and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Like any successful sestina, this has a touch of virtuosity about it, but its virtuosity is not what engages one’s attention. Its immediate effect is as emotionally direct as a fairytale. Just as Dylan Thomas’s villanelle ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ comes across as a dramatic cry rather than a formal set-piece, so the narrative and dramatic interest of Bishop’s sestina very quickly deflects attention from its master-class excellence as a technical performance. The poem circles unspoken sorrows, and as it circles them, it manages to mesmerize them and make them obedient to creative will. The short-circuited pain within the grandmother’s house, a pain to which the almanac imparts a fatal inevitability, is shut up for the time being inside the inscrutable house which the child draws. In so far as it echoes old tales where the wicked spirit is imprisoned in some box or tree or rock, this conclusion represents a victory over the negative conditions. But viewed from another perspective, it simply returns the situation to its original configuration, where the entrapment is ongoing and resolution is something attainable only in imagination.
In fact, ‘Sestina’, with its inscrutable house, performs the same reflexive but ultimately salubrious function as the monument performs in an early Bishop poem called (with equal plainness) ‘The Monument’. This monument is made of wood, of boxes placed upon boxes; like the sestina it is both enigmatic and entirely satisfactory. It promises nothing beyond what it exhibits, and yet it seems to be standing over something which it also stands for. Once again, a withdrawn presence, an inscrutable purpose or missing element is what the resulting structure exists to express or shelter. In fact, the final lines of the poem declare that the monument commemorates something undeclared, something embodying and maintaining a meaning it feels no need to proclaim:
It is an artifact
of wood. Wood holds together better
than sea or cloud or sand could by itself,
much better than real sea or sand or cloud.
It chose that way to grow and not to move.
The monument’s an object, yet those decorations,
carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all,
give it away as having life, and wishing;
wanting to be a monument, to cherish something.
The crudest scroll-work says ‘commemorate’,
while once each day the light goes around it
like a prowling animal,
or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it.
It may be solid, may be hollow.
The bones of the artist-prince may be inside
or far away on even drier soil.
But roughly but adequately it can shelter
what is within (which after all
cannot have been intended to be seen).
It is the beginning of a painting,
a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,
and all of wood. Watch it closely.
This monument to something which ‘cannot have been intended to be seen’ finds itself menaced by the very light which goes around it ‘like a prowling animal’. Yet in spite of the guardedness which these conditions induce, it still does want ‘to cherish something’. And if we watch it closely, as we are counselled to, we shall find that in being an object which has life and ‘can shelter / what is within’, it resembles the work of the poet who imagined it into being in the first place. For the gratifying thing about Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is that in the end it too overcomes the guardedness of its approach. It may be an observant poetry but it does not finally, in the colloquial sense of the term, ‘watch it’, even though the inclination to caution is persistently felt as a condition of the poet’s style. Qualification is her natural habit of mind, but even so, the poetry continually manages to go out to greet what is there, to salute what Louis MacNeice called ‘the drunkenness of things being various’. And it justifies itself as poetry by the thoroughness of its assistance. At its most ardent, it wants to give itself entirely to what it discovers, as when her poem ‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ concludes by asking ‘Why couldn’t we have … looked and looked our infant sight away’?
This is to say that Bishop’s famous gift for observation is more than a habit of simply watching; it represents rather a certain self-conquest, the surmounting of a definite temperamental wariness. She is more naturally fastidious than rhapsodic. If she is well enough disposed towards the phenomena, she is still not exultant. Her detachment is chronic, and yet the combination of attentive-ness and precision which she brings to bear upon things is so intense that the detachment almost evaporates. What Bishop does is to scrutinize and interrogate things as they are before giving her assent to them. She does not immediately or necessarily glorify them, being more of a sympathetic adjudicator than a born cheerleader, but neither does she refuse them their just measure of praise. Her sense of reality, to put it another way, is more earthbound than angelic. Her early poem ‘Anaphora’, for example, is a morning song in which Bishop does indeed conceive of an angelic creature, one who represents a part of us that is potentially equal to the brilliant promises of the morning and the day; yet she is constrained to acknowledge that this creature is also the one whose possibilities we nevertheless actually and repeatedly fail to realize. And so he
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks through the drift of bodies,
sinks through the drift of classes
to evening to the beggar in the park
who, weary, without lamp or book
prepares stupendous studies:
the fiery event
of every day in endless
endless assent.
But there is, after all, something marvellous about a beggar assenting to things as they are. For him, the fiery event of every day, be it the dawn or the sunset, has to be its own reward, since there is nothing else in it for him; and it is in similar acts of outstripping one’s own deprivation, in not doting upon it, so to speak, but proceeding instead into freely offered celebration – it is in such acts and attainments of the spirit that Bishop’s poetry redresses the scales that were loaded against her from the start.
The move is not so much from delight to wisdom, although both of these things figure importantly in the poems; in her case, the characteristic shift might be more precisely described as being from self-containment to an acknowledgement of the mystery of the other, with the writing functioning as an enactment of all the bittersweet deferrals in between. ‘The Fish’ is an obvious instance of this, the whole poem hypnotically suspended between the two definite actions reported in the first and the last lines: ‘I caught a tremendous fish’, ‘And I let the fish go’. In between, what the poem offers is a slow-motion replay, sensation by sensation, of the process by which the fish is recognized as a harbinger of what Hopkins calls ‘the glory of God’, of that dearest freshness that lives deep down in things, all that which the poem itself finally calls ‘rainbow, rainbow, rainbow’. For once, Bishop seems to go beyond assent, yet in fact the action of releasing the fish is simply the deepest form which assent can take, and, in a Cordelia-like way, it speaks more loudly than the superlative words. The fish is recognized as a kindred spirit, one of the swimming as opposed to the walking wounded, one who takes things in but prefers to keep his counsel:
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
– It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
– if you could call it a
lip –
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
One can imagine this fish and the poet who writes about him recognizing the truth in the reply of the old Eskimo woman who, when asked why all the songs sung by her tribe were so short, answered simply: ‘Because we know so much.’
Similarly, the cost of Bishop’s composure in her poems should not be underestimated. The rainbow effect is not attained without some expense of spirit. No writer is more positive in registering the detailed marvels of the world, yet no writer is more scrupulous in conceding that there are endangering negative conditions which must equally and simultaneously be accounted facts of life. I would like, therefore, to concentrate for a few minutes on a poem which reveals these characteristic motions of Bishop’s mind, both in art and in life, one which also has about it a touch of comedy and a hint of self-portraiture. This is her poem about the sandpiper:
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
– Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
‘The roaring alongside he takes for granted’, we are told right away; and if we think of that roaring as the noise of the public world as well as the noise of the sea, we can say much the same thing about Elizabeth Bishop. She does not go in for the epic panorama, for large historical treatments, for the synoptic view of cultures and crises so typical of other major twentieth-century poets. She is, of course, deeply aware that every so often the world is bound to shake, and not only with the thunder of waves, but also with the thunder of war or of earthquake or the merciless death of a parent or the untimely and guilt-inducing suicide of a beloved friend. In such circumstances, panic is a natural enough reaction, a reflex impulse to escape from the scene altogether. And yet since one cannot escape one’s times or one’s destiny, such panic has to be controlled, and to control is to set limits, to map a defined space within which one will operate. In the case of the sandpiper, this space is a shifting space of sand, between the tide and the land: it is here that the sandpiper naturally becomes a student of Blake, since William Blake is the poet who urged in ‘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.
Blake’s poem is visionary and prophetic, but even as zealous a student as the sandpiper can never possess its immense bardic confidence. The poor bird is ‘finical’, a word whose very sound and texture suggest nervousness, primness, petulance; a finical creature will never be in command of the situation, and so, instead of standing his ground, the sandpiper runs:
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward.
Nevertheless, the poet is instinctively drawn to the bird, and cannot blame him for his twitchiness. There is something detached and concerned in her attitude to his fretful busy scurrying which is not unlike her own attitude to herself as she expressed it in a speech in 1976. ‘Yes,’ she said then, ‘all my life I have lived and behaved very much like that sandpiper – just running along the edges of different countries, “looking for something”.’ But it’s not just Bishop’s migrant impulse that links her to the sandpiper. There is also her vigilant, hesitant, yet completely fascinated attention to detail, and her habitual caution in the face of the world. The phrase ‘watching his toes’, for example, applies in an exact and jokey way to both the bird and the poet. It echoes, obviously, the phrase ‘watch your step’ while putting a spin on the phrase ‘keep on your toes’, and in its double encompassing of alertness and caution, of being menaced and being ready, it is consonant both with Elizabeth Bishop’s habitual attitudes and with the tiny plight of the sandpiper.
I say ‘tiny’ plight. But part of the purpose of this writing is to blur the distinction between what is vast and what is tiny. The student of Blake, after all, will see a world in a grain of sand. So this poem will see to it that vast words like ‘Atlantic’ and ‘world’ and indeed the word ‘vast’ itself are matched and balanced and equalled by small words like ‘toes’ and ‘beak’ and ‘grains’. No detail is too small, as the parenthesis in line 10 insists. ‘The world is a mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear.’ We might in fact go so far as to say that the poem is about the way in which obsessive attention to detail can come through into visionary understanding; the way in which an intense focus can amplify rather than narrow our sense of scope. The last two lines of the poem do transform what is tiny and singular and project it on a cosmic screen. They make radiant and marvellous that which is in danger of being overlooked and disregarded. Again, the small and the great are brought into contact, and the small brings the great into question:
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
‘The millions of grains’: we see a pepper-and-salt of grains. A yard of sand is first a gritty texture and then a glittering marvel. And all this is effected without any straining of linguistic muscle. The poem does not raise its voice or overstretch its vocabulary. The words are usual and plain and available to everybody. Yet the poet does to words what she does to details: she makes them beckon us into hitherto unsuspected spaces. Quartz, rose, amethyst: all three of them are now ashimmer, ‘minute and vast and clear’, as if they had escaped from the light-drenched empyrean of Dante’s Paradiso. The student of Blake has found not only a world but a whole system of heavens in the grains of sand.
‘Sandpiper’ is a poem of immense discretion and discreet immensity, and if I appear to be talking it up in excess of its merits, then all I can say is that appearances are deceptive. It is a perfect achievement, one that brings itself and its reader into a renewed awareness of the mysterious otherness of the world. And it brings us to that threshold by following its nose – or its beak – through the old crazy-paving and matter-of-fact of detail. And the same is true of many of Bishop’s acknowledged triumphs, especially her great meditative excursus, ‘At the Fish-houses’. But since I have written at length about that poem in the title essay of The Government of the Tongue, I want to draw attention here briefly instead to those two longish late poems, ‘The Moose’ and ‘Crusoe in England’. Each of them is a memory poem, each gives access to a marvellous thing, but neither of them treats the marvellous as other than an achievement of the imagination. When the moose comes out of the woods, when Crusoe remembers the aura which his jackknife once possessed for him, the world does shimmer in a transformed light; and yet both of these poems, in Auden’s words, find the mortal world enough. Their characteristic strength comes from Bishop’s old gift for raising the actual to a new linguistic power. The
ir triumph is the redundancy of that power, its capacity to be more than enough. Here is Crusoe, remembering waterspouts:
And I had waterspouts. Oh,
half a dozen at a time, far out,
they’d come and go, advancing and retreating,
their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches
of scuffed-up white.
Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
sacerdotal beings of glass … I watched
the water spiral up in them like smoke.
Beautiful, yes, but not much company.
And here is the almost beautiful moose appearing out of the night as the passengers on a bus talk and talk intimately among themselves on the long journey south out of Nova Scotia, a journey which follows a scheduled bus-route and at the same time retraces in memory the path the poet once took from the pre-reflective world of her childhood:
Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.
Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
– Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
‘Perfectly harmless …’
Finders Keepers Page 39
