The Unbearable Lightness of Elizabeth Bishop · The Unbearable Lightness of Elizabeth Bishop ......

Verse Chronicle: Gravel on the Tongue · 155

chapter 14

The Unbearable Lightnessof Elizabeth Bishop

The beauty of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry lies in the keenness of itsreserve, and the duplicity such reserve demands from language.No poet this century, other than Auden, has written so many lik-able poems or suffered more from the consoling attentions of crit-ics. Her readers cannot be blamed for having mistaken her: it is thecondition of a poet of limited means to be mistaken, and usually inher virtues rather than her vices.

Her vices were of course often taken for virtues. Bishop wasonce pigeonholed as a poet of visual scale, of specious ornamenta-tion and frivolous detail. She was a Florida coastline stocked withrare birds, tediously pretty, littered with beautiful shells: “withthese the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line / is delicatelyornamented.” Robert Lowell wrote that “when we read her, weenter the classical serenity of a new country”—the visual seduc-tiveness of her poems has the passivity of landscape.

In poetry the instinct of communication is often exceeded by thepoetic means. The means can bear a burden in excess of their com-mitment, and in a poet like Bishop the innocence of those meansmay become part of the troubled drama of understanding, mayagree to be the carrier of less innocent messages. Poetry is not acode, because it is more ambivalent than code—its most immacu-late expression may not seem genuine unless betrayed by the ar-cheology beneath it.

156 · Desperate Measures

“Land lies in water,” begins “The Map,” the first poem in herfirst book, marking at the outset a devotion to appearances, evenwhen appearances are deceiving. Every schoolboy knows that wa-ter lies on land (there are undersea mountains taller than theHimalayas), but Bishop has a more primitive conception of thephysical world. Her ideas often rely on pretending to have the un-tamed eye (if not the heart—her heart was always a civilized bro-ken one) of the innocent.

A reader may delight in the faux naive (readers love playacting)but appreciate it only when it returns the wrongs of commonsense. There, all lands are islands—and islands float in the isolationof their waters. The cajoling quality of Bishop’s rhetoric—her se-duction of the reader’s judgment with her intimate “we” (“We canstroke these lovely bays”), the dry irony of her questions (“Are theyassigned, or can the countries pick their colors?”), the fine hesita-tion of her perceiving instinct (“Shadows, or are they shallows . . .”)—conceals the purpose to which the rhetoric is put, here to blurthe distinction between the map and the world it represents.

The map is not the world, but as rhetoric it becomes a world,just as our printed representations don’t merely refer to a worldbut are a world in themselves. In that world the guileless observa-tion may be the most guilty of suggestion.

The names of seashore towns run out to sea,the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains—the printer here experiencing the same excitementas when emotion too far exceeds its cause.

History has complications if no subtlety; but the complicationshave been resolved on the map, the visual equivalent to the blindwork of civilization, where the names of ports are carried to sea onships and the names of inland cities traded across mountains. Suchcommerce of course required the making of maps; but commercewas already ancient before someone looked down on the world likea god and drew a picture of it.

Emotion that exceeds its cause is usually labeled sentiment, buthere the printer has experienced the excitement of the discoverer.It’s easier to be a god than to act like a god, and the power of nam-

The Unbearable Lightness of Elizabeth Bishop · 157

ing has encouraged the printer to write the names in water andimpose them on scarps. That is a kind of civilization, too, and anexample of the fate that countries suffer from the inattentions ofhistory rather than the attentions of mapmakers. From above wesee none of the hatreds that run over borders, none of the wars thathave put borders in place. (From a plane we would see no bordersat all.) That detachment allows the mapmakers to devote their art(and this is a poem intimate with the detachments of art) to choos-ing a palette for history’s winners and losers. The colors of historyare bold strokes, as the poem reminds us: “More delicate than thehistorians’ are the map-makers’ colors.” The understandings ofthe poem proceed by what they ignore: art has here imposed onhistory.

Many early readers of Bishop must have felt that their emotionstoo were outrunning the cause, a common reaction to minor poetsor private favorites—Housman, Hardy, and Larkin have also ex-cited the wary eagerness of readers unsure whether their fondnessdid not exceed their judgment. The properties of her poetry areslight and conditional, and the subtlety of her arguments is feltneither as a compelled candor nor as a compelling passion. As apoet of the tentative, she bears the frailties of a resistance not in thelanguage so much as beneath it: the intimacies her poems troubleto create are sometimes desperate in their resolve, and even herunbearable prettiness—so tempting and so ingenuous—oftencloaks the unpleasantly real. The virtue of her language, like thevirtue of her emotion, is in its privacy and reservation; what it re-serves is not just the announcement of its causes but the retrieval ofits motives.

Bishop therefore did not have—perhaps could not have had—any significant influence on the direction of American poetry inthe postwar period; her sensibility was more precarious and lesscautiously disposed than the period demanded. She did notgrapple with the religious or formal or personal responsibilitiesthat tormented Robert Lowell, against whose poetry hers some-times acted as a subtle counterirritant—the softer inflections of hismiddle period were among the few signs that a poetry might bewritten to allay her influence. Their regard was mutual and their


echoings of each other sometimes concordant; but everythingLowell touched turned to poetry, and it was impossible for Bishopnot to measure herself against such fluent self-transformation—her disappointments and impediments never seemed of artisticvalue, at least to her.

Bishop was treated as a peculiar case, a deviant and unhelpfulexample like Marianne Moore, to whose poetry—similar in its ob-servant miniatures—hers was often compared, at times to her dis-favor. She had accepted Moore’s friendship and patronage, whichcame bound with the misapprehensions of critics. Moore’s earlypoems had radical force, in their carapace of poetic manner (herearly poetry has still not been completely absorbed, but then laterin life Moore apparently had little liking for the uncomfortableburs of that poetry). Bishop was a poet more conventional, whosetimidity and mordant self-deprecation never seemed virtuous toher (“One has wasted one’s talent through timidity,” she oncewrote in a letter). You might see in her sequence of prose poems,“Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics,” the barely concealed triptych of apersonality and its defeats: of all the tropical fauna, why elsechoose a poisonous toad that longs to be touched; a wanderingcrab ignorant of its terrible fragility and far from home; and a hugelumbering snail, asking for pity, that can never see its own gor-geous shell? Each has been crippled by its limitations.

Bishop’s major gift, what might be called the stimulus to thehigher and less provisional reaches of her art, was a nakedness ofthe observing eye, the curse of seeing the world as if it had neverbeen seen before—she seemed to come upon objects with a smalldelighted gasp (“Why couldn’t we have . . . looked and lookedour infant sight away”). To put it another way, she saw the realthrough the artifice of sight—of the sights possible, the analysesundertaken, in the complex of metaphor and simile: armed vision,in Coleridge’s phrase. Marianne Moore had a similar gift; yet de-spite her imaginative priority the gift was original in its effect onthe younger poet—the characteristic turns in Bishop’s early draftsmight have come after reading Moore’s poems, but they are al-ready part of a sensibility more warmly functioning, more inti-mate, and quite different in its occupations, if as yet more tentative


(compared to Bishop, Moore is a finicky clipper of news articles,her gift more scientific, more primly precise, and therefore muchcooler).

The course of Bishop’s poetry is largely a history of the use ofthis gift, its development (and taming) and temptation. Poetryfunctions supremely well in the visual frequencies, since languagetrades not just in observation but in the metaphorical transforma-tions that lie deep as etymology or shallow as simile. At its sim-plest, Bishop’s gift was formed not just in the saturated depths ofindividual comparisons but in the variation of emphasis and strat-egy, and the passivity of their forced beauty:

Here and therehis brown skin hung in stripslike ancient wallpaper,and its pattern of darker brownwas like wallpaper:shapes like full-blown rosesstained and lost through age.

(“The Fish”)

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glareand the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

(“The Bight”)

The world seldom changes,but the wet foot danglesuntil a bird arrangestwo notes at right angles.

(“Sunday, 4 a.m.”)

Now flour is adulteratedwith cornmeal, the loaves of breadlie like yellow-fever victims


laid out in a crowded ward.(“Going to the Bakery”)

Other poets have had striking descriptive gifts, but rarely has apoetry been organized to take better advantage of this gift in par-ticular. The lyric arrangement of her poems often became subordi-nate to the images, which sometimes (in “The Bight,” “Seascape,”and “Florida,” most obviously) overwhelmed argument. In suchpoems one detail succeeds another but, within the margins of sub-ject, the details often have little to do with each other. The poems,not surprisingly, offer the critic a progressive freedom of interpre-tation as well as a regressive constriction—the argument is not ap-parent at all or is apparent only in the interstices.

The danger of this gift (every literary gift harboring disadvan-tages to offset its advantage) lies precisely in its quarantine ofbeauty. The more the object is raised above the surface by the hardstrike of description, the less available it is to the poem’s plainerfunction. Bishop worried about using “this accumulation of exoticor picturesque or charming detail” and thought she might “turninto solid cuteness in my poetry if I don’t watch out—or if I dowatch out.”

An artist reveals by her anxieties many of the terms of her enter-prise, even if the enterprise finds ways of exceeding or compromis-ing those terms. Bishop’s nervousness about the picturesque liesbeneath the various ways she absorbs picturesque detail or forcesthe centrifugal energies of image to serve the inner torsions ofidea. The intrigues are visible even at their slightest and most in-gratiating, when the stakes are modest or the tone requires merelythe ingratiations of fancy. (Bishop was a poet who found new depthin fancy, but the frailty of her fancy calls forth the protectiveness ofher readers.) “Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,”she writes in “Arrival at Santos,”

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 inferioror because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;we are driving to the interior.

As so often, anything as troubling as emotion is overlaid by aninsouciance (one of Bishop’s many insulating virtues) as pliable asveneer. The careless play of images admits, partially in the form,partially in the way form holds off introspection or dread, the dis-order of emotion beneath the surface.

The postage stamps and soap, at hand for extraneous compari-son and ornamentation, are converted to terms of debility andcomplaint. That “wasting away” quietly suggests the fate of alltourists who remain too long abroad, but the remark about thequality of the glue or the intensity of the heat is beguiled by theending—the tourists, so intent on their “immodest demands for adifferent world,” will not turn back. In blind desire, they want todrive forward, further into inconvenience and difficulty.

Even in her travels Bishop was likely to remain a placid andhousebound observer. A critic might make more of the circum-stances of a woman who, until late in life, rarely had to work (likeRobert Lowell’s, her life resembled the lives of poets of anothercentury). Compared to most poets, she took few trips. She stayedin Brazil, having suffered an allergic reaction to a cashew, becauseshe fell in love and there she could piece out an existence from amodest inheritance. She said, speaking to an interviewer about herchildhood, “I was always a sort of a guest, and I think I’ve alwaysfelt like that,” and yet she had homes, and made homes (and lostthem) wherever she went. A woman of her disposition would havefelt homeless anywhere—but she was a traveler and not a tourist,and could find the consolation of beauty wherever she was invited.

Bishop often tests the consolations of beauty, the very beautyenforced by her description—this control prevents her poemsfrom a movement toward disintegration. That her powers of orga-nization were equal to her powers of observation is apparent asearly as “Wading at Wellfleet,” where the argument balances onthe fulcrum of one image: the ocean compared to an Assyrian


chariot, its rolling breakers the murderous wheels (the speakermust be wading on the Atlantic side of the Cape).

The point of the comparison is not that the terms negotiate witheach other but that the negotiation breaks down. The sea is pre-paring to go to war:

This morning’s glitterings revealthe sea is “all a case of knives.”

Lying so close, they catch the sun,the spokes directed at the shin.The chariot front is blue and great.

The war rests wholly with the waves:they try revolving, but the wheelsgive way; they will not bear the weight.

The image, too, has not borne the weight of comparison; but thepoem’s argument rises just where its movement has collapsed, andthe ending takes unawares the mildness of tone (a tone misleadingin its allurements). The sea has only been plotting (“A thousandwarriors in the sea / could not consider such a war / as that the seaitself contrives // but hasn’t put in action yet”), but we are aware ofthe violence of which the sea is capable (the hurricane of 1938 dev-astated the Massachusetts coast).

The burden of the failure is not that the image has failed tocomplete its transformation, but that the waves have been inad-equate to their desire; in the futility of desire the sea is condemned,for the moment, to its glitter. The function of the image as an im-age is thus parallel to its function in the argument: the yearning ofthe ocean to be the murderous chariot is little separate from theyearning of image, or the poetry or art of which it is an example, tohave an effect beyond the moral condition of the poem, to beequivalent, in its way, to the “arts” of war—in the immorality oftechnique, the poem is driven to destroy its own prettiness. Thepoem, which might be dismissed for the narrowness of its aestheticfocus, has a deeper and more troubling argument in the aestheticrealm. Bishop’s visual conceits are so charming—so warmly en-


chanted, however slightly or slyly detailed—that they tend to cor-rupt her melancholy. As the eye attends to the mere wash of pretti-ness, even of stubborn glamor, we ignore or repress the moodierBishop, whose vision is subject to its revealed need, and so sacrifi-cial.

The interior tensions of metaphor and simile are often severelyunderestimated, even (perhaps especially) by the artist liberal inusing them. Bishop might write casually, in the draft of an unfin-ished prose piece: “I noticed the white vertebrae of larger fish,heaped up or scattered. I found myself staring down at them, likean aeroplane up ten thousand feet, say, over the ruined columns ofa Greek temple.” Even the ornamental simile may have devastat-ing pressure if conceived by an imagination continually underpressure and desperate to achieve (or helpless to avoid) remarkableacts of transfiguration. The simile works upon its broken identi-ties; and the whiteness of Grecian ruins, as well as their fragilitywhen seen from the air, provides further tenors of and supports tothe comparison. But surely the authority of the comparison lies inthe observer’s realization that in each case something grand andbeautiful has been dismantled, has been rendered subject to mor-tality and decay. A sense of collapsed religion, vanished majesty,haunts the simplicity of the fishbones (a simile functions effectivelyonly when one of its terms haunts the other); and what might havebeen merely visual ends by becoming nearly moral, less a con-cealing decoration than a revealing attitude: otherwise the ob-server would not find herself “staring down at them.”

The intense gaze of such description is rarely available toBishop’s formal prose, though frequently if chaotically present inher letters. Prose did not call forth the same sustaining or organiz-ing powers of her imagination (her papers include a number ofabandoned book reviews), because prose required a narrativelargely inimical to the latent conduct of such images: prose needsan argument in the surface of the telling, not beneath it. For thatreason her stories seem slight and fussy (and often overworked atthe symbolic level), while her memoirs—so easily confused withher fictions—supply very little material beneath their cheery good


manners: she was almost obliged to say, however self-mockingly,“It’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry, I think, but inprose it keeps eluding one in the funniest way.”

The artist has no obligation, however, to work equally well indifferent modes, though Bishop’s failures in prose cast an obliquelight on the successes of her imagination in a mode less defensiveto the form and execution of her gifts. The exercise of an artist’sgifts is more or less efficient, depending on accidents of talent ortiming; but the resonant uses to which the gifts are put depend onthe resonating character of the subject. Bishop seems almost im-mune to the specific world of war and politics that loaned the sub-stance and shaped the formal response of almost every other poetof her generation—her aloofness is mustered as a refusal, a consci-entious objection to a world inimical to her poetry. And yet theplasticity of her gifts was such that within that modesty she couldshape a response blasphemous in its repose.

Her moral universe was agnostic. The grimy little paradise ofthe “Filling Station” benefits from an unseen feminine agency—the small orderings beneath its oil-soaked exterior give rise to aseries of doubts that can be answered only by a vague assurancethat “Somebody” performs these tasks: “Somebody embroideredthe doily. / Somebody waters the plant, / or oils it, maybe. Some-body / arranges the rows of cans / so that they softly say: / esso—so—so—so / to high-strung automobiles.” And, finally, “Some-body loves us all.” This ought to be comforting—it would becomforting, but the “Somebody” remains invisible, inapprehen-sible, and unknowable. And if this agent remains so vague andanonymous, perhaps it does not exist at all—the repeated “Some-body” conceals the terrifying idea of “Nobody at all” and seemsincreasingly uneasy and forlorn.

If the filling station is raised to metaphysics by these doubts, theuniverse is by an equal degree reduced. The unseen maternal pres-ence is doing what it can, but the small world of the station ishopelessly squalid. This might be depressing if the poet were notso obviously in love with squalor—Bishop’s poems delight in theuntidiness of life, the losses endured (a philosophy not stoic butsanguine—only the messy, viscous, unctuous oil could whisper


comfort to “high-strung automobiles”). The poems accept howlittle control we have, however much we desire; a poetry may itselfbe the tidiness that permits artistic misrule (in the restrained com-pass of the poem, Bishop’s charm could never wear thin, or toleratedoubt equal to its size). It would be wrong to mistake the economyof her means (and the repetitions of thematic design) as a simplelack of resources, just as it would be wrong to find in the missingmaternal presence at the filling station merely the helpless fact ofBishop’s biography; but the economy and the absences suggest—asa lesson for American poetry—where to position the inner life, ifthe poet has an inner life.

“The Riverman” speaks of nature untouched by the political,and so available to sympathy. It was not unusual for Bishop’s natureto serve as an ars poetica (“The Bight” is a disquieting reflection ofthe poet’s imagination, that workshop of “old correspondences,”that quiet harbor where the sediments of the past are dredged up).The riverman wishes to become a witch doctor, and believes orpretends to believe that nature will reveal its secrets to him in aprivate language he understands “like a dog, / although I can’tspeak it yet.”

The appeal of a private language, to a poet who has also appren-ticed herself to water spirits (her poems invoke water the way Lar-kin’s invoke the land), should be apparent; but what is crucial to thecorrespondence is not that nature serve as the metaphor for imagi-nation—nature often was her imagination—but that the explana-tion derive from the civilization nature would exclude: “the moonwas burning bright / as the gasoline-lamp mantle / with the flameturned up too high,” the rooms of the river spirit “shine like silver/ with the light from overhead, / a steady stream of light / like atthe cinema,” and the river worms have “tiny electric eyes / turningon and off and on.” The poet can consider nature only in the lan-guage of progress, which fosters the tragedy of misunderstandingembedded in the pathos of her work.

The impulse works quite differently when nature is not the ab-sorbing metaphor but the surrounding circumstance. “The Bur-glar of Babylon” is also about a man who would disappear into na-ture, here the burglar and murderer run to ground on the hills


above Rio. The hills have gradually been overrun with the shacksof the poor; but from the unfeeling distance of the rich who watchthe drama from their apartments, through binoculars, the spreadof the poor is a “stain,” or “like lichen.” The poor have masterednature in their own fashion—the hills have become the names ofpoverty: “There’s one hill called the Chicken, / And one calledCatacomb; // There’s the hill of Kerosene, / And the hill of theSkeleton. . . .”

“I’ve got to disappear,” says the burglar Micuçú (with an ironyunrecognized). His doomed spirit as the soldiers hunt him downlets the reader ignore his crimes—he becomes another victim, asdesperate as the poor who have come to Rio and cannot go home(the victim is sacrificial as well as symbolic). The ballad providesthe remoteness of fiction, a fiction that permits these conflictsin order not to incur the pieties a closer observer might invoke.This may seem like the cruelty of aloofness rather than a merelytroubled respect, which requires the irony of respect; but Bishopknew the tension of disintegrating observations held in delicate re-lation.

A more difficult example of political ambiguity occurs in “PinkDog,” whose rhymed triplets seem jazzy and unfeeling, while thesurrounding politics are murderous:

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, parasitesgo bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nightsout in the suburbs, where there are no lights.

Nothing in the poem dissociates the poet from the uncharitablevoice, a voice that thoughtlessly dismisses the unsightly beggars toadvise the pink dog on how to avoid a similar fate. What shouldthe dog do? Dress up in carnival costume, in which it won’t lookout of place. But the idiots and paralytic beggars drowned by deathsquads won’t go away—they possess the poem long after they cease


to inhabit the city that has tacitly consented to their murder. Thepoem depends on their eerie presence to lay bare the masqueradeof emotion that underlies the poem—Bishop often gains access toa darkening vision through the whimsy or slightness of her manner(few poets have ever been so severe in their irrelevance); perhaps itis appropriate that here one masquerade counsels another, reveal-ing itself through another. The ignoring voice cannot bear themurders, but its silence does not silence them—they poison thecontrived gaiety and expose its frantic inconsequence.

Bishop found ways of disturbing the dainty and inconsequentialsurfaces of her work without destroying them—that is, of beingtrue to the manner without ignoring its constricting limitations.This is not special pleading: the etiquette of Bishop’s work oftencontains the pleasures of her work, but it does not entirely deter-mine the meaning that exists partly on behalf of such surfaces andpartly in ironic or inimical relation to them. Is there any prose, forexample, that more adequately portrays the absurdity and tragedyof the ruin of Ezra Pound than Bishop’s nursery rhyme, “Visits toSt. Elizabeths”?

Certain ironies are available to a poet willing to use, and useharshly, the availing forms, however despised. Bishop’s slowly ac-cruing stanzas, based on “The House That Jack Built,” elaboratePound’s condition in a way not far distant from a madman’s con-tinual reckoning of his estate; though here the details alter slightlyfrom stanza to stanza, as if that world were hallucinated. If theseare “visits,” however, each stanza represents the greater detail no-ticed and recorded on each new occasion, with the slow additionsto the visitor’s understanding and the complications and adjust-ments in that understanding. The adjectives describing the man,Ezra Pound, are subject to the most radical change: he is stanza bystanza tragic; talkative; honored; old, brave; cranky; cruel; busy; tedious.In the penultimate stanza what lies beneath these varying guises isexposed: “the poet, the man / that lies in the house of Bedlam.” Butthe perception does not end there—the last stanza goes deeper, to“the wretched man / that lies in the house of Bedlam.” Here thecondition of the man and his circumstance are set at one, and the


condition begins to atone for the circumstance. Wretched has adouble force—as a moral judgment and as an admission of sympa-thy.

The apposition of “the poet, the man,” however, has its owncunning: the phrase balances (or weighs) the two states into whichall moral biography falls, but it also separates them. The equality isalso equivocation, and upon that division most criticism of Poundhas faltered. Bishop’s little twist of syntax has left Pound the authorof his own circumstance; that judgment is wretched in its sympa-thy.

It was not Pound but Eliot who was the author of much ofBishop’s imagination, and his influence was more deeply absorbedand is therefore more difficult to trace than an influence on stylelike Moore or an alter ego and negative example like Lowell. Thetracings must be more hesitant and less stable, but absorptions of-fer a more accurate calculus of a poet’s strength than the influencesstalled in style. Eliot was a poet who halted the development of twogenerations of poets seduced by his example or provoked into reac-tion against it: Bishop’s modest but assuming use of a poet whoproved so resistant might be called a fine example of reticence, anexample of how her protective timidity permitted her to wrestlewith poets more pertinent to her imagination than those who af-fected the play of her language.

Perhaps I have overstated a case that cannot go beyond mereinference. In “Love Lies Sleeping,” the observed world conceals aunifying myth, a vision available only to the hungover speaker andthe drunken or dead (or dead-drunk) man at the end:

for always to one, or several, morning comes,whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed,

whose face is turnedso that the image of

the city grows down into his open eyesinverted and distorted. No. I mean

distorted and revealed,if he sees it at all.


The minutely traversed city (“made delicate by over-workman-ship” in one of Bishop’s languid, scarring puns, which reaches backto touch the poet at her desk) is lurid in its beauty and dangerousand perhaps even toxic in its occupations (the city seems to havegrown “from fused beads of iron and copper crystals, / the littlechemical ‘garden’ in a jar”). Even though specific details—a water-wagon “throwing its hissy, snowy fan,” the water drying “light-dry,dark-wet, the pattern / of the cool watermelon”—soften the harsh-ness of the waking city, this softness does not disguise the nature ofthe inhabitants.

The poem addresses the “queer cupids” whose evening mealswill be prepared by the people “dragging in the streets their uniqueloves”—the cupids “will dine well / on his heart, on his, and his.”But there are other victims who will not wake, or will wake to thedistorted, revealed vision of the city: the victim at the end is appar-ently one whose heart has been eaten. There is a profound loneli-ness in Bishop’s poem, profound because this figure reminds us ofanother martyr to knowledge. If he is a victim of those devouringcupids, his fate is Promethean—for the Greeks the liver was theseat of the affections, and for the eagle to eat Prometheus’ liver isfunctionally no different, to the anthropologist, from the queercupids preparing a meal “on his heart, on his, and his.”

I don’t want to push the myth too far, at least not past the pointwhere it is suggestive; but the insinuation of myth (and not its jus-tification as myth) gives the poem its subterranean intensity. And inthis use of myth Eliot’s influence has been felt. Those “queercupids” may not be related to Eliot’s “golden Cupidon,” but thestill glance of the dead or drunken man, his open staring eyes,ought to remind us of Phlebas under water (Bishop’s city seems to“waver” in “skies of water-glass”). And what is the supine man onthe bed at daybreak (his upside-down vision distantly recalling theposture of St. Peter in martyrdom) but a right-side-up morningversion of the most famous modernist image, Eliot’s patient anaes-thetized on an operating table, the image of inverted evening?

The echoes of Eliot’s stage props confirm Bishop’s appropria-tion of his use of myth—she has taken on Eliot as Eliot had taken


on Dante. Eliot is not the ghost in the machine of the poetry butthe gatekeeper to the bleaker zones of emotion (emotion and influ-ence might be called the obverse and reverse of one batteredshield), which her brittle and whimsical surfaces disguise whenthey cannot protect.

“Sleeping on the Ceiling,” for example, a pendant to “Love LiesSleeping,” again evokes the inverted etherized patient—here thesleeper who has floated to the ceiling, an upside-down Paris, itscrystal chandelier a fountain in the Place de la Concorde. But thereis no peace in that helium lightness, and (“Let us go then,” wroteEliot) we must make a visit—“We must go under the wallpaper / tomeet the insect-gladiator, / to battle with a net and trident. . . .”This is a dark and compromised sleep. The insect gladiator maynot seem threatening, but the threat depends on the scale of ourmeeting. The pleasures of the unconscious have been set againstthe terrors of real battle “under the wallpaper,” in the id’s closeteddomain—we have gone from the civilized splendors of Paris to thebloody circuses of Rome (cockroaches are fond of the organic glueon the underside of old wallpaper—they also love to breed in theenclosed spaces under sagging wallpaper). Loneliness and doubtare the forms of this dream work, and the danger of the battle withthe insect is no less than the danger of Prufrock’s waking to drown.In this way Eliot supports Bishop as Dante supported him.

I have invoked the shadow of Eliot as another way of arguingthat Bishop is neither a poet of pure glassine surfaces nor a poetwithout deeply abiding and maturely conserving transactions withher influences (one might impose the template of Eliot’s “Journeyof the Magi” over Bishop’s “A Cold Spring”). The tendency to seeBishop as a special case isolates her in the literature from which shedrew a luxuriating vigor, even if she chose to use it offhandedly—or bury it so deeply in the poem it is fossilized there.

Most of her critics are warmly employed scratching up the fos-sils of biography. The life of an artist will always have the appeal ofan unpleasant (even slightly seedy) secret, merely because it standsbehind the art as a compound ghost, sometimes alluded to, some-times bearing upon, sometimes revealed—or seemingly revealed.


But critics can rarely make more than an inferential appeal to biog-raphy. No fact was ever less a fact than one tortured into poetry.We know that poets distort, cobble, trim, and refract. If we find a“fact” that seems to align with a poem, it is no proof that any otherpoem is aligned with fact. The life is only a fallible guide to readingthe poem, and the poem an open lie for reading the life.

Since poets have a contempt for the small details (Bishop in-sisted on keeping the February 1918 date of the National Geo-graphic in the poem “In the Waiting Room” even after the factcheckers at the New Yorker assured her the actual date was March1918), we should not expect them to have respect for larger ones.Where the life imposes itself on the art is in the shadings and ob-sessions, the compulsions—perhaps even in the manner of the dis-tortions.

Bishop was an orphan, or nearly an orphan (her father diedwhen she was eight months old and a few years later her motherwas permanently lodged in an asylum). Scenes of abandonmenthave an obvious resonance in her work—perhaps too obvious.Such “rhymes” are appealing to biographical critics because theyso neatly observe the psychological proprieties. But what ought tobe interesting is not the aligning of the life with the art, but themisaligning. A poem like “Sestina” may draw its emotional rup-tures from the poet’s memories, but the scenes of grandmother andgranddaughter have been transfigured, almost into fairy tale. Eventhe title seems to remove the acts from the private room of thepersonal (and, from a certain point of view, more deeply lodgethem there).

In the peaceable kingdom of the poem, with its six domesticatedend words, the word tears is the unexpected fluid element (house,grandmother, child, stove, and almanac are hard properties of the set-ting). The grandmother “sits in the kitchen with the child / besidethe Little Marvel Stove, / reading the jokes from the almanac, /laughing and talking to hide her tears.” We know of the sorrowwithout knowing the source, and what we know is that it must besuppressed. The tears are “equinoctial”; but, even if the grand-mother suffers them only twice a year, they cannot be stopped.


They appear everywhere—on the teakettle, in the teacup, as aman’s buttons in the child’s drawing, in the little moons of the al-manac (whether projected or insinuated makes no difference). Thesurface is matter-of-fact and almost lighthearted, and here Bishopimitates the grandmother’s attempt to keep her sorrow from thechild—to keep the child’s own knowledge of sorrow at a distance.The poem never mentions a death, never implies the child is anorphan. And yet there are ominous indications all around. Fourthings are said in the poem. What the grandmother says (“It’s timefor tea now”) maintains the bland illusion of domestic harmony; butthe Marvel Stove says, It was to be, and the almanac says, I knowwhat I know. Fate and secrecy are invoked just before the childdraws a picture of a house and a man with “buttons like tears.”

Perhaps there is nothing wrong. Here biography is almost tooexplicit. Little moons fall like tears from the almanac into theflower bed the child has drawn. The almanac says, ominously, Timeto plant tears. If the tears are seeds, we don’t want to know what willgrow from them. It is not the business of the poem to disclose whatthese tears suggest about the inner life of an adult who recalls sucha childhood. The life shadows a certain reading of the lines, buteven without the shadow the poem (where in the end “the childdraws another inscrutable house”) reveals too much about housesand bitterness and memory. The poem, in other words, attempts tosecure its own boundaries, to remain in the realm Bishop calls“self-forgetful.” (“What one seems to want in art, in experiencingit, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forget-ful, perfectly useless concentration.”) But in a sestina the return ofthe end words serves the return of the repressed.

Whether or not the poet has an intention here, the poem hasdifficulty fending off the pressure of biography. Of course a poethas intentions and the intentions have effects; but the intention isnot always, perhaps not ever, the same as the effect. Here biogra-phy provides, or seems to provide, an enriching and complicatingcircumstance, without being necessary to our understanding (butdictating terms likely to disable or simplify that understanding).

A similar case is “Crusoe in England,” where the rescuedCrusoe looks back upon his island. At least one critic has drawn the


parallel between Crusoe mourning the death of Friday in Englandand Bishop mourning in New York the death of her Brazilian com-panion, Lota de Macedo Soares. The poem luxuriates in such at-tentions, and other details seem to confess the inner life of an exile(Bishop spent more than twenty years in Brazil): “I often gave wayto self-pity. / ‘Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. / I wouldn’t behere otherwise.’”

The reader must be wary of accepting Crusoe’s life as a mirrorlife of Bishop. Whether Bishop’s biography is applied in its bearingand particularity to the fiction or whether the fiction is instead amedium for expressing a private vastation is a very different thing.Treating the poetry as the transcendence of fact is more difficultthan exposing it as the mere imposition of fact. We must read suchwork in self-division if we are neither to trespass on artistic propri-eties nor hobble ourselves in ignorance.

Critics sometimes forget that psychology is not the only thingthat determines the course of the poem, that much a poet writes isfound in the heat of engagement, and much that he rewrites is col-ored more by accidents of talent than by the masks and fetters ofpsychology. It is fashionable to think of the writer as helpless be-fore psychology, yet many writers deploy their imaginations infrustrating the demands of the inner life. Not every deviation frombiography is pathological, or driven by repressive instinct; nor isevery mask a protection. An artist has keener orders of fidelity andloyalty than an autobiographer, and the poem has demands moreradical than tales of the past. This is not to say that psychology isirrelevant to the arraignments of the imagination, merely that theassumption of relevance is often a presumption of helplessness, theauthor’s impotence before his own psychology. (If not all devia-tions can be referred to psychology, none can be securely referred.)The critical evidence must ignore, because ignorant of, the privatesense of authority with which a writer writes.

That is the artist’s duplicity and his only hope of escaping themere priorities and prior arrangements of the life. The artist’s fi-delity requires a withdrawal from the life if there is to be any solacein the art, and the fact of that withdrawal lies in the success of anart that is not minutely mined by the life. The poet may be alive to


the inner meaning but keen to preserve its lack of standing asmeaning. Half-hidden, it retains the same influence emotions exertin life—the force of a poem comes not from actual disclosures, butfrom our sensitivity to their latent presence. There a poet whosepleasure lies in her transparency, in the seeming perfection of aminor art, has a troubling coerciveness, even if her flinching re-treat from its sources leaves her art permanently mangled orcrippled. Her vices, like those of Emily Dickinson, are intimate toher best work and inseparable from it. Bishop is one of the bestexamples in our poetry of how the eccentric course of meaningdocuments both the major and minor terms of an art nearly perfectin its clarity and constricted by its fastidiousness. The terms of herlimitations are likely to be, to readers not wholly conditioned bythe grotesque expanses of poets not nearly her equal in the psycho-logical realm, the modest terms of our respect.

The Unbearable Lightness of Elizabeth Bishop · The Unbearable Lightness of Elizabeth Bishop ......

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