when one realizes that in fact the
two processes are mutually dependent, i.e. there must be a “receding,” something must
give way, retreat, disappear, in order for “remembering” to begin. The action of
remembering happens in the space opened by the action of receding. Likewise, the
receding, or effacement of what has been remembered, must take place to clear the
space for new memories. As Susan McCabe observes: “The commemorative impulse
circulates Bishop’s poems about paintings (as in “Large Bad Picture”) and objects, as
Costello has pointed out. We want to commemorate, put on record, commit to memory,
know by heart. But the poem testifies to erasure and forgetfulness: the best we can do in
our ‘crudest scroll-work’ is to write in our homeliness and frailty, give ourselves up to
time and chance” (59).
Thus, nothing can be effaced completely just as nothing can be remembered
without previous effacement. Also, new memories interfere with and reshape the old
ones. To stress the imperfection and continuity of both actions Bishop does not mention
“memory” or “recession” but uses the continuous verb forms, emphasizing a neverending process and the fact that the two actions are simultaneous and depend, or feed
on, each other. Thus, even though Bishop starts her poem with “remembering,” and
only later brings in “receding,” it does not have to mean that she starts in a reversed
order – the two processes are circular and have neither a beginning nor an ending.
The way Bishop uses repetition in this poem may also be read as a commentary
on how memory functions. Let us look at the words that are repeated in the poem:
“crying, crying,” “rolling, rolling,” “round and round and round.” If we put them next to
one another, what we will get is a minimalist poem that – in the context of the whole of
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“Large Bad Picture” – can be read as a commentary on the cycles of remembering and
receding and on the feelings – succinctly summarized by “crying, crying” –
that
accompany these processes.
Writing about North & South, Elizabeth Bishop’s first collection of poetry
(which includes “Large Bad Picture”), Randall Jarrell observed that “all her poems have
written underneath, I have seen it” (Schwartz and Estess, 181). “Large Bad Picture” is
a bit different in this respect. One could use Jarrell’s phrase to describe the poem but the
pronoun it in “I have seen it” would refer to the picture and not to the actual scene.
What makes this poem very different from the poems of, for instance, Marianne Moore,
(like “The Frigate Pelican” or “The Pangolin”) is the way Bishop treats names and
naming. In a manner that is rather uncharacteristic of her, Bishop decides not to give the
reader the exact names of the objects and the species of animals she is writing about.
She does not explicitly name the genre of the eponymous picture and we only read
about birds and a “large aquatic animal,” whereas in other poems Bishop would provide
descriptions of sandpipers, herons, auks and puffins. Unless we understand the
expression “large aquatic animal” as a humorous reference to a whale (thus bringing to
mind Melville’s Moby Dick), we may gather that there is an apparent lack of balance
between the information the reader might expect in an ekphrastic poem (What is the title
of the picture? What is the name of the painter? Where, precisely, is the scene situated?
At what time of year? What kind of animals can one see?, etc.) and the information he
or she is given. For instance, in the sixth stanza, describing the picture, Bishop, quite
unexpectedly, brings in the sense of hearing; similarly, from the description of
a landscape painting the reader could expect to learn more about the straits and animals
figuring in the picture; instead, he or she reads about “the small red sun.” The change of
reference, from the sense of sight, to the sense of hearing may mean a transition from
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the realm of the picture to the realm of the poet’s imagination (the issue will be
discussed later). It may also, however, mark the moment of losing control. Sight is the
sense linked with power, control, mastery. When we look, we keep the object we look at
at a distance. We can also choose not to look, to avert our eyes. In contrast, one cannot
choose not to hear something, we do not have perfect control over what we hear. The
moment the speaker hears the birds’ crying is a delicate one, it is a moment of losing
control and, possibly, succumbing to memories and strong emotions.
“Large Bad Picture” is not only devoid of some expected information, it also
lacks human presence. Whereas the lyrics of Williams and Auden, such as “Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus” and “Musée des Beaux Arts” may be read as discussions of
moral issues, Bishop’s poem – precisely because of the lack of detailed information and
the lack of human presence, corresponding somehow to the lack and losses of Bishop’s
life – seems not overtly concerned with moral questions. Since people are absent from
the described picture, there are no analyses of interpersonal relationships and no
statements about the place of suffering in the human world (as in Auden’s poem). The
two human presences in Bishop’s poem – the speaker and the painter – are removed
from each other in time so that no face-to-face confrontation can take place and hence
no moral issues can be directly posed. The lack of human figures in the whole poem
with the exception of the first stanza is striking: birds are crying, “a large aquatic animal
breathes,” but there are no people. Even the repeatedly mentioned “crying” is not
human. Instead, the sun is personified (it is “comprehensive, consolling”) and also the
ships “consider” the sunset. To define the exact effect in Bishop’s poem – of the lack of
overtly manifest human presence, let us analyse for comparison William Carlos
Williams’ poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”:
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According to Breughel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
(Williams, Pictures from Breughel 4)
129
Writing about Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” Jerzy Jarniewicz
observes that “splash” is a word crucial to the understanding of the poem as it refers
both to the sound made by a body falling into the water and to the spots of paint on
Breughel’s canvas. The two meanings of the word make it possible for Williams to talk
about two things – Breughel’s painting and his idea of what the fall of Icarus looked like
– at the same time. Or, as Jarniewicz observes, to start as if he was talking about the
painting (treating the painting as if it was a text that tells a story, since Williams starts
with the phrase “according to Breughel”) and then as if forget about it to talk about the
mythological event only to join the two at the end of the poem in “splash.” Williams
tricks the reader just as Breughel tricked his viewers. Jarniewicz writes that Breughel
played a trick on his viewers by putting his splash, the drops of paint that represent
Icarus, in a peripheral position – thus, it is possible that the viewer will overlook the boy
falling out of the sky, becoming – due to the painter’s hoax – an accomplice of the
ploughman and the ship’s captain. Jarniewicz argues that in this case, it is not a moral
question – to help or not to help (Icarus) – but a question of perspective, of framing and
focus, in a word – of interpretation (Jarniewicz 32). By the same token, the reading of
Bishop’s personifications is a question of interpretation as well. Is the fact that it is the
ships that consider the sunset and not their crews just an example of metonymy? Or is
this lack of human presence somehow meaningful? Are the ships really considering the
sunset or are they simply, together with the birds and the “large aquatic animal” gazing
at us, readers, contemplating us?
Indeed, we may read the fragment about the ships “considering” the sunset as
neither an instance of metonymy (in fact, it is the ships’ crews that consider the sunset)
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nor personification (ships have human features and can watch the sunset12) but interpret
it along Lacanian lines, i.e. recognise in the ships the object that is always-already
gazing at us. This is how Sean Homer, referring to the ideas of Jacques Lacan and
quoting from Slavoj Žižek writes about the concept of the gaze:
In seminar XI Lacan developed Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a pre-existing gaze that
stares at us from the outside. For Merleau-Ponty this gaze emanates from an allseeing transcendental subject, but for Lacan no such subject exists. According
to Lacan, we are not primarily conscious subjects viewing the world, but rather
we are always-already “beings that are looked at.” There is a fundamental
separation between the eye and the gaze. While ‘I’ see from only one point, I
am looked at from all sides. There is a gaze that pre-exists my subjective view –
an all-seeing to which I am subjected. Žižek summarizes these notions well:
“The eye viewing the object is on the side of the subject, while the gaze is on
the side of the object. When I look at an object, the object is always already
gazing at me, and from a point at which I cannot see it.” (124-125)
12
One may add that in the phrase “perpetual sunset” – the sunset is perpetual because it is
immobilized on the canvas – one hears an ironic echo of John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Instead of
the ancient urn, the “still unravished bride of quietness” (Keats, 213), we get a landscape painting with
a setting sun.
Keatsian references appear as well in the sixth stanza of “Large Bad Picture” where Bishop,
writing about the birds, unexpectedly refers to the sense of hearing: “One can hear their crying, crying, /
the only sound there is / except for occasional sighing / as a large aquatic animal breathes.” This stanza
can be read as an echo of the second stanza of Keats’ ode: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard /
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; / Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, / Pipe to the
spirit ditties of no tone.” In Bishop’s poem the Keatsian reference marks the transition from the
description of the picture to the realm of imagination or memory (in the fifth stanza Bishop writes about
birds that look like the letter ‘n’ on the canvas, suggesting that there is no illusion of their reality, while in
the next stanza she writes about the sounds they make).
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According to Lacan we are first of all “beings that are looked at” and not primarily
conscious subjects; Bishop, however, is not that radical. She does grant the subject some
degree of consciousness, but this very consciousness is a source of pain. The experience
of the gaze, of the object gazing at us from all directions can be traumatic – similar to
the experience described by John Berryman, with a self-mockery that is typical of him,
in the 45th of his Dream Songs: “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back” (29).
Perhaps the most traumatic instance of such gaze in Bishop can be found at the
end of “Love Lies Sleeping”:
for always to one, or several, morning comes,
whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed,
whose face is turned
so that the image of
the city grows down into his open eyes
inverted and distorted. No. I mean
distorted and revealed,
if he sees at all.
(CP 16)
Here, the city, the object that is gazing at the person virtually “grows down into
his open eyes,” intrudes upon him. The eyes and the city come together in a painful
tangle: the city grows roots in the eyes, while at the same time it becomes “inverted and
distorted” or, as Bishop adds later, “distorted and revealed.” The revelation is
potentially dangerous for the subject and perhaps this is the reason why the figure does
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not want or is not able to see it: “the city grows down into his open eyes… / if he sees it
at all.” In Elizabeth Bishop. Life and the Memory of It, Brett C. Millier claims that the
figure “is at least hung over, if not dead drunk” (152). If this be the case, the reason for
drinking may be the desire to escape confrontation with the gaze of the city.
If the awareness of the gaze is a traumatic experience, meeting the eyes of
another person, another subject, is a yet more harrowing one. For example, at the end of
“Cirque d’Hiver,” having performed a series of circular, dance-like movements
(bringing to mind, for instance, William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Dance,” starting
and ending with the line “In Breaughel’s great picture, The Kermess,” Collected Poems
II, 58-9), the horse and the dancer finally face “each other rather desperately,“ saying
“Well, we have come this far” (CP 31), that is, probably, we have come full circle, and
we have to face this fact, and face each other.
Going back to “Large Bad Picture” one can say that in this poem the gaze
emanates from several sources, several objects (“gaze is on the side of the object,” as
Žižek writes). First of all, it comes from the described painting. One can call it an object
that is “always-already” gazing at us, especially that in this case the painting is related
with the speaker’s family history and is potentially a source of uneasiness – the
landscape, the painting and the painter might have been there, might have existed before
the speaker (later, in Geography III, and particularly in “Poem” which is also
a description of a “bad picture” painted by a family member, Bishop will become more
explicit about her personal relationship to the depicted location: “Heavens, I recognize
the place, I know it!” She will also treat the passage of time with delicate irony: “Those
particular geese and cows / are naturally before my time,” CP 176-177). Secondly, one
can speak of gazes inside the described picture. Whereas in the universe of the picture
one cannot with certainty locate the gaze on the side of the ships (they may be treated as
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an instance of metonymy replacing the ships’ crews or as the ships’ crews’
personification), we can treat the perpetually setting sun as an object that is “always–
already” gazing at the ships. The ships might be called an object that is the source of the
gaze only when we consider the relationship between the picture and the viewer, i.e. the
ships may be said to be gazing at the viewer of the picture and unsettle him or her.
I presented the concept of the gaze and the way the meeting of somebody else’s
look is shown in Bishop’s poems because I want to translate the relationships between
the one that looks and the one that is looked at into the relationships between Bishop
and her precursors, and particularly, in this case, with W. H. Auden. This relationship is
neither a Bloomian struggle nor a mentor and protégée relationship (as in the case of
Bishop’s relationship with Marianne Moore) but rather a relationship based on the
avoidance of direct confrontation with the precursor (as if she wanted to escape the gaze
of the precursor poem). However, this is only a sort of fake avoidance, since Bishop is
in fact criticizing her precursor but she does so from a vantage point that is completely
her own.
As I already noticed above, Bishop’s decision to minimize human presence in
“Large Bad Picture” might be read as a consequence of her reading of Auden’s
interpretation of Breughel’s painting, the interpretation he presents in the second part of
“Musée des Beaux Arts.” And “Large Bad Picture” as a whole may be read as a poem
that responds to Auden’s impact on young Bishop’s literary consciousness, but it does
so in a roundabout way. When, in the letter to Lowell, Bishop criticizes Auden’s
“Musée des Beaux Arts” for the lack of realism in representing possible human
reactions to the fall of Icarus, she finally says that in the end Auden has the right to
depict it this way since he is in fact describing Breughel’s painting and in the end it is
the painter who is wrong. It seems that Bishop’s first impulse is to criticize Auden, only
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later does she say that it is Breughel who is to blame. “Large Bad Picture” may be read
as an intricate, indirect criticism of the approach to art and moral questions one finds in
“Musée des Beaux Arts.” If Auden represents human behaviour unconvincingly, Bishop
– instead of representing people in a more convincing manner, thus challenging and
facing her precursor – gets rid of people altogether, avoiding a direct, face-to-face
confrontation of her poem with Auden’s lyric. Just as Auden cannot be said to be wrong
because he only describes a picture, Bishop cannot be said to disagree with Auden, or
escape confrontation with the older poet, since she also only describes a picture. In
a way, the irony of “Large Bad Picture” consists in Bishop’s seeming avoidance of
confrontation with Auden’s poem, in her strategy of agreeing and disagreeing with
Auden at the same time and not voicing her strategy in a direct way.
Bishop’s subtle strategies may be better seen if one juxtaposes the ending of her
“Large Bad Picture” with the last lines of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”– Auden
ends his poem with: ”the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something
amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
Auden’s ship is definitely heading somewhere. In contrast, in Bishop’s poem the ships
“apparently… have reached their destination / It would be hard to say what brought
them there, / commerce or contemplation.”).
Whereas the ending of Auden’s poem points towards the future, in the last lines
of “Large Bad Picture” Bishop wonders what brought the ships there, thus asking
a question about the sources, origins, the past, history (“Apparently they have reached
their destination. / It would be hard to say what brought them there”). There can be no
definite answer to this question – and Bishop comes up with two, apparently
contradictory, hypotheses: the ships were brought there by “commerce or
contemplation”. The pair of words echoes the earlier juxtaposition of “remembering”
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and “receding.” Once again, the two terms stand in opposition. Commerce is the
circulation of goods and money, a movement that is horizontal, circular and, in a way,
perpetual (money and goods never stop changing hands), whereas contemplation is
a focusing of affection, thoughtful observation, a look that – metaphorically speaking –
enters the contemplated object13. But once again, the binary opposition is overcome
thanks to the sun that is being considered by the ships. One can say that the sun is
a perfect emblem of commercial activity – it circulates like goods and money (or, at
least, it is perceived as circulating), it is the source of energy (just as commerce is said
to be the source of energy for well-prospering societies) and – finally – it looks like
a golden coin. In the picture described by Bishop, however, the sun, the emblem of
change and circulation, meets the contemplative gaze of the ships and the opposition of
“commerce” and “contemplation” becomes less sharp than it seems in the beginning
(the ships contemplate the emblem of commerce).
Thus, we do not know which of the two forces brought the ships there; and it is
possible that it was the combination of the two. But do we know the purpose or aim
they are here for? Is considering the perpetual sunset really their true destination? The
rhyme “destination” / “contemplation” is too exact, too neat and too jingling not to be
treated as a signal of irony. The irony may be directed against the view of art as
commemorating and reflecting the beauty of nature. But mainly, especially in the light
of the discussion with Auden, the irony of Bishop may be read as a declaration that she
is not, in this poem, interested in the future. Here, she is a poet of history and, instead of
13
According to Marek Bieńczyk, both the contemplative and the melancholic gazes are in a way endless,
all-encompassing. The difference lies in the fact that the contemplative gaze really studies the object
whereas the melancholic one pushes the object into non-existence (80). Thus, in Elizabeth Bishop’s
“Large Bad Picture” we encounter the contemplative gaze. In contrast, in her “Over 2,000 Illustrations
and a Complete Concordance,” where she talks about pictures that, “when dwelt upon… resolve
themselves” (CP 57), we can recognize the melancholic gaze.
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seriously contemplating the sunset, she, ironically enough, muses about the beginnings
(the history of the described picture and her own family history).
Elizabeth Bishop’s interest in history and her use of irony can be combined, and
almost made one if we refer to Emil Cioran’s notion that history is irony on the move
(“L’histoire est l’ironie en marche”). According to the thinker, the movement of history
is similar to the movement of irony in that it constantly effaces what went before, and
constantly means something else than it seems; history, like irony, is never what it
appears to be. In a conversation with Sylvie Jaudeau, when asked to clarify his
aphorism, he said:
Toute ce que l’homme entreprend se retourne contre lui. Toute action est source
de malheur parce qu’agir est contraire à l’équilibre du monde, c’est se donner
un but et se projeter dans le devenir.
Le moindre mouvement est néfaste. On déclenche des forces que finissent par
vous écraser. Vivre vraiment, c’est vivre sans but… L’homme périra par son
génie. Toute force qu’il déclenche lui nuit. C’est un animal qui a trahi; l’histoire
est sa punition. (21)
Arguing that there is a connection between history and irony that may explain
Bishop’s interest in history, I do not want to say that Bishop is exclusively a poet of
(personal) history. Although the poem I have just analysed focuses on history, one
should not forget about the questions of geography. Elizabeth Bishop herself stressed
the importance of geography in her work – when she received the Neustadt International
Prize for Literature, she observed: “Naturally I know, and it has been pointed out to me,
that most of my poems are geographical, or about coasts, beaches and rivers running to
the sea, and most of the titles of my books are geographical too: North & South,
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Questions of Travel and one to be published this year, Geography III” (“Laureate’s
Words of Acceptance,” LA 732) But here, geography may be understood in the way it is
defined in the epigraph to Bishop’s Geography III, a quotation from a geography
manual: “What is Geography? / A description of the earth’s surface” (LA 148). The
words “description” and “surface” are crucial here. From the very first poem in her
Complete Poems (“The Map”) Bishop apparently concentrates on the surface and only
then goes deeper, delves into history. I do not want to say, however, that this movement
from the surface (geography) into depth (history, personal archeology) is necessarily
diachronic; usually, it is simultaneous, i.e. the words that describe surfaces refer at the
same time to the issues of history. Once again, the machinery of irony is put to work
and it enables Bishop to refer to several issues at the same time, to be a poet of both
history and geography.
Another piece that seems to be merely a description of a surface (once again, the
surface of a painting) but in fact is, simultaneously, an exploration of the issues of
personal history is “Poem” from Bishop’s last collection Geography, III:
About the size of an old-style dollar bill,
American or Canadian,
mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays
–this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)
has never earned any money in its life.
Useless and free, it has spent seventy years
as a minor family relic
handed along collaterally to owners
who looked at it sometimes, or didn’t bother to.
It must be Nova Scotia; only there
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does one see gabled wooden houses
painted that awful shade of brown.
The other houses, the bits that show, are white.
Elm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple
–that gray-blue wisp–or is it? In the foreground
a water meadow with some tiny cows,
two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;
two minuscule white geese in the blue water,
back-to-back, feeding, and a slanting stick.
Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,
fresh-squiggled from the tube.
The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring
Clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky
Below the steel-gray storm clouds.
(They were the artist’s specialty.)
A specklike bird is flying to the left.
Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?
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. The hint of steeple,
filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,
must be the Presbyterian church.
Would that be Miss Gillespie’s house?
Those particular geese and cows
are naturally before my time.
A sketch done in an hour, “in one breath,“
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once taken from a trunk and handed over.
Would you like this? I’ll probably never
have room to hang these things again.
Your uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,
he’d be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother
When he went back to England.
You know, he was quite famous, an R.A....
I never knew him. 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?
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.
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(CP 176-177)
Like “Large Bad Picture,” “Poem” is an example of Bishop’s ekphrasis. It is also
an echo of, and a gloss to, the earlier lyric. In both of them, Bishop chooses unknown
works, pictures painted by her family members. The concentration on the ordinary, the
quotidian is very characteristic of her. Her choice has two consequences: firstly, the
pictures are not of any particular interest as works of art in their own right (though they
can be said to be part of American folk art) and, secondly, it is rather unlikely that the
readers have seen them. Consequently, the readers cannot confront their interpretation
of the pictures with Bishop’s and must make do with the texts themselves. Even though
the object described is unavailable to the reader, the poem is concerned with ways of
looking and reading.
“Poem” begins with a general description of the picture and a glimpse of its
history. It is compared to a dollar bill and the metaphor of money is present all the time
in the poem (I will dwell on it more extensively later). Bishop begins the second stanza
by establishing the place where the landscape was painted (“It must be Nova Scotia”)
and describing what can be seen on the canvas. While she is doing it, however, she
constantly shifts between trying to see what the painter must have seen and what she
can see on the canvas (“a water meadow with some tiny cows, / two brushstrokes
each”). Even when she says “only there / does one see gabled wooden houses / painted
that awful shade of brown” the word “painted” can be understood in two ways – as
referring to the real houses or to the houses in the picture. Towards the end of the stanza
the levels of reality get even more confused: “A specklike bird is flying to the left. / Or
is a flyspeck looking like a bird?” Is it a speck of paint that was to represent a bird or a
representation of a bird that resembles a speck? Or is it something that the painter did
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not plan? A speck that comes from a yet different order (neither the landscape painted,
nor the paint)? If the latter is the case, the speck might be interpreted as an instance of
reality intruding upon art, art absorbing reality, even if it happens by accident. The
musing on the question of whether this spot is “a specklike bird” or “a flyspeck looking
like a bird” is in fact a meditation on the relationship between art and life (not life in
general but the speaker’s biography: just as the intrusion of the speck – an intervention
of outside reality – changes the painting, the biography of the speaker makes the
painting worth studying and writing about). The painting provides the speaker with an
important link with her family and the places where she spent her childhood, even
though the emotions of the speaker are for the most part muffled, suppressed. We must
not, however, miss the humour of the “flyspeck” issue – if Bishop chose to focus on a
different imperfection of the painting, for example, some paint peeling off or a tiny hole
in the canvas, an imperfection caused by the passage of time, the tone would be much
graver or even conventionally sentimental. The “flyspeck” meditation introduces
a whole tangle of problems summarized more succinctly later in the poem:
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?
(CP 177)
“Life itself” and “art ‘copying from life’”: it is not certain that the artist painted
from nature; moreover, even if he did, the force of convention and tradition seems
stronger than his mimetic impulses. Still, the speaker is able to recognize the depicted
place; “life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other.” The
question is not only “which is life and which is the memory of it?” but also “whose life
it is?” and “whose memories are at stake?” The speaker’s? The painter’s? The lives and
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memories are so tangled up precisely because they constitute a kind of reservoir of
shared memories and shared biographies – this is probably what the speaker comes to
realize in the course of trying to figure out what is the meaning of the painting, and,
most importantly, what is her place in this network of memories and family
relationships – and it is complicated and painful for an orphan (if we choose to read the
poem along biographical lines) to establish what is her place in the family. In the next
stanza, looking at the picture, Bishop sees a reality but it is a reality as she has
memorized it: “Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! / It’s behind – I can almost
remember the farmer’s name.” But once again she shifts between her memory and the
canvas in front of her: “His barn backed on that meadow. There it is, / titanium white,
one dab. The hint of steeple, / filaments of brush-hairs, barely there, / must be the
Presbyterian church.” The stanza ends with a funnily ironic statement: ”Those particular
geese and cows / are naturally before my time.” Even though throughout the whole
poem Bishop emphasizes the fact that she is looking at a painting, at the surface of it,
full of filaments of brush hairs, with brushstrokes only conventionally representing
reality, here she wants to forget about it for a while and treat a few wisps of paint
standing for geese and cows as real animals. The adjective “naturally” makes the
sentence even more ironic.
Let us have a look at the way Bishop examines the painting’s genealogy and the
way it came into her possession. We learn that the sketch was done “in one breath,” the
author having not anticipated that it was going to be ever examined so closely. Also, it
is interesting to see how important issues are communicated through understatement,
litotes, as if between the lines. Even though Bishop, on the surface, keeps diminishing
the importance of the picture, by saying that it was drawn very quickly and that later it
was not exposed but kept in hiding (“A sketch done in an hour, ‘in one breath,’ / once
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taken from a trunk and handed over”), the way she talks about it and the quotations
from the older family member make the issue an important, even grave, one. “Would
you like this? I’ll probably never / have room to hang these things again.” At first, the
aunt’s question seems very casual. After all, she calls the family souvenirs “these
things.” But the fact that she may not have room “to hang these things again” may mean
that she is moving, possibly to an old people’s home, so in fact the question she asks is
a painful one. Behind her utterance, there is the aunt’s drama of loss and the
understatement she uses is a device that helps to cope with this loss, to tame it. The fact
that there is a younger person to whom one can pass the family possessions, also makes
the loss more bearable; apart from the drama of personal loss, there is the element of
continuity (in the family) and change. And for the younger person, the gift is a sort of
invitation to become a member of the family, the more important for somebody who
was an orphan. The acceptance of the gift by the speaker is also an act of acceptance of
her family history, an act of difficult affirmation. By accepting the gift, the speaker
assumes her place in the family and in a way affirms, or at least comes to terms with,
her lot.
The poem is full of powerful ironies. Nothing is what it seems to be. The speaker
keeps restating her views, trying to pin down the meaning of the picture, but it
constantly evades her, and it is not clear what she is referring to – the picture or the
memories. The points of reference become, in a way, indeterminate; both for the
speaker of the poem and for the reader. And the poem ends with an announcement of
even more powerful ironies that will annihilate, devour everything of meaning that is
left: “the munching cows / the iris, crisp and shivering, the water / still standing from
spring freshets, / the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese” (177).
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However, the ironies that seem to announce sheer negativity and the
impossibility of arriving at any fixed meaning, are counterbalanced in the poem by
affirmative acts of will, and thus cease to be as destructive as De Man’s irony,
especially in the interpretation presented in his essay “The Concept of Irony.” Not
everything is going to be dismantled, neither meanings nor objects. The irony is not allpowerful, the speaker and the previous owner of the picture are not puppets subjected to
the annihilating force of irony or, as De Man could say, they are not just “moments in
the dialectics of irony” (Bielik-Robson 2004, 220, translation mine) but subjects who
have the power to put a stop to the havoc wreaked by irony, through acts of will. For the
older person, the handing over of the picture is a drama of loss, but just because she
gives it of her own accord, it is more of an act of affirmation than of surrender. Passing
the picture to a younger family member, painful as it is, gives hope for continuity in the
family, not a steady, changeless continuity, but a continuity marked with constant
change. The picture is, metaphorically, a place where the family identity can dwell,
abide in; it becomes a metaphorical abode, giving a little hope for endurance, even
though the hope is “perishable” like the clapboards in “Jerónimo’s House” (CP 34) or
like the wooden boxes of “The Monument” that want to “commemorate” and “cherish
something” (CP 24).
And what should one make of the fact that the phrase “about the size of our
abidance / along with theirs” echoes the opening sentence of the poem: “about the size
of an old-style dollar bill, American or Canadian”? Does it mean that money and
abidance have anything in common? Is abidance like money? Can everything that was
said about money – and irony – also refer to abidance? Certainly, one can say that both
money and abidance are approached in the poem in a similar manner, that is, through
understatement. Money is by no means unimportant, even though the poem (jokingly)
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purports that it is so. Neither is abidance anything of minor importance. It is in fact a
crucial factor in identity building. Secondly, unlikely as it may seem, money and
abidance do have something in common. Even though they seem antonymous –
abidance being the epitome of stability and money being the emblem of change,
something that constantly changes hands and value – together they metaphorically stand
for the continuity and mutability typical for any family across generations.
Taking the picture, the speaker becomes the owner of a fragment of family
history, relatively unknown to her (“Your uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George, /
he’d be your great-uncle”). It should be noted, however, that it is communicated in a
very subdued manner; there is no lofty atmosphere that could have accompanied such
an event. Moreover, the seeming lack of importance of the picture (it is called “useless”)
contrasts with the uncle’s position, i.e. his membership in the Royal Academy (“he was
quite famous, an R.A.”).
Throughout the poem, the reader’s expectations and interpretations are
constantly dismantled; it is impossible to say what the words refer to exactly, or rather,
they refer to many things at the same time. The perspectives constantly shift, we
circulate between the canvas’ surface, the speaker’s memories, the memories of her
uncle and their two different “looks” at the place depicted in the painting (“art ‘copying
from life’ and life itself, / life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into
each other”):
We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal [emphasis mine – A.Z.] small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it
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Apart from stating that the place was a genuine small backwater, the word “literal”
suggests a possibility of making a mistake – a “literal” is also a typographical error. The
metaphor of printing can be applied to memory – it is possible that the memory was
misprinted in the painter’s – or the speaker’s – mind. And the whole picture might have
been even more distorted through the act of writing about it. Such an interpretation is
confirmed in the last line of the poem where the phrase the “yet-to-be-dismantled elms”
appears. The elms may be called “yet-to-be dismantled” because they were no longer
there when the speaker visited the place or because she supposes that they are no longer
there at the moment of writing the poem. But they can also be called “yet-to-be
dismantled” because everything in the picture – and in the poem – will be dismantled,
i.e., taken to mean something else, to stand for something else.
One of the most important factors that dismantle the reading of “Poem” is the
question of money. From the beginning until the end the picture is being compared to
a dollar bill – not only in the way it looks like (the same size, even the same colours –
“the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays”) but also in the way it functions in the
world. A single dollar bill is perceived as a means to gain more money, it is supposed to
multiply; money is expected to make money. In the same vein Bishop asks (in brackets,
as if in passing, but it is a crucial question), or supposes that “this little painting” is only
“a sketch for a larger one,” suggesting that its meaning cannot be self-contained, that it
cannot be sufficient to have just this little picture, just as the possession of a a single
dollar bill is usually not satisfactory. The picture is also similar to money because it
circulates, it has changed hands many times in its history:
it has spent seventy years
as a minor family relic
handed along collaterally to owners
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who looked at it sometimes, or didn’t bother to
This is what people do with money – hand it over and do not look at it more often than
necessary, probably only to check its nominal value. Here, we do not know the value of
the banknote the picture is compared to. Moreover, Bishop does not specify – or she
considers it unimportant, since the old-style Canadian and American banknotes were
similar? – where the bill comes from. It is important since a banknote without a specific
bank that can guarantee its value, is – as Bishop writes about the picture – “useless” (it
has no value, no purchasing power) as well as “free” (in fact, it is free because it is
useless). Of course, the adjective “useless” is used ironically and jokingly – one would
never think that a dollar bill is useless; just like the picture is by no means useless for
the speaker of the poem but rather constitutes an important part of her memory and
identity as well as provides a pretext for writing the poem.
The picture behaves like money and looks like a dollar bill but it “has never
earned any money in its life,” like a badly counterfeited banknote. The famous uncle’s
authorship is not enough to make the picture valuable since painting was probably not
his main field of activity (Bishop writes in a slightly ironic tone about clouds that
“storm clouds” “were the artist’s specialty”). Even though the fact that it was created by
a family member cannot guarantee its artistic value, it is clear that Bishop attaches some
importance to the picture as she devotes the whole poem to its description. It must
possess a personal value, as a family relic; in a sense, in the poem, family functions like
a personal bank. But this personal, emotional value is very unstable: this instability and
uncertainty is shown towards the end of the poem in the phrase “about the size of our
abidance / along with theirs” that is an echo of the first line of the poem (“About the
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size of an old-style dollar bill”). The picture is like a dollar bill (small, with unknown
value) and so is our abidance.
The described banknote and the painting share one more feature that makes
comparing them possible. The nominal value of the dollar is unspecified; similarly, the
title of the painting remains unknown. Finally, the two lacks (of the dollar’s nominal
value and the painting’s title) are mirrored in the title of the poem which is only
a generic one. Everything the reader gets is indefinite – a picture, a dollar bill and
a poem. The meaning of the poem is constantly changing, circulating, it is not anchored
to anything stable or certain, the poem is “useless and free.” The comparison to money
on which the whole poem is built serves as a model that shows how the poem works,
how its meanings constantly change, circulate and undermine one another; in a word,
money in “Poem” shows the way irony works in language and interpretation.
Yet another poem in which Bishop tackled the question of home and
homelessness is “Crusoe in England.” Initially, Bishop intended to call it “Crusoe at
Home” (Ferry 94). The change in the title suggests that for somebody who has spent so
many years on a desert island, the question of what – and where – is home is not an easy
one to answer. Also, the irony of naming a poem about homelessness “Crusoe at Home”
would be too simplistic, as it would only imply that England is not his home any more.
But if England is not, then maybe the desert island was his true home?
Indeed, it seems that Crusoe is never at home – neither on his island nor in
England. Though he himself, back in England, seems to long for the island, a place
where everything – as it seems to him after he has come back to England – had a clear
meaning. “The knife there on the shelf - / it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix” (CP
166). It seems that in Crusoe’s mind his life on the island was close to the Biblical,
prelapsarian state – words and things stuck together and everything was clear and
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meaningful. Now, he is like one chased out of paradise – “I’m bored, too, drinking my
real tea. / surrounded by uninteresting lumber” (166).
At least, this is how he conceptualizes his situation. However, the reference to
William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is there to shatter the illusion that
life on the desert island was one of bliss and happiness. At first glance, it seems that in
the poem we deal with Crusoe’s “emotions recollected in tranquility,” the tranquility of
his English home. However, instead of tranquility Crusoe feels weariness and boredom
(“I’m old. / I’m bored, too”). And, instead of Wordsworth’s daffodils, in Bishop’s poem
we have irises, the change signalling the ironic nature of the reference. This is how
Crusoe writes about his musings on Wordsworth:
…The books
I’d read were full of blanks;
the poems – well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
“They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss…” The bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.
(CP 164)
It could have been troublesome for Crusoe, however, to look the reference up since the
presence of Wordsworth’s poem in Bishop’s lyric is an anachronism. Wordsworth’s
poem was written in 1804 and published in 1807 (in Poems, in Two Volumes), whereas
Defoe’s narrative was published in 1719. The prototype of Defoe’s protagonist,
Alexander Selkirk, lived on one of the uninhabited islands on the archipelago of San
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Fernández between October 1704 and February 1709. Anne Ferry, writing about
Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” mentions other works referring to Selkirk: a poem by
Cowper, “Verses, supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk, During His solitary
Abode In the Island of Juan Fernandez,” a prose report – one of many written at the
time – of Selkirk’s time on the island, by Richard Steele and even a report allegedly
written by Selkirk himself (“Written by his own Hand”) (Ferry 94). Although we may
suspect that Defoe’s book is the most important point of reference for Bishop, she did
not intend to argue with Defoe and the relationship of her poem to Defoe’s story is very
casual. This is what she writes in a letter to Jerome Mazzaro (April 27, 1978): “Your
piece on my ‘Recent Poems’ fascinates me. I never dreamed of Alice in Wonderland in
connection with ‘Crusoe in England’. I don’t believe I ever read The Little Prince &
when I wrote the poem I hadn’t re-read Robinson Crusoe for at least 20 years” (OA
621).
Let us go back, however, to the question of the anachronism in the poem. Is it
only a jocular gesture on Bishop’s part? The word that is missing and that Crusoe looks
up immediately after his return to England is “solitude,” from the last stanza of
Wordsworth’s poem:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
(Wordsworth 1382)
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The anachronism directs the reader’s attention to the meanings of “the bliss of solitude.”
Why cannot Crusoe recall the word “solitude?” From the point of view of psychology,
one can say that the impossibility of recalling the word is a sort of defense mechanism:
the mere realisation of his solitude might prove unbearable for Crusoe. If there is any
“bliss” to be enjoyed, “solitude” must be forgotten. The difficulty in recalling “solitude”
might also be read as an ironic commentary to Wordsworth: there is no bliss in solitude,
nothing flashes “upon the inward eye” and instead of “emotions recollected in
tranquility” Crusoe on the desert island only recollects odd bits and pieces of knowledge
that do not add up to form a meaningful whole. The lack of bliss and coherence is felt
both on the desert island and in England. Nothing coheres in Crusoe’s world. If we
arrive at any feeling of wholeness, it is in Bishop’s poem as such – its progress, its
movement consists in a constant oscillation between two poles – Crusoe’s homelessness
and solitude on the desert island and his homelessness and solitude in England; the lack
of bliss on the island and the lack of bliss and the boredom of his stay in England; the
desert island on which Crusoe had been shipwrecked and England, which proves for
him another desert island: it is a wilderness, as it is devoid of meaning. None of the
locations seems privileged. Although the title of the poem leads one to expect
a description of Crusoe’s life in England, most of the poem is devoted to his
reminiscences of his life on the desert island. But this is what happens in his mind, in
England – he keeps musing upon his solitary life.
Even though Crusoe, back in England, laments the loss of meaning his few
properties had for him on the desert island, suggesting perhaps that the correspondence
between things and words was closer to the prelapsarian, Biblical situation, other
fragments of the poem, undermine this claim: “One billy-goat would stand on the
volcano / I’d christened Mont d’Espoir or Mount Despair / (I’d time enough to play
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with names)” (CP 165). Here, Crusoe is depicted as a mock-Adam: instead of seriously
naming the sites or animals on the island he plays with names, showing that the near
homophonous phrases (“d’Espoir” and “despair”) have exactly antonymous meanings in
different languages (the French “espoir” signifying hope). This shows the arbitrariness
of language but also suggests that in some situations the distance between hope and
despair can be infinitesimal (in fact, the difference between them can be hardly
perceptible, or, as in this case, hardly audible; though the change of languages, from
French to English, makes all the difference). Moreover, the appearance of time (“I’d
time enough to play with words”) signals that Crusoe’s island is not Eden before the
Fall, that men had already been chased out of paradise. Is this arbitrariness of language
the reason why Crusoe in Bishop’s poem does not name his island and it remains “unrediscovered, un-renamable”? (CP 162). In the beginning of the poem the speaker
mentions that a new born island has just been named, but not by him. And what does it
exactly mean that he does not give a name to the island? Does it mean that he never felt
there at home and that is why he did not want to name the island or – on the contrary –
it was like home and home is something that cannot be named or pinpointed? Or – if we
opt for an autobiographical interpretation – for somebody whose life has been marked
with loss as heavily as Bishop’s, it is extremely dangerous to feel somewhere at home
for fear of losing the place, and so, Crusoe, as the author’s alter ego adopts a strategy of
not naming whatever is dearest to him, as if he wanted to pretend that in fact it has no
value.
One might think of yet another reason for not naming the island. Before
presenting it one must answer the question of why we need names in the first place.
Names both join or bind (a group of phenomena under one name) and separate (make
given phenomenon separate from other phenomena; the separation makes it possible to
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avoid confusion in referring to given entities). Naming can also be a performative act –
a phenomenon comes into being as a result of it having been named (in the case of
Crusoe, his island would not come into being if he named it, but it would become more
strongly bound to him emotionally). But mostly, precisely because of the arbitrary
nature of language, giving a name is a social act. There must be a group of language
users who agree to give a name to an entity (just like giving a name to a new-born child
requires an approval of appropriate authorities).
Crusoe did not have a reason to give a name to his island. First of all, he did not
have to distinguish the island from the others – he might have spent the rest of his life
there and thus, for him, the island constituted an almost perfectly self-contained
universe. Precisely because he foresaw the possibility of spending the rest of his time on
the island, the dreams of living on a series of islands, one by one, infinitely, are
nightmarish. Secondly, he did not give a name to the island since he did not have
anyone who could make this act valid. We may suspect that Friday, in Crusoe’s eyes,
would not do, as an “uncivilized” person, though Crusoe did share some experiences
with him. When towards the end of Bishop’s poem we learn that Friday “died of
measles / seventeen years ago come March” (CP 166) Crusoe’s life in England in the
light of this new piece of information appears all the more lonely.
Crusoe felt at home neither on the desert island nor back in England. Wherever
he was, he missed the other place. The only space where Crusoe could feel at home –
and being at home for him means being in England and on his island simultaneously –
is the space of the poem. Only in “Crusoe in England” do all the places and all the
meanings cherished by Crusoe come together to form a harmonious whole.
The presence of the anachronic reference to Wordsworth discussed above has
one more function. Namely, the quotation from a poem written many years after Crusoe
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was shipwrecked, reveals that a later consciousness has filtered through into the poem –
the speaker of the poem is not Crusoe at all but an alter ego of Bishop, disguised. The
quotation from “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is like a tear in the costume that lets us
catch a glimpse of the person who wears the disguise. Indeed, “Crusoe in England” may
be read as a poem about Bishop’s homelessness and deracination; and the presence of
Friday introduces homosexual overtones. Speaking in the poem Bishop wears a double
disguise – she figures both as a man and a literary figure. (The question of masking and
disguise as an ironic strategy will be tackled in the next chapter.)
Irony is the artistic counterpart of Bishop’s biographic homelessness and
expatriation as it necessarily introduces distance (between the parts of the divided ironic
consciousness, or between the surface meaning and the intended meaning) and
detachment. The ironic distance is the counterpart of both the spatial distance separating
the expatriate from home and psychological distance separating an orphan from her
roots.
In poems on home and homelessness, Bishop uses irony to distance herself from
her losses and pain and to connect the few family memories and images she has into
something that will provide her with a substitute for the home she had lost. When she
uses irony in the distancing function she resorts either to understatement (as in the
ekphrastic poems where she diminishes the importance of the described paintings) or to
disguise and masking (as in “Crusoe in England” that pretends to be completely
detached from Bishop’s biography). The connecting function of irony lets Bishop gather
the heterogeneous bits and pieces of her family history and make them meaningful to
her. Paradoxically, irony is not a disrupting factor but a means of arriving at a sense of
coherence, almost a saving grace. This is how David Kalstone comments on the
beginnings of Bishop’s stay in Brazil (but the comment may apply to the whole of her
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writing career): “She was not writing, as Lowell did, in the shadow of a family, present
and past, but rather the reverse, almost a lone individual entering into and acquiring
attachments…, out of a need to gain a world rather than to lose one” (195). And irony
was the factor that gave her shelter and helped to form attachments to her own past, to
retroactively build her family history.
Chapter 5
The Politics of Irony. Irony as a Masking Device. The Private and the Public Spheres in
Bishop’s Poetry.
In the following chapter I will examine Elizabeth Bishop’s use of irony from the
political angle. I will focus on two dimensions of the political – first, I will examine the
sphere that seems the most intimate one, i.e. love and sexuality, showing how political
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issues encroach on the private ones and force Bishop to resort to all kinds of ironic and
masking strategies to ensure her safety and the greatest possible degree of freedom. The
reasons why she felt that disclosing certain facts might be dangerous – politically and
personally – are manifold. In Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View
Camille Roman provides a suggestive list of problems Bishop had to struggle with:
she was both ill and reticent… Bishop was struggling with many other conflicts
and demands: her poetic genius; an attachment to a protected, privileged life;
professional ambition; compromised attempts at recognizing social difference;
childhood war trauma; the childhood death of her father and the mental
institutionalization of her mother; anxieties about authoritarianism, militarism,
Communism, and Fascism; political and historical naïveté and innocence; and
lesbianism (2).
The private sphere will be examined against the background of gender issues. Here, I
will refer to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble as well as Camille Roman’s Elizabeth
Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View which categorizes and analyses masking
strategies Bishop applied in response to the political situation during World War II and
the Cold War. The problems of gender in Bishop’s poetry will be shown in the readings
of two poems: “Pink Dog,” which advocates dressing up as a life-saving strategy, and
“Exchanging Hats,” which presents gender as masquerade in a light, ostensibly
insouciant manner. In my analysis of the private sphere in Bishop’s poetry, I will look
both at poems published during Bishop’s lifetime – “Four Poems,” “Varick Street,”
“Sonnet” – and at some of the poems and drafts collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the
Juke-Box edited by Alice Quinn – “It is marvellous to wake up together,” “Vague Poem
(Vaguely love poem).” The poems that were either unfinished or unsatisfactory for their
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author will be placed next to the ones Bishop decided to make public. Such an
arrangement will foreground the issues Bishop wanted to mask and demonstrate how
intricate and multifaceted her strategies were in the poems she considered complete.
Moreover, not only does the way Bishop dealt with love differ in the published and
unpublished poems, but also the number of love poems published during her lifetime is
relatively small compared to numerous love poems that can be found in Edgar Allan
Poe & The Jukebox: “Good-Bye,” “Washington as a Surveyor,” “What would be worst
of all,” “Under such heavy clouds of love,” “Valentine” [See here, my distant dear, I
lie], “I had a bad dream,” “It is marvellous to wake up together,” “Edgar Allan Poe &
The Juke-Box,” “Hannah A.,” “Little Thaw in January,” “I had a bad dream…,” “Dear,
my compass,” “Close close all night…,” “Far far away there, where I met…,” “Aubade
and Elegy,” “Vague Poem (Vaguely love poem)” all deal – not always successfully –
with the subject in question. It would be interesting to think what kind of internal
psychological or political censorship – apart from the obvious cases when she refrained
from printing the poems for artistic reasons – made Bishop refrain from publishing
these lyrics.
In the second part of the chapter, I will concentrate on Bishop’s Brazilian poems,
most notably, “Arrival at Santos” and “Santarém.” Reading “Arrival at Santos,” I will
demonstrate that in dealing with political problems (such as colonialism or the cultural
hegemony of the United States) Bishop resorts to a strategy similar to the one she
adopts when she confronts her precursors, i.e. she avoids a direct, face-to-face
confrontation. In this case, she gives vent to her criticism by introducing in the poem a
voice that cannot be recognized as her own and by ironically juxtaposing this voice with
other voices. Moreover, ostensibly dealing with Brazilian issues, Bishop also indirectly
discusses other problems (her own homelessness, and her position as a woman in the
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American poetic tradition), but as if covertly. Instances where she makes more
pronounced political declarations are rare (“Roosters” can serve as an example), usually
rather understated (“View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress”) and often
remain unpublished or even unfinished (“Brasil, 1959,” “Suicide of a Moderate
Dictator”). To better demonstrate the specificity of her irony, I will contrast the way
Bishop uses the device in Questions of Travel (the volume that contains most of her
Brazilian poems) with the irony used by Stevens in his “Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction.”
Finally, the analyses will close with a look at “Santarém,” written in 1978, one
of the last poems published during Bishop’s lifetime. Not only does the poem
beautifully summarize the Brazilian themes in Bishop’s poetry but it also draws on
motives from all of Bishop’s work (it contains numerous references to her earlier
pieces). The poem shows all the subtleties of Bishop’s inimitable use of irony. Its irony
is multi-faceted and nuanced without effacing the speaker’s ego. In contrast, in de
Man’s interpretation of irony, the ego disappears completely, is effaced by the
procession of tropes. Also, Bishop’s dismantling of strong binary oppositions in
“Santarém” is a result of careful observation of the Brazilian landscape and a reading
and reassessment of her own oeuvre rather than a result of any pre-defined theoretical
standpoint.
In “Pink Dog” Bishop combines indelicacy, wry humour and understatement.
The poem deals with social issues (poverty and the situation of women) and overtly
advocates masking as a means of avoiding being “an eyesore,” indeed as a survival
strategy (Bishop can do it in the poem precisely because it is not a poem about people):
The sun is blazing and the sky is blue
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Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.
Naked, you trot across the avenue.
Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare!
Naked and pink, without a single hair…
Startled, the passersby draw back and stare.
Of course they’re mortally afraid of rabies.
You are not mad; you have a case of scabies
but look intelligent. Where are your babies?
(A nursing mother, by those hanging teats.)
In what slum have you hidden them, poor bitch,
while you go begging, living by your wits?
Didn’t you know? It’s been in all the papers,
to solve this problem, how they deal with beggars?
They take and throw them in the tidal rivers.
Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites
go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights
out in the suburbs, where there are no lights.
If they do this to anyone who begs,
drugged, drunk, or sober, with or without legs,
what would they do to sick, four-leggèd dogs?
In the cafés and on the sidewalk corners
the joke is going round that all the beggars
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who can afford them now wear life preservers.
In your condition you would not be able
even to float, much less to dog-paddle.
Now look, the practical, the sensible
solution is to wear a fantasía.
Tonight you simply can’t afford to be an eyesore. But no one will ever see a
dog in máscara this time of year.
Ash Wednesday’ll come but Carnival is here.
What sambas can you dance? What will you wear?
They say that Carnival’s degenerating
–radios, Americans, or something,
have ruined it completely. They’re just talking.
Carnival is always wonderful!
A depilated dog would not look well.
Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!
(CP 190-1)
The title suggests that the animal in question will be male. The dog’s colour, rather than
signalling a skin disease, makes one think that we will be dealing with a toy or a knickknack dog. The opening lines, however, can be easily understood as referring neither to
a dog nor to an inanimate object, but to a person: “The sun is blazing and the sky is blue
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/ umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue. / Naked, you trot across the avenue.” Only as
late as the fourth stanza do we learn that the dog is a bitch: “Where are your babies? //
(A nursing mother, by those hanging teats.)” The poem wants to mask the fact that its
protagonist is a dog; the disclosure of the information that it is a female dog is
postponed. Such use of masking and deferral of information in a poem that advocates
dressing up means that the lyric puts its advice in practice – it is a poem about poverty
and sexual inequality dressed in a costume of a carnivelesque and grotesque fantasy
about a dog.
In his essay “’The Flicker of Impudence’: Delicacy and Indelicacy in the poetry
of Elizabeth Bishop” Thomas Travisano observes: “Carnival’s gaiety emerges here as a
desperate deferral strategy, an attempt to deny, postpone, or dance away life’s most
unsettling problems” (Lombardi 124). It seems, however, that participating in the
carnival festivities is neither an attempt to dance away all one’s troubles nor a passing
fancy. The masquerade should actually be permanent, costume is something necessary.
As Joan Feit Diehl observes in her essay “Bishop’s sexual poetics,” the voice that gives
the advice is both “sympathetic and admonitory:” “Unless the poor bitch can redirect
her wits toward disguise, she will join those ‘idiots, paralytics, parasites’ thrown into
nearby tidal rivers” (Lombardi 33). Wearing a costume, a disguise, is not play, but
a question of life or death.
In the same essay, Diehl points to Stevensian echoes present in Bishop’s poem.
The first line of the lyric, “The sun is blazing and the sky is blue,” brings to mind the
title of Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” (358), and Bishop’s
“What sambas can you dance? What will you wear?” echoes the last lines of Stevens’s
“The American Sublime:” “What wine does one drink? / What bread does one eat?”
(131). In “The American Sublime” Stevens asks
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How does one stand
to behold the sublime?
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers,
And plated pairs?
(130)
According to Diehl, his answer is “a stripping away of the external self” (Lombardi 33)
until all that is left is “The spirit and space, / The empty spirit / In vacant space”
(Stevens 131). How is the reading of Stevens relevant to the analysis of Bishop’s poem?
Diehl draws a parallel between the two poems: “Like ‘The American Sublime,’ ‘Pink
Dog’ confronts a world of disguise and advocates a necessary defense, not of stripping
away but of costume” (32). Bishop advises the ironic strategy of masquerade, of
constant change and readjustment. And dancing is precisely constant change. But
carnival is also an epitome of plenty, of abundance, or even excess. In this sense,
Bishop’s stance is the negative of the American sublime as understood by Stevens. The
juxtaposition of Bishop’s ironic masquerade and Stevens’s American sublime will be
significant in the discussion of Bishop’s irony as it will help grasp the specificity of
Bishop’s irony and perhaps define it as something opposed to the sublime.
I n Luminous Traversing. Wallace Stevens and the American Sublime Jacek
Gutorow presents early attempts at a definition of sublimity: “Longinus approached
what he called the sublime (hupsous) as both a set of rhetorical devices and a sensibility
which is artificially aroused and elevated by things terrifying and uncanny. One should
note that the double perspective – on technical issues (rhetorical devices) and on
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psychic processes – results in serious ambivalence inherent in the very definition of the
term” (15).
Obviously, one can see that the sublime shares this “double perspective” with
irony which can be viewed as both a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, and as
a consciousness, a state of mind. The difference between Stevens’s and Bishop’s
approaches to poetry lies precisely in the strategy of stripping away advocated by
Stevens. The negativity, the stripping away are qualities of the sublime stressed by the
opponents of Harold Bloom’s interpretation of the Stevensian sublime (Gutorow,
Luminous Traversing, 26). Paul A. Bové, quoted by Gutorow, says: “Stevens’ poetry is
often a destruction of the sublime as Bloom describes it” (26). The critic, analysing
Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” adds: “this poem reveals the untruth, the illusion, the fiction
of all attitude toward reality which ignore the nothingness at their base, their center”
(26).
A poem that best presents the overabundance, the joy of costume and crossdressing, as opposed to the nothingness at the heart of Stevens’ sublime, is Bishop’s
“Exchanging Hats”:
Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady’s hat,
-oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist
in spite of our embarrassment.
Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.
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Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach
with paper plates upon your laps,
keep putting on the yachtsmen’s caps
with exhibitionistic screech,
the visors hanging o’er the ear
so that the golden anchors drag,
-the tides of fashion never lag.
Such caps may not be worn next year.
Or you who don the paper plate
itself, and put some grapes upon it,
or sport the Indian’s feather bonnet,
-perversities may aggravate
the natural madness of the hatter.
And if the opera hats collapse
and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,
he thinks what might a miter matter?
Unfunny uncle, you who wore a
hat too big, or one too many,
tell us, can’t you, are there any
stars inside your black fedora?
Aunt exemplary and slim,
with avernal eyes, we wonder
what slow changes they see under
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their vast, shady, turned-down brim.
(CP 200-1)
The poem establishes an apparent symmetry between genders. Both uncles and aunts
seem to be described by adjectives with negative prefixes: “unfunny” and “anandrous.”
But this is only camouflaging symmetry. “Unfunny” is a negation of a common
adjective, whereas “anandrous” means “having no stamens” and is used to describe
flowers. The word originates in Greek – anandros lacking males, from AN- + anēr man
(“Anandrous”). Thus, the adjective referring to the female relatives is a negation of an
adjective referring to male flowers, whereas “unfunny” carries no reference to the
feminine gender. In English, as opposed to Greek, the issue is even more complicated as
the word “androus” does not figure in the English lexicon (although there exist words
like “monandrous” and “poliandrous”). In other words, the feminine form, even though
it historically derives from a masculine one, is not derived from the male form by
adding a negative suffix but is an independent word in contemporary English.
Moreover, the fact that Bishop chooses a botanical term, one that many readers may
have to look up in dictionaries, suggests further asymmetries between the two genders
and points to complexities in defining femininity.
Also, the epithet “unfunny” describing the uncles is used twice, as if they did not
merit any other adjectives. The repetition stresses the flatness of their jokes, and the
general lack of imagination on their part. In contrast, the aunts are not only anandrous
but also “exemplary and slim,” they have “avernal eyes” (“avernal” comes from the
name of the Italian lake Avernus and was associated in poetry with infernal regions) and
they wear hats with “vast, shady, turned-down brims.” The aunts are certainly more
poetic and mysterious than the uncles. The brims of their hats are vaguely suggestive of
Marianne Moore (as depicted in the famous Richard Avedon portrait). In “Invitation to
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Miss Marianne Moore” Bishop wrote about “angels all riding / on the broad black brim
of your [Moore’s – A.Z.] hat” (CP 82) – in “Exchanging Hats,” instead of “angels,” she
uses the nearly homophonous “changes” – the “slow changes” that she is looking for
might be the shifts in gender relations.
But why are the uncles so monotonously unfunny in the first place? This is how
Judith Butler comments on the conclusions of Lévi-Strauss: “Structuralist discourse
tends to refer to the Law in the singular, in accord with Lévi-Strauss’s contention that
there is a universal structure of regulating exchange that characterizes all systems of
kinship. According to The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the object of exchange that
both consolidates and differentiates kinship relations is women” (49).
In the light of the cited fragment one can say that the uncles are unfunny because
their jokes only show their will to perpetuate the persistence of the “universal structure
of regulating exchange.” The feminine headgear the uncles try on is metonymic of
women. One should also notice that the exchange of hats that the uncles and aunts
engage in is not mutual – we do not know whether the lady’s hat the uncles try on
belongs to any of the aunts (most probably – it does not) and the yachtsmen’s caps are
certainly not the property of any of the uncles. In other words, the uncles and the aunts
play two different games. The men’s game is unfunny as it reduces women to objects of
exchange and perpetuates the old, patriarchal social order. The somewhat broad and
bawdy jokes made in a closed male circle serve to strengthen what Luce Irigaray calls
“hommo-sexuality,” the order in which only men can actively participate in sexual
relationships and women are only objects (qtd. in Butler 67). In contrast, the women’s
game in Bishop’s poem is at once lighter and more subversive. Their game, a sort of
masquerade, at once protects them (the masquerade may serve to hide thoughts or
desires men are afraid of and may want to react against) and help redefine their identity
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through a different structuring of power relations between genders. This is what Butler
writes about female masquerade:
[T]he woman in masquerade wishes for masculinity in order to engage in public
discourse with men and as a man as part of a male homoerotic exchange. And
precisely because that male homoerotic exchange would signify castration, she
fears the same retribution that motivates the “defenses” of the homosexual man.
Indeed, perhaps femininity as masquerade is meant to deflect from male
homosexuality – that being the erotic presupposition of hegemonic discourse,
the “hommo-sexuality” that Irigaray suggests. In any case, Riviere would have
us consider that such women sustain masculine identifications not to occupy
a position in a sexual exchange, but, rather, to pursue a rivalry that has no
sexual object or, at least, that has none she will name. (67)
Masks, costumes, dressing up, cross-dressing, exchanging hats are so important to the
analysis of Bishop’s irony precisely because masquerade is a manifestation of the same
ironic consciousness that manifests itself in utterances that always mean something else
than it seems at first. And when one seems to have established the new meaning, it
changes again, and continues to change overcoming all limitations. Similarly, a person
wearing a mask seems to be saying that they are indeed someone else than it seems, and
that they can change into yet another person by wearing a different mask. Moreover, the
mask shields the face it covers. It gives protection so that one can grimace, smile, cry
and show fear without anyone taking notice. Looking at the poems that touch upon the
subjects of love, eroticism and intimacy I will examine Bishop’s masking strategies as
well as try to see what is being hidden behind the masks. I will start with a look at one
of the last poems published during Bishop’s lifetime, “Sonnet” (written in 1979):
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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!
(CP 192)
Although “Sonnet” can be interpreted as an affirmation of freedom as well as
one’s homosexuality (due to the final adjective and the exclamation mark), Bishop
makes her statements in a very indirect, or even confounding way. Camille Roman,
referring to Michel de Certau’s work on political resistance, distinguishes four
negotiation strategies Bishop uses: visible complicity, quasi-visible dissent, quasi(in)visible dissent, and confounding silence (Roman 4). Although I do not want to stick
to her classification on a regular basis as I think Bishop’s negotiation strategies are even
more complex than Roman claims, I think that Roman’s categories may prove useful in
describing some of the poet’s ironic strategies. Her approach to form in “Sonnet” is
exceptionally problematic and ambiguous. The title, announcing that the poem we are
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about to read will be a sonnet, signals visible complicity in relation to the poetic
tradition. But the way the poem is rendered formally points to an attempt at quasivisible dissent from the conventions. In her text “Perversity as Voice” Jacqueline
Vaught Brogan observes: “Although technically a sonnet in some ways because it has
fourteen lines, an octet and sestet, Bishop’s last lyric subverts the most famous lyric
form by inverting the position of octet and sestet and by reducing the expected iambic
pentameters to half-lines” (Lombardi 192). The formal innovations Bishop introduces
may suggest that sonnet, as a form associated with the expression of heterosexual love,
usually by a male speaker14, needs to be modified to better suit her aims. Bishop’s
approach to form in this poem is reminiscent of the strategy she adopted in “The
Gentleman of Shalott.” Whereas in the latter she rewrote the ballad form, here Bishop
reshapes the sonnet. Interestingly, in both cases, Bishop’s innovations tend towards the
humble, the minimalist. Her ballad is a very short poem, only a distant echo of the
original form, and in her sonnet, she also aims at minimalization, reducing the length of
the lines and not sticking to any of the traditional rhyme patterns of a sonnet, choosing
instead to use an irregular pattern of rhymes, half-rhymes, and assonances.
The analogy between “Sonnet” and “The Gentleman of Shalott” expands beyond
the formal aspects of the two poems. Although “The Gentleman of Shalott” has only
one protagonist and the short “Sonnet” as much as four, one can interpret “the bubble /
in the spirit-level,” “the compass needle,” “the broken thermometer’s mercury” and the
light refracted in the “bevel / of the empty mirror” as representative of four states – or
four stages – of consciousness – described by the adjectives “caught,” “undecided,”
“freed” and “gay.” Indeed, one can even read the sequence of adjectives as a compact
narrative telling of the struggles – both internal and social – of a homosexual person,
14
With notable exceptions of love sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (cf. Sonnets from the
Portuguese) or Edna St. Vincent Millay.
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and the eventual coming out of the closet. The final image of the poem – the “rainbow
bird” formed by the light refracted and dispersed in the “bevel / of the empty mirror,”
and the last word of the lyric – the triumphantly exclaimed “gay” – support such an
interpretation.
Bishop presents a truly carnivalesque collection of characters – four different
disguises for the speaker’s ironic, divided and torn ego. “Sonnet” is more plenary, more
exuberant than “The Gentleman of Shalott” (as there are more protagonists, and more
metamorphoses) but at the same time it is also more minimalist in some respects – in
“Sonnet” Bishop writes about things one usually barely notices; small, changing,
ephemeral (as the rainbow bird) and elusive.
Still, all the four “creatures” from “Sonnet” are in one way or another similar to
the Gentleman of Shalott. Like the Gentleman, the bubble is “a creature divided.” But
its division is of a different nature than the Gentleman’s split. The Gentleman of Shalott
is half-body and half-mirror image, whereas the bubble is divided between freedom and
entrapment. It is at once free and enclosed – it can float freely inside the spirit-level
(although its floating does depend on the position of the tool; the way it floats does not
depend on the bubble’s unconstrained decisions) but it can never leave the container in
which it has been closed.
The compass needle – “wobbling and wavering, / undecided” – also resembles
the Gentleman of Shalott, who finds “uncertainty… exhilarating” (CP 10). But then
again, the compass needle indeed only appears to move like an undecided person,
whereas in fact its movements are guided by the laws of physics and have nothing to do
with decision making or free will.
The broken thermometer’s mercury is like the Gentleman of Shalott when he
manages not to worry about the glass staying put, and thus can freely “walk and run /
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and his hands can clasp one / another” (CP 10). But its freedom also depends on
somebody’s breaking the thermometer and its movements are again guided by the laws
of physics. Mercury, the epitome of unconstrained poetic imagination, elusive,
resembling the mythological Protheus in its constant metamorphoses, turns out to be
entirely dependent on external conditions.
Finally, the same is true about the “rainbow bird,” the effect created by the light
that has been refracted by the bevel of the mirror. If the Gentleman of Shalott’s
existence was half-dependent on the mirror, the rainbow bird could not even half-exist
had it not been for the bevel. In the narrow sense, the Gentleman is – within the poem’s
universe – dependent upon the mirror; and in a broader sense – as he is an imaginary
creature – upon the imagination of the poet. The four objects in “Sonnet” are not
imaginary but are treated as if they were not objects but protagonists of the poem. They
serve as metaphors for the vicissitudes of freedom and entrapment. It turns out that even
the substances and images that seem metaphoric of freedom (mercury, the rainbow bird)
are in fact constrained and limited. What should one do to secure for oneself a
reasonable degree of freedom? Bishop seems to suggest that choosing one of the four
proposed costumes, or shapes and holding on to it, is not enough. In “The Gentleman of
Shalott” she wrote about the “sense of constant re-adjustment,” the necessity of an
incessant flow of thoughts, a perpetual movement of the ironic mind. Here, she expands
upon it, showing that the lonely imaginary figure of the Gentleman of Shalott will not
suffice; one has to change the costumes more often and keep metamorphosing into the
four different figures she introduces in “Sonnet.”
Let us contrast “Sonnet” with Bishop’s earlier poem, “O Breath,” the final piece
in the sequence of “Four Poems,” from A Cold Spring (1955). We will see how the lyric
treats the questions of love and masking, and the relation between surface and depth:
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Beneath that loved and celebrated breast,
silent, bored really blindly veined,
grieves, maybe lives and lets
live, passes bets,
something moving but invisibly,
and with what clamor why restrained
I cannot fathom even a ripple,
(See the thin flying of nine black hairs
four around one five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably on your own breath.)
Equivocal, but what we have in common’s bound to be there,
whatever we must own equivalents for,
something that maybe I could bargain with
and make a separate peace beneath
within if never with.
(CP 79)
The poem opens with a lofty epithet – “lovely and celebrated breast” – and tries
to learn what hides beneath this breast, or, to put it more literally, what is the nature and
the mechanism of love. Obviously, the tone of the first line, and the hyperbole used,
may be taken to mean that what the speaker endeavours to do is doomed to fail from the
very start. Once more, we have costume – in this case, one can interpret the body as the
costume hiding the heart and soul – and the uncertainty as to what is hidden underneath
the apparel. The poem acknowledges the failure of a symmetrical relationship. Nothing
in this relationship is direct, reciprocal or immediate. The speaker talks about making
a “separate peace” [emphasis mine – A.Z.] not with the other person, not even with
“something [they] have in common,” but with “whatever [they] must own equivalents
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for.” And yet making peace “with” is asserted as impossible. The complexity of
Bishop’s reasoning brings to mind metaphysical conceits but it would be more fruitful
to look at the issue from a theoretical point of view. In his foreword to the Polish edition
of Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Michał Paweł Markowski
makes a distinction between Lacan’s and Barthes’ understanding of love. According to
Markowski, in Barthes’ interpretation love is neither a symptom, nor a signifiant – in
love, there is no distance between speech and desire; thus, uttering “I love you” is
a gesture against language, against signs. In contrast, in Lacan’s interpretation, the
uttering of “I love you” only sends back to an infinite chain of signifiants, to speech that
hides the unconscious (20-21). In her poem, Bishop underscores the untraversable gap
that exists between signs and that which wants to finds its expression. Moreover,
between the speaker and the object of her love there is another gap, a void similar to the
Lacanian objet petit a, typographically depicted by the caesuras appearing in every line
of “O Breath.”
What complicates the expression of love in Bishop’s lyric, is the ambiguous,
half-erotic, and half-indelicate image of black hairs on the lover’s chest:
(See the thin flying of nine black hairs
four around one five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably on your own breath.)
Interestingly, the image appears in brackets, as if it was to be hidden, inconspicuous.
The indelicacy of the image and the way the indelicate elements are incorporated in the
poem have been accurately described by Thomas Travisano:
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Vulgar detail abounds in Bishop’s work, reflecting both her natural instincts as
an observer and a conscious method of achieving depth and complexity of tone.
But these details are harder to observe than in the verse of her contemporaries
because Bishop refused to grant them featured status or to cry “Woe!” over
them. Instead, she wove vulgar detailing so skillfully into the fabric of her verse
that most casual readers and many not-so-casual ones have failed to notice
them, although they will not have failed to feel their effects. (Lombardi 114)
Travisano emphasizes the fact that Bishop uses the indelicate not only to “emblematize
sickness,” but also to foreground vitality, humour and, most of all, to strengthen the
reader’s surprise (114). In “O Breath” the indelicate image plays yet different functions.
First of all, in the context of the juxtaposition of Barthes’ and Lacan’s interpretations of
love, the image, this time, seems to support Barthes’ reading of love. Namely, the hairs
on the lover’s chest, “flying almost intolerably” bring to mind the chapter of Fragments
d’un discours amoureux where Barthes talks about the disruption of the impeccable
image of the loved person. Barthes refers to an episode of The Brothers Caramazov in
which a dead body is recovered from the grave after five years and turns out to be
impeccable except for a tiny spot on the nose, a sign of its rotting. By the same token, in
each relationship, there comes a moment when an apparently insignificant detail shatters
the perfection of the loved person and binds him or her with the flat, common world –
the object of love suddenly stops being the other and becomes an other among others
(Barthes 67-69).
In Bishop’s poem, however, the hairs mentioned in brackets not only shatter the
perfect image of the loved person – they also introduce a sort of sexual ambiguity and
anxiety. At first, the passage in brackets brings to mind a fragment of T.S. Eliot’s “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
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And I have known the arms already, known them all –
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
(6)
Interestingly enough, just like Bishop, Eliot mentions the hair in brackets. However, in
his case, the observation conveys a certain fear of femininity, if not straight misogyny.
In Bishop’s poem, the hairs are intolerable because they belong to a woman – apart
from the fact that hair on a female chest is culturally less acceptable than on a man’s,
the mentioning of the hair becomes automatically a covert confession of the speaker’s
lesbianism. The confession, because it is perceived as dangerous, is hidden in brackets
instead of being made manifest.
If “O Breath” was focused on the questions of separation and mediation, “It is
marvellous to wake up together” opens with images of unity and harmony. The unity
exists not only between the two lovers who wake up together, “[a]t the same minute”
(EAP 44) but also between the lovers and nature: it starts raining immediately after they
wake up: “marvellous to hear / The rain begin suddenly all over the roof;” and the
simultaneity of the storm and their caresses at the end of the poem, also suggests
harmony with nature: “All over the roof the rain hisses, / And below, the light falling of
kisses” (44). However, the simple, jingling rhyme makes one want to reconsider the
question of whether nature and love really coexist in such peaceful harmony. At first,
the ending seems to confirm the existence of a perfect accord:
Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
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As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.
(44)
Everything can change without warning; the lightning can strike without giving us time
to blink, to protect our eyes. And the kisses can change – here, one can think about both
a fervent fit of passion or an upsurge of sudden coldness – without any previous signals.
Thus, even though one could have expected a questioning of harmony between the
lovers and nature, the harmony stays intact. Instead, the peacefulness is questioned.
But what is it that this poem – unpublished during Bishop’s lifetime – reveals, or
unmasks, that might have been considered dangerous by Bishop? Most probably it is
not love or eroticism, which is not treated in any exceptionally open or daring manner.
What comes to the surface in this poem – and is better hidden in the published ones – is
anxiety and fright. According to Freud, anxiety is a state of awaiting danger and
preparing to face it, whereas fright is a state one finds oneself in when one is in danger
one has not been prepared for (“Strach” 310). In a way, in anxiety there is something
that protects one from fright, enabling one to prepare for the danger. In Bishop’s poem,
there is the anxiety caused by the weather change – just as the rain can “begin
suddenly,” love can suddenly disappear. This is anxiety, rather than fright, as Bishop
writes that “world might change to something quite different” “[w]ithout surprise”
(EAP 44). Fright is something the speaker might have experienced in the past as well as
something that she projects into the future. The anxiety is there to keep the fright at bay.
In “It is marvellous to wake up together” there is also, at a different level, the reluctance
to show the anxiety and fright as the revelation of these feelings might provoke danger.
In Bishop’s published poems fright and anxiety appear quite often but expressed in such
a way that they may be more easily overlooked. For example, in “2, 000 Illustrations
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and a Complete Concordance,” after having listed many sights and situations one can
encounter when one travels, Bishop describes a brothel in Marrakesh and proceeds: “It
was somewhere near there / I saw what frightened me most of all” (CP 58). What
follows is a description of “a holy grave” (58). Her contention, dropped as if in passing,
makes one reconsider the whole poem in the context of fright – after all, everything seen
during travels proves to be frightful.
It seems that in “Vague Poem (Vaguely love poem),” yet another of her
unpublished lyrics, Bishop felt less anxiety and fright and chose to be more candid and
daring:
Just now, when I saw you naked again,
I thought the same words: rose-rock, rock-rose…
Rose, trying, working, to show itself,
forming, folding over,
unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges.
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex –
(EAP 153)
It is true that the passage is rather explicit but the excerpt quoted is the very ending of
the poem – before the above fragment come 31 lines that prepare the readers for the
erotic comparison, and justify its appearance (one can also say that the 31 lines record
the speaker’s hesitation).
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In its floral imagery the poem echoes “Faustina, or Rock Roses” from A Cold
Spring. There is no certainty as to when “Vague Poem (Vaguely love poem)” was
written but Alice Quinn proposes 1973 as a plausible date (EAP 345). Writing about
rock roses in “Vague Poem (Vaguely love poem),” however, Bishop makes a significant
change in relation to the image from the earlier poem. Staging the poem as a dream
scene, the poet shifts the word order and produces two expressions, not knowing which
one it was that she heard in the dream: “rose rocks” (a type of crystal common in
Oklahoma, EAP 345) and “rock roses” (flowers). The oscillation between the two
images in the whole poem strengthens the impression that the speaker hesitates before
presenting the closing erotic image. The images – of rocks and flowers – that are later
used as an analogy to erotic love show the two, apparently contradictory, aspects of
love. Rocks stand for stability and durability. They offer protection, like a shield or
a suit of armour. Here, one can think not only about the protection love can offer but
also about the protection the speaker seeks when she is afraid of revealing the erotic
nature of love. The flowers – rose rocks – stand for ephemeral beauty and vulnerability.
The opposition between rocks and flowers, however, is not as sharp as it seems. In the
poem Bishop mentions crystallography, reminding the reader that rose rocks are not as
unchanging as they appear. Just like flowers, they develop and change with time, only at
a different pace. Foregrounding the least typical, or stereotypical features of stones is
reminiscent of Lowell’s “Water” where the rock and the water behave contrary to the
speaker’s expectations but most of all it reminds us of Bishop’s “The Bight” where all
the elements of the natural world (water, stones, the air) prove to have different qualities
than the observer had expected, all sharp divisions and oppositions are questioned and
the world melts away, in a dazzling, hazy dialectics, in what Marshall Berman calls
“gaseousness” (144).
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The dismantling of sharp binary oppositions is very typical of Bishop. For
example, when Thomas Travisano writes about delicacy and indelicacy in Bishop’s
poetry, he observes that the two are not opposed to each other, neither clearly isolated –
rather, the indelicate element is almost imperceptibly woven into the fabric of the poem
and makes the overall poetic effect more genuine (Lombardi 111-125). The same is true
about war imagery. Camille Roman quotes reviewers of Bishop’s North & South who
stress the fact that the book (according to Louise Bogan) “contains all manner of
references to war and warriors” and that (according to Susan Schweik) it “might be
read, in fact, as a war book in-directed. In it the matters of literature – naval
engagement, border crossing, skirmishes, search missions, even a monument of sorts –
appear, but only as covert operations” (qtd. in Roman 31). Again, even in North &
South war is not juxtaposed with peace, the public is not openly opposed to the private.
Neither is war simply a topic of the poems. Instead, war imagery and war vocabulary
are so much part of the speaker’s frame of mind that it is impossible to tell apart the
different spheres of life – war, art, geography, love, and others – as the perception of
one of them is always reshaped by the perspectives borrowed from the others. For
instance, the first poem of Bishop’s first collection North & South, “The Map,” tackles
the question of representation. The final line, however – “[m]ore delicate than the
historians’ are the map-makers’ colors” (CP 3) – may provoke one to read the
eponymous map as a military one. Similarly, the mysterious construction described in
“The Monument” may not only be a work of art, suggestive of Joseph Cornell’s
installations, but also, perhaps, an ancient war machinery or a monument to somebody
killed in a war. The following fragment points to an alliance between politics, war and
art:
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an ancient promontory,
an ancient principality whose artist-prince
might have wanted to build a monument
to mark a tomb or boundary, or make
a melancholy or romantic scene of it…
(CP 24)
Still, in both poems – “The Map” and “The Monument” – there are no signals that
would make one choose only one interpretation at the cost of others. One reading does
not efface other possible interpretations. For instance, the interpretation of “The Map”
as a poem about military expansion does not preclude reading the poem as an analysis
of the questions of mimesis. The apparently conflicting interpretations, tones and
vocabularies do not cancel one another; Bishop makes them work with the help of
irony, an irony that dissolves too sharp binary oppositions.
The three opening poems of Questions of Travel – “Arrival at Santos,” “Brazil,
January 1, 1502” and “Questions of Travel” – show how any expectations of a wellordered structure become undermined and how the most heterogenous elements, instead
of becoming opposites, enter most surprising configurations. “Arrival at Santos”15 opens
with an instance of order and symmetry that is so perfect – as well as being at once very
casual, like a (mock) remark of a tour guide dropped in passing – that the reader looks
in the text for signals that will help overturn the too neat binary structure: “Here is a
coast; here is a harbor” (CP 89). And indeed, instead of an orderly description of the
15
“Arrival at Santos” first appeared in Bishop’s second collection, A Cold Spring (1955) and was later
reprinted in Questions of Travel (1965). Its presence in A Cold Spring emphasizes its correspondence
with “The Bight,” another poem describing a port. Its inclusion in the next collection underscores the
narrative character of Questions of Travel.
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voyage and the city, we are offered a description that testifies to the speaker’s –
a first-time visitor to Brazil – feeling of loss. For the traveller, the coast, the harbor, the
city of Santos, and the country she is about to visit do not form any coherent structure or
order; they appear completely undifferentiated, confusing, and yet charged with
expectations:
impractically shaped and – who knows? – self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?
(CP 90)
The architecture, the nature and the industrial landscape will not add up to form
a comprehensible picture. On the one hand, being in the dark about what awaits her, the
speaker focuses on contemporary rituals typical of border crossing, and tourism in
general – getting through the customs safely and smoothly (“The customs officials
speak English, we hope, / and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes,” CP 90), and sending
postcards. One can say that the curiosity about stamps, the flag and the local money is
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a typical gesture of someone who does not know a given country. What is more, the fact
that Bishop chooses a speaker who should be surprised that Brazil has its own flag and
currency introduces the issue of colonialism and its aftermath as well as the United
States’ imperialism, questions that will all be posed in the subsequent poems of the
Brazilian section of Questions of Travel. On the other hand, however, it is interesting
that Bishop should focus precisely on the money, the flag and stamps – objects that are
linked to the state (issuing money), politics, law enforcement and communication.
Money, the flag and stamps all bear the state’s signature. The political questions seem to
overwhelm the speaker from the very beginning, even though she may be reluctant to
admit it. The pondering on political issues also hides some profound doubts – namely,
there is some sort of uncertainty as to the question of whether she may enter Brazil at all
and a meekness resembling the behaviour of the man from the country who wants to
enter the law from Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law” (reprinted also in The
Trial as part of the “In the Cathedral” chapter) (235). Also, the power relations and the
legal system of Brazil that the speaker is yet to discover constitute a new system of
signifiants that has to be mastered and the necessity to master the system is yet another
source of apprehension.
Interestingly enough, in the passage about entering the harbour Bishop rhymes
“comprehension” with “suspension.” At face value it only means that after a long sea
voyage, of being neither home nor abroad, one finally comes to one’s destination and
begins to understand the new place. But the rhymed couplet also asserts the necessity of
a period of suspension before any comprehension takes place. The exact rhyme
legitimizes interpreting the pair of words as an equation: comprehension is only
a suspension, Bishop seems to be saying, a suspension before a new comprehension will
overturn the previous one. The assertion about the ever-changing nature of knowledge,
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hinted at many times in Bishop’s poetry (most notably in the ending of “At the
Fishhouses”), will be later more openly voiced in the final lines of John Ashbery’s “And
Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” from his 1977 volume Houseboat Days:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
(519-20)
The beginning of understanding is simultaneously the commencement of its
undoing and, one may add, the beginning of a new understanding, just like any
comprehension is only a suspension before the advent of a new knowledge.
Ashbery’s exceptionally lucid poem outlines a poetics of irony as well as a tentative
theory of communication. In Bishop’s “Arrival at Santos,” however, we can hear at
least two alternating voices – the voice of the conceited, frightened American tourist
amazed by the fact that Brazil has its own flag, and the voice of someone sensitive to
the ebb and flow of meaning, a person with an ear attuned to hear the ironies that
change our understanding of things.
The presence of the voice of the tourist thinking along stereotypical lines may
account for the fact that, even though the port has something of the untidiness of the
harbour from Bishop’s “The Bight,” there is much less warmth in the speaker’s voice
when she talks about it:
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Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,
but they seldom seem to care what impression they make,
or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,
the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps –
wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter
do when we mail the letters we wrote on the boat,
either because the glue here is very inferior
or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.
(CP 89-90)
In fact, one can discern fright, or even panic, in the speaker’s reaction to the city: “We
leave Santos at once” (CP 90). There is something impatient in the desire to see the
interior (as well as to finish the poem in order to proceed to the consecutive poems of
the Brazilian sequence of Questions of Travel. The final lines of the poem seem a bit
paradoxical: “we leave Santos at once; / we are driving to the interior.” Santos inspired
fear and impatience in the speaker who, instead of escaping from Brazil, getting outside,
chooses to plunge ever more deeply into the country. And the fact that “interior” rhymes
with “inferior” that appears two lines earlier suggests that the voyage will not be an easy
one. In fact, the pair “inferior – interior” introduces Dantesque tones. The voyage inland
turns into a descent into Hell, into the ever more terrible circles, down to the very
centre. (Obviously, one should not read the passage in all seriousness. To relieve the
tension, the speaker looks at the frightful prospect of travel with some ironic distance.)
In “Arrival at Santos” Bishop’s irony lets her speak in two different voices. One
should add that it is very difficult to determine which words are uttered by the
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stereotypically depicted tourist and which – by the more open-minded speaker. One can
also view the utterances as pronounced by one person who struggles to choose between
the two conflicting points of view and modes of thinking. The ironic mode, shown in
the pair of rhyming word “suspension” / “comprehension,” stresses the fluid, mutable
nature of knowledge. It is interesting to look at this mode more closely, in the context of
Wallace Stevens’ ironic strategies.
Just like Stevens (and Ashbery in “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”) Bishop
stresses the necessity of the mind’s constant questioning of its own creations. In “The
Imaginary Iceberg” one can find a line that can serve as commentary on the activity of
an ironic mind in the process of creation and destruction (or creation via destruction):
“This iceberg cuts its facets from within” (CP 4). It is reminiscent of Stevens’ irony in
the interpretation of Anthony Whiting who, referring to Schlegel, writes about the
ironist’s engagement in two never-ending, simultaneous processes of “self-destruction”
and “self-creation” (13). There are, however, some crucial differences in Stevens’s and
Bishop’s approaches to irony. Let us consider Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction” and juxtapose it with Bishop’s travel poems, notably the ones gathered in
Questions of Travel. Obviously, Stevens’ long poem and Bishop’s volume of poetry are
two very different entities. Bishop has never written a long, meditative poem but her
whole book, with its division into parts (“Brazil” and “Elsewhere”) can be viewed as an
entity comparable with Stevens’ poem. Such juxtaposition will help see the differences
in the two poets’ use of irony and the differences in the scope and ambition of their
respective poetics.
It seems that Stevens’ long poem does not seek ultimate conclusiveness and
closure. As the title suggests, these are only “notes,” pointing to a future project (the
“toward” making the final effect even more remote than the preposition “for” that could
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have been used in its place), a “fiction,” modified by an indeterminate article. The
fiction, however, is supposed to be “supreme,” which suggests a hierarchical structure
with the said “fiction” placed at the very top and governing all other possible fictions.
Moreover, the modal verb “must” appearing in the titles of each of the three parts of the
poem – “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” “It Must Give Pleasure” – is typical
for a manifesto (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is an ars poetica of sorts) and
reveals the Nietzschean will to power and the willingness to transform rather than
a tentativeness and acceptance more often to be found in Bishop’s writing. The
abstraction postulated by Stevens also stands in sharp contrast with Bishop’s penchant
for everything that is singular and concrete.
Anthony Whiting points to the neat and precise structure of Stevens’ long poem
but he also notices the poet’s departures from the order announced in the titles of
subsequent parts:
Stevens’ lengthiest ars poetica appears to be organized in the same manner that
its ultimate predecessor, Aristotle’s Art of Poetry, is organized, through
classification and division. Stevens first divides his subject, a supreme fiction,
into three major categories, “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” “It Must
Give Pleasure.” Each of these categories is then formally subdivided into ten
cantos and each canto further divided into seven tercet stanzas. The method of
organization and the formal symmetry of the poem might suggest that the
movement of thought in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is hierarchical and
logical, that Stevens moves in the poem from one precisely delineated category
to the next. But “Notes,” as B.J. Leggett observes, “does not itself hold strictly
to its three-part division.” A theme or idea introduced in one section is returned
to and reexamined in the other two sections (149).
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Even though Stevens sometimes breaks with the neat organization of his
arguments, mocking slightly the academic discourse (after all, his long poem is not an
argumentative essay), his classifications remain well-ordered and hierarchical and the
speaker’s will to enforce his point of view can be felt at all times. The first part of the
poem, “It Must Be Abstract” starts in the imperative mode: “Begin, ephebe, by
perceiving the idea / Of this invention, this invented world, / The inconceivable idea of
the sun” (380). Then, Stevens continues using the modal verb “must”: “You must
become an ignorant man again” (380). Although Stevens’ is an ironic mind, ceaselessly
questioning its own ideas and rephrasing his thoughts, the abstract world of Stevens’
poem is under constant control of his will and imagination. Stevens’ is not the
Kierkegaardian mastered irony that would connect him with the society. One of the
effects of Stevens’ irony is, as in the case of Lowell, isolation. But the ends towards
which the two poets use irony could not be more different. As has been argued in
Chapter 3, Lowell uses irony to criticize the world, to voice his charges against it and
thus underscore his misery. Stevens, instead of voicing charges against the existing
world, creates an abstract one, using his will and imagination while irony makes his
dialectics of constant and simultaneous creation and destruction work. In contrast,
Marianne Moore is not as radically abstract as Stevens. As Agnieszka Salska observes,
Moore strives to preserve the balance between the abstract and the particular (75). Thus,
in “Poetry” she famously writes about “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”
(Moore 41). The world of her poems is one of imagination but it is inhabited by
genuine, live creatures. Her irony, as has been argued above, is not aimed against the
world (contrary to Lowell’s), though it is used to criticize it on moral and aesthetical
grounds. It seems, however, that Moore does not entertain the belief in the possibility of
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changing the world with her poems. Although her irony keeps her at a certain distance
from the society, she does not want to be shut off completely in the world of her
imagination. The use of very diverse sources as material for her poetry, including
popular ones, like newspaper articles or allusions to baseball, make her closer to the
substance of everyday life.
To situate Bishop vis-à-vis Wallace Stevens (her relation with Lowell and
Moore has been discussed in Chapter 3), especially the Stevens of “Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction” we should look at Bishop’s Questions of Travel a a whole. Even
though Stevens’ “notes” suggest inconclusiveness, Bishop’s “questions” are still more
indeterminate. After all, “notes” can contain sketches for both questions and answers,
whereas “questions” undoubtedly refer to the interrogative mode exclusively. Stevens’
“supreme fiction” evokes a well-structured narrative, a story that shapes and dominates
other stories, one that has been invented by a powerful consciousness. Bishop’s “travel”
can be rather haphazard, and the phrasing of the book title – Questions of Travel –
allows the possibility of treating the questions as referring to any travel, or, in fact, as
a sign of hesitation, a questioning of the very idea of travelling. The doubts are indeed
voiced in the title poem of the collection: “Should we have stayed at home and thought
of here?” (CP 93). Furthermore, while Stevens divides his long poem into three
symmetrical and identically structured parts, Bishop divides her book into two parts,
“Brazil” and “elsewhere,” which can hardly be called compatible categories. Obviously,
one reason for calling the second part of the book “Elsewhere” is that it contains poems
set in various places. (The second part is also more diversified generically as the
original edition Questions of Travel features the short story “In the Village.”) The
majority of the “Elsewhere” poems, however, is set in Nova Scotia where Bishop spent
her childhood. The decision not to mention this location in the title of the second part of
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the volume may result from the excessive emotional weight of the name. The lack of
symmetry in the titles of the two parts of Questions of Travel is also a sign of respect for
both Brazil and Nova Scotia. Brazil is so rich and singular that no other country or place
in the world can be its counterpart. Nova Scotia is so important emotionally that one
cannot make it too conspicuous by placing its name in the title.
“Santarém” is one of Bishop’s last published poems. It is also a farewell to
Brazilian topics in her work as well as an ironic reading of both her memories and her
poetry. Although the poem seems to aim at a precise description of a particular event,
the language reveals that in fact it is mainly concerned with the processes that take place
in the mind.
In a letter to Jerome Mazzaro, Elizabeth Bishop writes: “’Santarém’ happened,
just like that, a real evening & a real place, and a real Mr. Swan who said that––it is not
a composite at all” (OA 621). Thus, at first glance, it seems that the poet wants to tell
her story “as it happened,” straightforwardly, using transparent language. However, is
this really the case? Already the opening lines question the possibility of accurately
recording real-life events in language, because of the very nature of memory; the poet
stresses her uncertainty about the real state of affairs: “Of course I may be remembering
it all wrong / after, after––how many years?” (CP 185). Here, the feeling of the poet’s
hesitation and lack of confidence is strengthened by the repetition of the word “after” in
the second line. Signs of hesitation appear throughout the poem. Everything that she
saw and everything that she remembers could have been different. There are also
instances of reformulations, places where she tries to describe something as accurately
as possible and the effect of her struggle to find the most appropriate word is recorded
in the poem: “In front of the church, the Cathedral, rather, / there was a modest
promenade and a belvedere / about to fall into the river” (CP 185). Bishop was obsessed
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with finding the right words, and would sometimes spend years working on a single
poem. In his sonnet “For Elizabeth Bishop 4” Robert Lowell wrote about her: “Do / you
still hang your words in air, ten years / unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps
/ or empties for the unimaginable phrase––” (Schwartz, Estess 207). In this case Bishop
makes the process of finding the most suitable word a part of the poem itself, perhaps
making fun of her perfectionism. As we read on, we encounter the following: “A river
schooner with raked masts / and violet-colored sails tacked in so close / her bowsprit
seemed to touch the church // (Cathedral, rather!)” (CP 186). Once again, Bishop is
registering – in this case, ironically and humorously – the processes that take place in
her mind, the way she remembers (and forgets) things, showing that she has forgotten
the most appropriate word for the sacred edifice. In fact, these devices – repetitions,
revisions – make the poem more genuine. Bishop, as Jane Shore writes “is like a person
who is thinking out loud, we overhear her additions, her corrections and her deletions”
(183). Writing about Bishop’s style, Shore notices:
All of these devices accumulate in Bishop's poetry to give an overall impression
of reticence, of a tentative and ambivalent attitude toward her constantly
amended, edited and supplanted images. Sometimes, she shows this by
changing her mind. At other times, she is of two minds. She seems to take one
attitude. But when we look more closely at her images, we detect a second point
of view lurking there as a contradictory, often perverse, subtext (184).
What makes “Santarém” different from other Bishop’s poems is the poet’s will
to stress the extent to which she is aware of her poetic techniques, and the effort to make
the process of writing a part of the poem itself. Moreover, Bishop seems to allude to or
even quote from, her earlier work – “Santarém” becomes not only a memory of things
seen, but also a memory of things written, Bishop’s reading of her own work. For
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instance, when at one point she writes “it was not a miracle,” one cannot help but think
of the sestina “A Miracle for Breakfast” (CP 18). Even single words, like “cheerful” or
the repetition of “flowing” refer us back to other Bishop’s poems, “The Bight” (CP 61)
and “At the Fishhouses” (CP 66), respectively.
In her strongly autobiographical short story “In the Village” (CPr 251-271)
Bishop describes a patchwork quilt made by her grandmother from various pieces of
clothes that belonged to her family members. In Elizabeth Bishop. Her Poetics of Loss
Susan McCabe observes that “encoded in the quilt’s heterogeneous ‘irregularly shaped
pieces’ is the passage of time, and those relationships that make it up” (22). She
considers the quilt to be a good model for Bishop’s poetry. Namely, it is a poetry that
has to make do with what the poet has, even though it may not be perfect; it is a poetry
that is concerned – in Wallace Stevens’ words – with “the act of finding / What will
suffice” (239). In “Santarém” we find another, but in a way, very similar, metaphor for
Bishop’s poetry – the wasps’ nest. Wasps’ nests can be made either of wood that had
been chewed by the wasps mixed with their spit or from sand and clay. Thus, they are
made of what is available, the modest materials that are processed to serve its
constructors. Similarly, Bishop uses whatever she has at her disposal – fragments of her
own poems, memories, stories, history, anecdotes, everything that makes the poem work
and be alive and lively, and nothing to make the memory too ideal. Moreover, the image
of the wasps’ nest has manifold functions and works on many levels. First of all, it is
not only a “real-life” artifact but also an object taken from Bishop’s earlier poem,
“Jerónimo’s House” (CP 34), from her first book North & South, sending the reader in
two directions – towards reality and towards literature – at the same time.
And secondly, as Bonnie Costello observes (174), in “Santarém” itself, it
functions as a miniature or substitute for the buildings (“one story high, stucco,” CP
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185) described above (it is “hard as stucco,” CP 187), showing Bishop’s idea of a home.
Costello argues that the nest is “an emblem of [Bishop’s] ambivalence” (174) – she
finds it in a pharmacy, i.e. a place to which one goes to relieve one’s pain. The nest used
to be “a dwelling of pests, a source of stings” (Costello 174), but it is also a miniature
house. Costello observes that its complexity is similar to the ambivalence of other
homes appearing in Bishop’s writing. One can add that Bishop’s liking for the wasps’
nest is not shared by her fellow traveler, Mr. Swan, and this makes her relationship with
the object even more personal. And the nest itself – combining such contradictory
factors as pain and the sense of protection (after all, a nest is a kind of house) – is
analogous to irony that can connect different, apparently contradictory, discourses and
spheres.
It seems then that Bishop is as if of two minds. On the one hand, she is trying to
tell the story as it really was, she is describing real artifacts (the nest); but on the other
hand – she is using quotations, referring to her own poetry and playing with form and
language. But it seems that the two approaches can be reconciled – and thanks to this,
the reader is offered a genuine representation of how the poet’s memory really
functions. The description becomes more genuine thanks to the use of irony that
undermines and dismantles all attempts at idealization. Whenever her desire to interpret
the world and to draw parallels makes her jump to conclusions, her ironic consciousness
enters and blocks it: “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” (CP
185). Here, one should point to a very important feature of Bishop’s irony. Namely, the
way she uses it does not issue from any ready-made theoretical standpoint but is the
result of careful observation and constant self-control (in this case, a careful observation
of nature and a control over the mind that wants to see nature as symbolic of Eden).
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Santarém is no paradise at all, Bishop seems to be saying, quite the contrary. To
strengthen the feeling that we are on earth, the poet presents us with a matter-of-fact
reference to slavery: “After the Civil War some Southern families / came here; here they
could still own slaves” (CP 186). Characteristically, the word “here” is repeated,
stressing perhaps that the problem she alluded to lies heavily on the speaker’s mind.
However, to avoid unnecessary dramatism, to remain – as usual – very reticent, she
writes about it in parenthesis, as if to move it into the background. But still, even though
the presence of nature and the (somewhat strained) comparisons of the scenery to Eden
may evoke the pastoral convention, the reference to slavery preclude reading
“Santarém” as a traditional pastoral poem. Joseph Kuhn, in his essay “Irony and the
Eclogue in the Poetry of the Southern Fugitives” reminds us that according to William
Empson “the old pastoral” (304) implies “a beautiful relation between rich and poor”
(Empson qtd. in Kuhn 304). The master-slave relation mentioned in Bishop’s poem can
hardly be called beautiful.
The omnipresence of goldness may also suggest the originary purity, richness
and perfection of the garden of Eden. As Costello observes (173), this is evocative of an
Andrew Marvell’s pastoral, “The Garden,” where everything melts away, though not in
goldness, but in greenness:
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
194
To a green thought in a green shade
(818)
In Bishop’s poem goldness is omnipresent: the evening is “golden,” we read
about “dark-gold river sand” and “[t]he zebus’ hooves, the people’s feet / waded in
golden sand, / dampered by golden sand.” However, it turns out that everything was
“gilded” and not “golden” and the priest’s brass bed – struck by lightning – was
“galvanized black” (CP 185-187). “Goldness” is only an illusion caused by the light of
the setting sun.
There is another apparent similarity between Marvell’s pastoral “The Garden”
and Bishop’s “Santarém.” Bishop writes about “watery, dazzling dialectics” (CP 185) in
which notions are dissolved. This process seems a counterpart of Marvell’s
“[A]nnihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.” In Marvell’s
poem the mind first creates a replica of the material world – the mind is called “that
ocean where each kind / Does straight its own resemblance find” – then expands upon it
to build something even greater, and finally – it annihilates its creations reducing it to
one undifferentiated, simple, originary, “green thought.” The dissolution from Marvell’s
lyric resembles the final lines of Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete
Concordance” where the children’s gaze dissolves with the poem’s last word – “away”
(CP 59). It is, however, very different from what happens in “Santarém.” The
dissolution Bishop alludes to refers to binary oppositions, which are supplanted by more
nuanced vision or by more particular and less abstract images (like, for instance, the
final image of the wasps’ nest):
Even if one were tempted
to literary interpretations
195
such as: life / death, right / wrong, male / female
–such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off
in that watery, dazzling dialectic.
(CP 185)
The dissolution Bishop writes about is in fact another name for her irony. Rather
than mold into a conglomerate of indistinguishable parts or make her return to an
originary, undifferentiated and reflectionless oneness, it makes her transcend too easy
conclusions. Here, one may go back to Kuhn’s essay on irony and the eclogue. Kuhn
reminds us that according to Empson “the essential procedure of the old pastoral” (306)
is “putting the complex into the simple” (Empson qtd. in Kuhn 306). He proposes a
reinterpretation of the definition that could be used in reading the ironic pastorals of the
Fugitives. Kuhn argues that the very process of translating the complex into the simple
“leaves a residue of the complex that is the ironic point of vantage of the dramatized
poet-speaker” (306). His insights can be equally fruitful in the reading of Bishop’s
poetry. The speaker of “Santarém” takes exactly this ironic vantage point. This is a
position which prevents following any simple, schematic solutions, a position in which
the poet’s mind is constantly examining its own activity. That is why the poem is full of
repetitions, rephrasings and reformulations.
We are not in paradise – we are on earth, where nothing is perfect, everything
proves to be different than it seems and every experience is distorted by imperfect
language and faulty memory. But although what we see is imperfect and our
expectations are questioned and undermined by irony, Bishop is, in spite of all the
problems, satisfied: “I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place” (CP 185). Her
approach is strongly anti-idealistic, she demonstrates a cheerful resignation. In the last
line of “The Bight,” we read that everything is “awful but cheerful” (CP 61). Similarly,
196
in “Santarém” Bishop claims that “everything” is “bright, cheerful, casual.” But, after
a moment of hesitation marked by the characteristic long dash, the poet adds – “or so it
looked” (CP 185).
“Santarém” is both an interpretation of Bishop’s experience and her writing.
Made of elements that had been used before, i.e. of words and phrases that were
important in her earlier poems and using materials and images that are far from
perfection or simply ugly, Bishop still manages to convey a certain charm. At the same
time, however, she is careful not depict what she writes about as too perfect. The
omnipresent irony destroys any attempts to idealize, to create an illusion of paradise.
“Santarém” is not a monument but rather, a wasps’ nest, not utterly beautiful, bringing
painful associations but still – something like a home.
Conclusion.
Perhaps the most characteristic and significant feature of Bishop’s irony is the
fact that it abolishes binary oppositions, questioning the traditional understanding of
rhetorical and romantic irony as binary structures, and thus undermining any too easy,
structuralist interpretations of reality. Replacing the binary structure of irony with
a possibly endless chain of meanings makes Bishop’s irony almost suit the definition
formulated by Paul de Man in his essay “The Concept of Irony:” “irony is the
permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes” (179). Bishop’s approach to irony,
however, is less radical – she manages not to lose control of her irony and, despite de
Man’s diagnosis, communicate something meaningful.
197
If irony is there to underscore the ever-changing nature of reality and meaning,
how can it be stopped in the first place? It seems that in fact Bishop does not stop her
ironies altogether but rather manages to defer their action for a moment, giving the
reader just enough time to contemplate the elusive object or the fleeting meaning.
Bishop’s strategy will become clearer when we reconsider the ending of her “At the
Fishhouses” against the background of the last lines of John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura
Poesis Is Her Name” as the latter’s poet’s lyric contains ironies that are more radical
and much more unstoppable than Bishop’s. Ashbery’s poem has already been alluded to
above to demonstrate how any new comprehension of reality overturns the previous
interpretations. One should add that in Ashbery’s poem any positive understanding is
from the very beginning ironically accompanied by the perspective of its negative:
“understanding / May begin, and in doing so be undone” (520). Irony undermines all
interpretations, the processes of weaving and unravelling of meaning are simultaneous;
the beginning of an understanding is also, from the very start, its undoing.
In contrast, Bishop is less willing to let everything of meaning elude her and
float off. In “At the Fishhouses” she tries to capture “what we imagine knowledge to be:
… flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown” (CP
66). Our knowledge is “flowing, and flown” – Bishop uses the gerundive form to stress
the mutable and elusive character of knowledge. But then, after a coma and the
conjunction “and,” she places the past participle of the verb “to flow.” In this context,
one realises that our understanding is really undone when it is “flown” but as long as it
is “flowing” it is still there for us to contemplate. It is momentary and changing, but still
visible on the reader’s horizon. Bishop gives the reader the space of the gerundive form,
the coma, and the conjunction (and the time it takes to read them) to contemplate the
nature of knowledge. Only later does the ironic negativity enter for good (in the shape
198
of the final “flown” of the poem). In other words, irony is deferred by means of
grammar. Similarly, in other Bishop’s poems, irony is delayed with the help of
repetition. For instance, in “Questions of Travel,” the poet repeats the gerundive form
when writing about “the streams and clouds” that keep “travelling, travelling,” giving
the reader more time to ponder about the phenomena that are, naturally, not destined to
stay with us. Finally, one can say that Bishop’s reformulations of thoughts and selfcorrections (as in “Santarém”) as well as her descriptions with variations (for instance,
in “The Monument” the speaker describes the mysterious object several times, from
different angles, rephrasing her words and adding new information) are there not only to
make the descriptions more accurate but also to prolong our contemplation of the
objects and the meanings before they are “undone.”
One can say then that the poet’s irony, instead of making communication
impossible, by dissolving meaning in endless metamorphoses and contradictions,
enables Bishop to better probe and describe the elusive reality she aims to grasp.
Moreover, paradoxically, her irony, instead of weakening or even dismantling the poet’s
ego, strengthens it, by giving the poet a unique vantage point and a unique voice. At the
same time, however, her voice is not as overwhelming, or even authoritarian, in its
relation to the reader as that of Wallace Stevens, a poet whose use of irony is equally
nuanced and sophisticated. Thus, Bishop’s mastery in employing irony comes from her
ability to keep the difficult balance and avoid the many dangers that await the ironist.
One of the dangers – at least, from Bishop’s perspective – is using irony as an
instrument for accusing the world, risking the note of self-pity (as in the case of Robert
Lowell). Another danger is – and this is the case of Marianne Moore – using irony as a
tool helpful in teaching a lesson in morals and aesthetics. There is also the danger of
emotional violence, as in the case of Emily Dickinson. Bishop’s controlled irony
199
provides the distance to her emotions, keeps them at bay. Placing Bishop’s practice of
irony against the ways other writers use this device is very helpful as Bishop’s irony is
very difficult to be described in positive terms. It is easier to describe it negatively,
showing what Bishop refrains from doing, demonstrating how her ironic strategies
differ from the ones of her precursors and contemporaries, and, in this manner, better
understand Bishop’s craft.
Bishop’s irony is not only assertive but also defensive, in several fields and in
many different ways. First of all, Bishop’s irony lets her distance herself from her poetic
precursors and contemporaries; it enables her to overcome her anxiety of influence by
letting her perform an ironic swerve in relation to other writers.
Apart from helping to overcome the anxiety of influence, irony is for Bishop an
aid in distancing herself from personal problems in her writing. In other words, irony
helps her make the private public, or – turn her life into art. Even turned into art, all the
details of nature, geography, setting, time remain vivid and carefully recorded. Unlike
Dickinson, however, Bishop does not neglect the particular in favour of the
paradigmatic. And it is irony that lets Bishop distance herself from the painful details
without the necessity of effacing them from the poems.
Finally, irony is used by Bishop as a binding device. Bishop questions not only
the binary structure of irony, but also the hierarchy of the surface meaning and the
intended meaning. Her meanings are multiple and one cannot say that some meanings
have privilege over others. Thus, the vantage point of irony enables Bishop to join very
different, seemingly incongruous intellectual stances into a consistent whole, without
losing the complexity she wants to convey. The binding potential of irony is important
for a person who felt deracinated, did not have a real home but felt compelled to build
one for herself. Irony turned out to be a surprising ally in the process of home- and
200
identity-building. What is more, her mastered irony – apart from helping Bishop
construct a home (and become reconnected to her family) and a poetic voice – lets
Bishop enter the community of ironists, thus providing a cure for isolation and the nonbelonging.
Due to the limited scope of this work not all issues concerning Elizabeth
Bishop’s ironic strategies could be examined. For instance, it would be interesting to
analyse the relationship of irony to other tropes (although, of course, irony is not only
a trope), such as, for instance, metonymy, in Bishop’s work. One could also consider
the relationship between irony and allegory (a good example of Bishop’s allegorical
writing is her anti-war poem “Roosters”).
Comparing Bishop’s use of irony with the way other writers use the device, I
limited myself to authors one generation her seniors – like Moore, Stevens and Williams
– or her contemporaries – like Auden and Lowell. One could also go back in time and
examine Bishop’s use of irony vis-à-vis the metaphysical poets (John Donne, Andrew
Marvell and George Herbert). Such a reading would certainly prove fruitful as Bishop
herself frequently alluded to their work in her letters (OA) and poems. For instance,
Bishop’s “The Weed” can be read as a modern rendering of the metaphysical conceit.
One could also want to read Bishop’s work in the context of the English Romantics or
Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Finally, perhaps the most fascinating topic to be covered in relation to Bishop
and irony is the way her use of irony influenced other writers. The most interesting
students of her irony are the poets of the New York School, notably – John Ashbery and
James Schuyler. The two poets could not be more different. John Ashbery seems to be
interested in the relationship between irony and the act of communication (as has been
shown above on the example from his “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”) and
201
indeed the process of communication; the role of irony in this process occupies
a prominent position in his poetry. Schuyler, seemingly more straightforward and less
interested in probing the limits of communication, is quite often, like Bishop, a nature
poet, and his irony is much gentler, and less insistent, than Ashbery’s.
A lot has been said about the two poets’ use of irony – David Lehman devotes
an essay – “The Shield of a Greeting: the Function of Irony in John Ashbery’s Poetry” –
to this issue (Lehman 101-27) and Geoff Ward writes extensively on Schuyler’s irony in
The Statutes of Liberty. The New York School of Poets. It would be interesting,
however, to see how much they owe to Bishop in this respect, how they fend off her
influence or read her ironically.
Obviously, the influence of Bishop reaches far beyond other poets’ practice of
irony. In the beginning of her career she was considered by some critics a too faithful
disciple of Marianne Moore, Wystan Hugh Auden or Wallace Stevens (Schwartz, Estess
182, 185) and, by most critics – as Timothy Morris claims – she was regarded “a minor
poet with major strengths in description and observation” (106). The critic argues that
such views on Bishop’s work were common until as late as 1979 (the year of the poet’s
death). Her importance and following grew steadily and she came to be admired by
poets so different (and not exclusively American) as, for instance, Robert Lowell,
Theodore Roethke, James Merrill,16 John Ashbery, Mark Ford or Anne Stevenson (who
is also the author of the first biographical book on the poet). Bishop’s work also caught
the attention of critics of diverse theoretical stances, like Harold Bloom, Marjorie
Perloff, David Kalstone, Bonnie Costello or Susan McCabe. Nowadays, Bishop
occupies an unquestionable position in the American poetry canon and constitutes
16
Instead of writing writing an essay on Bishop, Merrill only managed to write a short poem on the poet,
entitled “Her Craft” (qtd. in Schwartz, Estess 241), testifying to the difficulty of giving justice to Bishop’s
poetry in critical writing.
202
a strong link in the tradition of major American women poets starting with Anne
Bradstreet and continuing through Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore.
One should also observe that during Bishop’s life a shift has occurred in the
literary interests of American writers. The focus widened from Europe (mainly from
France, Britain, and Russia17) to include Latin America. The change can be observed
even in Bishop’s life who travelled to Europe in the 1930s and translated Max Jacob
(the translations were published in Poetry in May 1950, LA 927) and later on lived in
Brazil and translated from the Portuguese (Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral
de Melo Neto, Manuel Bandeira, and others) and from the Spanish (Octavio Paz), as
well as edited (with Emanuel Brazil) An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian
Poetry (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan UP, 1972). Thus, Bishop proved a major figure not
only as a poet but also as a translator and an editor. She turned out to be an important
catalyst of vital changes on the American poetry scene18 and a major point of reference
for poets, critics and translators. It is her masterly application of irony that helped her
create an inimitable voice by joining apparently contradictory materials, as well as
helped her define her place in American literary tradition. Elizabeth Bishop’s practice of
irony has also influenced our understanding of the elusive term, making us re-examine
the earlier definitions of irony.
17
For instance, Robert Lowell published free translations of Rimbaud and Baudelaire in his Imitations
(1961) and in the 1950s and 1960s the New York poets testified to their admiration for such authors as:
Boris Pasternak (John Ashbery – Herd 10), Pierre Reverdy (O’Hara in his “A Step Away From Them”
17), Raymond Roussel (all the New York poets), or the English Romantics.
18
Among the poets who have focused on Latin America are, among others: Thomas Merton, the author of
translations of South American poets (Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cesar Vallejo, and others)
published in Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963) and The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (1977),
and Forrest Gander, interested in Mexican literature, the editor and translator of Mouth to Mouth: Poems
by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women (1993).
203
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Ironia jako sposób wymknięcia się kategoryzacji i narzędzie budowania
własnego głosu poetyckiego w twórczości Elizabeth Bishop.
Streszczenie.
Przedstawiona praca jest próbą interpretacji twórczości Elizabeth Bishop,
amerykańskiej poetki późnego modernizmu, w ramach szeroko rozumianej kategorii
ironii. Ironia jest tutaj pojmowana jako paradoksalne antidotum na nietzscheańską
kondycję opóźnienia i bloomowski lęk przed wpływem.
Autor rozpoczyna od przedstawienia klasyfikacji ironii – na ironię sytuacyjną,
sokratyczną, retoryczną i romantyczną – by następnie skoncentrować się na
zarysowaniu rozmaitych ujęć ironii retorycznej i romantycznej. Ironia retoryczna
zostaje zdefiniowana na kilka sposobów, m.in. jako wypowiadanie nie tego, co chce się
dać do zrozumienia, jako przywoływanie innej wypowiedzi echem, wreszcie – w ujęciu
pragmatycznym – jako efekt interpretacyjnego wysiłku odbiorcy, a nie wytwór autora.
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Następnie autor usiłuje odpowiedzieć na pytanie „Jak rozpoznać, że dana wypowiedź
jest ironiczna?” by zgodzić się z interpretacją Bedy Allemana, który twierdzi, że – z
uwagi na doświadczenie współczesnego czytelnika w odczytywaniu ironii – ironia jest
tym subtelniejsza, im mniej jej sygnałów można znaleźć w tekście. Autor stawia tezę, iż
wczesne redukcyjne odczytania Elizabeth Bishop jako jedynie pomniejszej poetki
natury i skrupulatnego opisu wynikały z przeoczenia przez ówczesną krytykę
ironicznego charakteru jej twórczości.
W dalszej części pracy autor przedstawia pojęcie ironii romantycznej i jego
współczesne odczytania. Ironia romantyczna jest tutaj rozumiana jako świadomość
niewyczerpanej zmienności rzeczy połączona z wiarą, iż umysł – bezustannie
rewidujący swoje ustalenia – może nad ową zmiennością i płynnością zapanować.
Kluczową cechą ironii romantycznej jest dwoistość, zaznaczająca się na różnych
poziomach – jako rozdźwięk między znaczeniem dosłownym i zamierzonym, jako
podmiotowo-przedmiotowe rozdarcie i wreszcie jako pęknięcie w obrębie samego
podmiotu. Interpretatorzy ironii romantycznej widzą w niej sojusznika autonomii
podmiotu, jednak ich odczytania ironii są skrajnie różne. Jedni, jak Paul de Man w
artykule „Pojęcie ironii”, interpretują ironię jako trop autoteliczny i przenoszą ją w sferę
retoryki. Agata Bielik-Robson twierdzi, iż de Man, definiując ironię jako „permanentną
parabazę alegorii tropów” czyni z niej tylko pozorną sojuszniczkę wolności
podmiotowej, w istocie unieważniając podmiot, czyniąc z niego jedynie „moment w
dialektyce ironii”. Bielik-Robson przeciwstawia de manowskiemu rozumieniu ironii
interpretację Harolda Blooma. W jej ujęciu bloomowski clinamen jest rodzajem
konstruktywnej ironii, która pozwala podmiotowi stworzyć własny głos poprzez
twórczą dezinterpretację i zniekształcenie głosu prekursora lub prekursorów. Ironia nie
jest więc negatywną siłą niweczącą znaczenia i unieważniającą samo istnienie
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podmiotu, ale rodzajem luźnego wiązania pozwalającego poecie na połączenie pozornie
nie dających się pogodzić elementów i wpływów. Lęk przed wpływem nie znika, ale
dzięki tak rozumianej ironii podmiot cierpi na własnych warunkach.
Ponieważ ironia jest środkiem wymykającym się łatwym kategoryzacjom, a
ironia Bishop jest szczególnie trudna do uchwycenia, najlepszym sposobem na jej
opisanie jest próba sformułowania jej negatywnej definicji. Dlatego istotną częścią
pracy są analizy porównawcze. Wiersze Bishop są zestawiane z utworami jej
prekursorów (takich jak Marianne Moore, Edgar Allan Poe, William Carlos Williams,
Wallace Stevens) i poetów jej współczesnych (Wystan Hugh Auden, Robert Lowell) –
na tle wierszy innych poetów specyfika ironii Bishop staje się lepiej widoczna i łatwiej
uchwytna; można też zaobserwować sposoby, na jakie Bishop, przy pomocy ironii,
radzi sobie zarówno z lękiem przed wpływem innych poetów, jak i z niepokojem co do
własnej pozycji w amerykańskiej tradycji literackiej.
Kolejne rozdziały pracy przedstawiają różne funkcje ironii w twórczości Bishop
i różne podejścia poetki do tego tropu. W rozdziale drugim autor analizuje związki
między ironią a formą. Czytając kolejne szkice vilanelli „One Art” autor pokazuje, w
jaki sposób rygor formalny (kondensacja, powtórzenia) czyni z prywatnego, bezładnego
katalogu strat, jakim jest „One Art” w pierwszym w szkicu, ironiczny, pełen
niedomówień i prawdziwie mistrzowski wiersz, jaki znamy z książki Geography III.
Zostają również omówione sposoby, na jakie Bishop ironicznie nawiązuje do swoich
poprzedników – wykorzystując w „One Art” fragmenty „Kruka” Edgara Allana Poego, i
przepisując balladę Alfreda Tennysona „The Lady of Shalott” w liryku „The Genleman
of Shalott”.
Kolejny rozdział zestawia ironię Bishop z ironicznymi strategiami Marianne
Moore i Roberta Lowella, dwójki autorów, którzy mieli ogromny wpływ nie tylko na
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twórczość, ale i na prywatne życie poetki. Zestawiając utwory Moore – „The Steeple
Jack” i „The Frigate Pelican” – z wierszami Bishop – „At the Fishhouses” i „The Bight”
– autor dowodzi, że ironia Moore służy przede wszystkim wyartykułowaniu kwestii
moralnych i estetycznych, podczas gdy ironia Bishop ma za zadanie poszukiwanie
odpowiedzi na pytania natury epistemologicznej i ontologicznej. Z kolei analiza
porównawcza wierszy Lowella „Water” i „Myopia: a Night” oraz „The Bight” i „12
O’Clock News” Bishop pokazuje, że ironia Lowella służy przede wszystkim oskarżaniu
świata, który zawiódł oczekiwania osoby mówiącej w wierszu. Lowell posługuje się
ironią, aby wyeksponować psychikę podmiotu. Ironia Lowella izoluje jednostkę,
ustanawiając wyraźną opozycję między nią a światem. Tymczasem ironia Bishop wiąże
ją ze społecznością czytelników i piszących, włączając autorkę do Kierkegaardiańskiej
„wspólnoty ironistów”. Ponadto, w przeciwieństwie do Moore i Lowella, którzy
pozostają wierni binarnej strukturze ironii, Bishop kwestionuje i podważa binarne
konstrukcje, kładąc nacisk na płynność, zmienność i nieuchwytność znaczenia oraz na
konieczność nieustannego rewidowania kolejnych interpretacji rzeczywistości. Chociaż
ta płynność i nieuchwytność ironii przywodzi na myśl definicję Paula de Mana z
„Pojęcia ironii”, Bishop potrafi zachować, do pewnego stopnia, kontrolę nad ironią i
uniknąć osłabienia pozycji podmiotu.
Poetce udaje się opóźnić „rozpływanie się” sensu za pomocą całej gamy
środków retorycznych – na przykład, analizując naturę wiedzy w utworze „At the
Fishhouses”, Bishop zestawia imiesłów przymiotnikowy czynny „flowing” z
imiesłowem czasu przeszłego „flown”, pokazując, że nasza wiedza, choć nietrwała i
nieuchwytna („flowing”) przez chwilę jest nam jednak dostępna, by zniknąć dopiero
wraz z kończącym wiersz słowem „flown”.
Stosowane przez poetkę powtórzenia
również pozwalają opóźnić moment działania destrukcyjnych sił ironii. Wreszcie, opisy,
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w których autorka wielokrotnie przeformułowuje myśli służą nie tylko precyzji opisu,
ale pozwalają czytelnikowi dłużej kontemplować rzeczy i ich znaczenia, opóźniając ich
osunięcie się w niebyt.
Rozdział czwarty ukazuje ironię jako stylistyczny odpowiednik biograficznego
wykorzenienia i bezdomności Bishop. Ironia jest tu rozumiana na dwa sposoby. Po
pierwsze, jako niedopowiedzenie, dzięki któremu poetka może zachować dystans do
swoich emocji, co z kolei pozwala jej przetworzyć to, co prywatne w sztukę. Na
przykład, utwór „Poem” stanowi rozważanie na temat obrazu, ważnego dla autorki nie z
powodu jego walorów artystycznych, ale dlatego, że namalował go jej krewny. W
wierszu rozgrywa się dramat utraty – starsza krewna, prawdopodobnie przenosząc się
do domu spokojnej starości przekazuje obraz osobie mówiącej w wierszu. Ironia
rozumiana jako niedopowiedzenie i przemilczenie pozwala Bishop uniknąć
konfesyjnego tonu. Po drugie, ironia staje się tutaj rodzajem spoiwa. Bishop straciła
ojca we wczesnym dzieciństwie, a kiedy miała pięć lat u jej matki zdiagnozowano
chorobę psychiczną (Bishop nie widziała się z matką do jej śmierci). Poetka nie miała
więc prawdziwego domu, a jej życie naznaczone było kolejnymi stratami bliskich osób.
Ironia rozumiana jako czynnik wiążący daje jej możliwość zbudowania substytutu
domu ze skromnych materiałów, jakie ma do dyspozycji, pozwala jej metaforycznie
zadomowić się w literaturze. (W „Poem” gest przyjęcia obrazu z rąk ciotki jest również
gestem akceptacji własnej historii, akceptacją zaproszenia do grona rodziny. Z kolei
„Crusoe in England” pokazuje, że Crusoe potrafi być u siebie jedynie w przestrzeni
wiersza – domem nie jest ani bezludna wyspa, ani Anglia, do której powrócił.)
Ostatni rozdział pracy dotyczy ironii w szeroko pojętym kontekście
politycznym. Tożsamość seksualna jest tutaj rozumiana jako rodzaj maskarady, a ironia
pozwala na szybkie zmiany masek, zapewniając podmiotowi bezpieczeństwo. Miłosne
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wiersze Bishop znane z The Complete Poems zostają zestawione z utworami miłosnymi,
których Bishop nie chciała opublikować za życia. Dzięki temu można zaobserwować,
co poetka uważała za potencjalnie niebezpieczne, i w jaki sposób usiłowała te
niebezpieczne treści ukryć. Autor przechodzi następnie do analizy brazylijskich wierszy
poetki: „Arrival at Santos” i „Santarém.” W „Arrival at Santos” Bishop ucieka się do
ironii, by – wbrew tytułowi – skomentować nie politykę Brazylii, a polityczne
uprzedzenia amerykańskiego turysty. Z kolei w „Santarém,” wierszu napisanym w 1978
roku, na rok przed śmiercią poetki, Bishop spogląda na swoją dotychczasową
twórczość, powracając do tematów brazylijskich i posługując się mikrocytatami z
własnych utworów. „Santarém” pokazuje jak działa ironiczny umysł poetki – Bishop
nieustannie przeformułowuje swe zdania tak, aby nie pozwolić sobie na akceptację
atrakcyjnych, lecz niezgodnych z prawdą, wniosków. Jej podejście do ironii nie jest
wynikiem z góry obranej strategii retorycznej, ale wyrasta z pragnienia oddania
sprawiedliwości opisywanym rzeczom.
Praca dowodzi, że doskonałość poezji Elizabeth Bishop nie byłaby możliwa bez
jej niepowtarzalnego podejścia do ironii. Praktyka poetycka Bishop może w istotny
sposób wpłynąć na nasze rozumienie tego pojęcia. Ironia, przez wielu krytyków
rozumiana jako negatywna siła niwecząca możliwość rozumienia, a nawet
przekreślająca rolę podmiotu, staje się dla Bishop, paradoksalnie, siłą pozytywną –
narzędziem zgłębiania wiedzy i ważnym środkiem budowania poetyckiej tożsamości.
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