Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
‘Sure are big creatures.’
‘It’s awful plain.’
‘Look! It’s a she!’
Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
‘Curious creatures,’
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r’s.
‘Look at that, would you.’
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer
by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there’s a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.
Something that the American poet Charles Simic has written in relation to the work of the artist Joseph Cornell – an artist, incidentally, to whom Elizabeth Bishop was also devoted – seems worth quoting at this juncture. ‘There are really three kinds of images,’ Simic writes:
First, there are those seen with eyes open in the manner of realists in both art and literature. Then there are images we see with eyes closed. Romantic poets, surrealists, expressionists and everyday dreamers know them. The images Cornell has in his boxes are, however, of the third kind. They partake of both dream and reality, and of something else that doesn’t have a name. They tempt the viewer in two opposite directions. One is to look and admire … and the other is to make up stories about what one sees … Neither [way] by itself is sufficient. It’s the mingling of the two that makes up the third image.
Simic entitles his short meditation ‘The Gaze We Knew as a Child’, which again seems apposite to Bishop’s images, for they too strike us as being both preternaturally immediate and remotely familiar. Their attraction partakes of ‘something that doesn’t have a name’, as if things known once upon a time in a pre-literate security were reappearing among the destabilizations of the post-modern. Her images call consciousness towards recollection. And it is surely Bishop’s successful effort to become utterly receptive in face of the phenomena and to give a just account of the reactions, both positive and negative, which they induce – it is surely this peculiar honest gaze, both level and brimming, which has drawn so many readers to her work over the last couple of decades. Naturally, as a woman poet whose laconic sense of her relegation through gender was matched only by her sense of entitlement through achievement, Bishop has rightly gained the advocacy of feminist critics. Her quietude was a far cry from quietism, and poems like ‘Roosters’, dating from the early 1940s, were a clear-eyed and deeply creative response to the impositions of a militaristic, patriarchal world. Yet she always resisted the pressures to connect herself politically with activist feminist politics. She was by temperament and choice too much of a loner to subscribe even to the most urgent of solidarities.
Within recent American poetry, Bishop occupies a position analogous to that long occupied on the other side of the ocean by Philip Larkin. In an era of volubility, she seems to demonstrate that less is more. By her sense of proportion and awareness of tradition, she makes what is an entirely personal and contemporary style seem continuous with the canonical poetry of the past. She writes the kind of poem that makes us want to exclaim with admiration at its professional thoroughness, its technical and formal perfections, and yet at the same time she tempts us to regard technical and formal matters as something of a distraction, since the poem is so candidly about something, engaged with its own business of observing the world and discovering meaning.
All of which is immediately manifest in the poem I want to read and comment upon by way of conclusion. This is a villanelle entitled ‘One Art’, and, since its publication in Bishop’s last volume, it has become one of the most admired examples of her work. This last volume, Geography III, was published in 1976 and contains a number of extraordinary poems of summation and benediction – including ‘The Moose’ and that other hide-and-seek, count-to-a-hundred dramatic monologue, ‘Crusoe in England’. These poems arise from a mind that is unembittered but still unappeased, like the sandpiper still ‘looking for something, something, something’. They come near the end of a life which Bishop had long contemplated both with regard to its penalties and its blessings. They represent the effort of a memory observing its own contents, a consciousness squaring up to itself and taking the measure of its own strengths and weaknesses. And this reflexive strain, this compulsion of her intelligence to keep standing at an angle to her predicament, finds its natural form in the villanelle. With its repetitions and revisions and nuancings, its shifts and refinements and siftings of what has already been finely sifted, the villanelle is the perfect mould for Bishop’s habitual method of coming at a subject in little renewed attempts and sorties. But each little attempt falls short of stating the big sorrow or sorrows which occasioned the poem. Anybody familiar with the outlines of the poet’s biography will know that there are plenty of specific occasions from which the poem’s general preoccupation with loss could have arisen, but the lines can be read without any special knowledge of the facts of Bishop’s life:
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.
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.
In this poem, Bishop’s ability to write plainly and at the same time reticently manifests itself in extremis. This is wonderful lyric writing; it is impossible to separate the poem’s reality as a made thing from its effect as a personal cry. It is in one way, of course, entirely formal, preoccupied with its technical procedures, taking delight in solving the challenges of rhyme, in obeying (and disobeying) the rules of the highly constraining villanelle form. At the same time, it is obviously the whimper of a creature who has been hard done by; or, to be more exact, it is a choked-off whimper, the learnt behaviour of somebody who, without the impersonal demands of an art and an ethic of doughty conduct, might have submitted to self-pity. In fact, the conquest of a temptation to self-pity is what the poem manages to effect: wit confronts hurt and holds a balance that deserves to be called wisdom. The writing itself could be called deadpan-ironical or whimsical-stoical, but it is not exactly either. It is, to quote another famous line of Bishop’s, ‘like what we imagine knowledge to be’. By its trust in poetic form and its abnegation of self, it bears a recognizable relationship to the work of that seventeenth-century English poet-priest whom Elizabeth Bishop so admired, George Herbert. Like Herbert, Bishop finds and enforces a correspondence between the procedures of verse and the predicaments of the spirit. She makes rhyme an analogy for self-control. The first time ‘master’ and ‘disaster’ occur, in stanza one, they are tactfully, elegantly, deprecatingly paired off. It wasn’t a disaster. The speaker is being decorous, good-mannered, relieving you of the burden of having to sympathize, easing you out of any embarrassed need to find things to say. The last time the rhyme occurs, however, the shocking tr
aumatic reality of what happened almost overbrims the containing form. It was a disaster. It was devastatingly and indescribably so. And yet what the poem has just managed to do, in the nick of time, is to survive the devastation. The verb ‘master’ places itself in the scales opposite its twin noun, ‘disaster’, and holds the balance. And the secret of the held balance is given in the parenthesis ‘(Write it!)’. As so often in Bishop’s work, the parenthesis (if you have ears to hear) is the place to hear the real truth. And what the parenthesis in ‘One Art’ tells us is what we already knew in some general way, but now know with an acute pang of intimacy, that the act of writing is an act of survival:
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.
The pun in that nick-of-time imperative – ‘Write it!’ – is in deadly earnest. The redress of poetry is called upon by one of poetry’s constant votaries; the poem is asked to set the balance right. Losses of all sorts have caused the mind’s scales to tilt drastically and so they desperately need to be evened out by a redistribution of the mind’s burdens – and the act of writing is depended upon to bring that redistribution about. The throwaway tone of the thing is recognizably the tone that accompanies a throw that risks all. In the pun on the word ‘write’, therefore, and in the harmony which prevails momentarily in the concluding rhyme, we experience the resolving power of deliberately articulated sound in much the same way as the narrator of the story ‘In the Village’ experienced it. There the scream was subsumed in the anvil note; here the ‘disaster’ is absorbed when it meets its emotional and phonetic match in the word ‘master’. Bishop’s ‘one art’ does not after all fail her. For all her caution about over-stating its prerogatives and possibilities, she does continually manage to advance poetry beyond the point where it has been helping us to enjoy life to that even more profoundly verifying point where it helps us also to endure it.
Oxford Lectures. December 1992
Burns’s Art Speech
Poets’ real biographies are like those of birds … their real data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography is in his vowels and sibilants, in his metres, rhymes and metaphors … With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story they tell …
Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One
From the start, the way Burns sounded made me feel close to him. His choice of words, his rhymes and metaphors collapsed the distance I expected to feel between myself and the Schoolbook poetry I encountered first at Anahorish Elementary School and subsequently at St Columb’s College, Derry. I’m almost certain that I knew his lines ‘To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November, 1785’ before I went to secondary school, but it wasn’t any previous acquaintance with the poem that gave me a special relationship to it when I met it again in The Ambleside Book of Verse. In those days, when it came to poetry, we all braced ourselves linguistically. And rightly so: everybody should be in good verbal shape when faced with a page of verse. In our case, however, we expected that the language on the written page would take us out of our unofficial speaking selves and transport us to a land of formal words where we would have to be constantly on our best verbal behaviour. ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit’ fulfilled these expectations perfectly, as did the elevation of ‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright’. But next comes this:
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
and this was different. Even before a metre or a melody could be established, the word ‘wee’ put its stressed foot down and in one pre-emptive vocative strike took over the emotional and cultural ground, dispossessing the rights of written standard English and offering asylum to all vernacular comers. To all, at least, who hailed from north of a line drawn between Berwick and Bundoran, ‘Wee’ came on strong. It was entirely untwee. It neither beckoned nor beguiled. It was just suddenly and solidly there, and there it remains to this day, like a pebble of the pre-literary and the pre-literate stuff, irreducible, undislodgeable and undeniably true. A bit like what Burns himself was like at his best, the Burns whom Walter Scott remembered, for example, as a person ‘strong and robust’ with ‘a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity’, expressive of ‘perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption’, and exhibiting thereby a ‘perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness’.
Big claims, you may feel, for a wee word; but not, I would argue, exaggerated claims. Both as a matter of poetic fact and a matter of personal reminiscence, the opening of Burns’s poem to the mouse is a decisive occurrence. It gets into the boundless language of poetry by reason of its unchallengeable Tightness as utterance, its simultaneous at-oneness with the genius of English and Scottish speech; and it got under my official classroom guard and into the kitchen life, as it were, of my affections by reason of its truth to the life of the language I spoke while growing up in mid-Ulster, a language where trace elements of Elizabethan English and Lowland Scots are still to be heard and to be reckoned with as a matter of pronunciation and, even, indeed, of politics.
‘Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie’ – ‘sleeket’ was something else that slipped under the guard, as a sleeket thing might be expected to, since the word has connotations of plausibility as well as silkiness and slinkiness. And the line built quickly and securely on that ‘wee’ foundation. The mouse, for example, was not cowering but ‘cowran’, a participle as careless about its final g as we ourselves were in our schoolyard speech. It was a beastie, not a beast, the way a John among us became a Johnnie or a Hugh a Hughie or, indeed, a Robert a Rabbie. And the whole thing, I knew, had to be spoken in a more or less County Antrim accent, an accent I happened to be familiar with from my trips to the fair hill in Ballymena where the farmers said ‘yin’ and ‘twa’ for ‘one’ and ‘two’ and in general spoke a tongue that was as close to Ayrshire as to County Derry.
There is no need, I suppose, to keep going on in this fashion, because what I am describing is a common enough phenomenon. It is always a pleasure to find your subcultural life being represented with accuracy and without condescension in a high cultural context – and in its own way, in its own time, The Ambleside Book of Verse did provide just such a context. Nowadays, however, as well as recognizing the documentary accuracy of the language, I can also rejoice in what we might call its poetic verity. By which I mean its earworthiness, the way it is as firm and as buoyant as a boat beneath an oarsman. ‘Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie’: the line comes on like a reassuring ‘There, there, there, there’; the four stresses of the four adjectives establish the largeness and largesse of the human agent on the scene. The poetic feet have a benevolent tread and step into the poem as surely and unthreateningly as the ploughman coming to inspect the ruined nest. Indeed, what is being sounded forth beat by metrical beat is that independence which was so often remarked upon as an attractive and indispensable part of the Burns’s own make-up – what Scott called his ‘perfect firmness’.
Moreover, it is because of the aural trustworthiness of the first line that the rhetorical exclamation of the second one – ‘O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!’ – carries real emotional weight. I can, of course, imagine Spike Milligan using a burlesque Scoto-Goonish accent and putting these words through it as through a synthesizer in order to send them up; but the point is that it would indeed require such genuinely comic gifts as Spike’s to rock the line on its emotional keel. ‘O, what a panic’s in thy breastie’ has a scramblier movement than the first line, but it is a movement which springs from sympathy rather than mimicry. There is nothing remotely Disney-like going on here: this is not mere skilful verbal simulation of the behaviour of a frightened mouse but an inv
oluntary outrush of fellow feeling. And as the address to the unhoused mouse continues, the identification becomes more intense, the plough of the living voice gets set deeper and deeper in the psychic ground, dives more and more purposefully into the subsoil of the intuitions until finally it breaks open a nest inside the poet’s own head and leaves him exposed to his own profoundest forebodings about his fate. The last stanza feels weird, in the strictly Anglo-Saxon sense:
Still thou art blest compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear.
What has happened here is truly, almost literally, a discovery. From a hiding place in the foggage of the poet’s own consciousness, his wee, cowran, tim’rous soul has been panicked into a sudden recognition of its destiny. The sturdy, caring figure who overshadowed and oversaw the panic of the mouse at the beginning has been revealed to himself as someone less perfectly firm, less strong and robust than he or the reader would have ever suspected. In other words, Burns’s mouse gradually becomes a sibylline rather than a sentimental element in the poem – so much so that, by the end, the reader feels that the bleakness of Lear’s heath must have overtaken the field at Mossgiel on that wintry November day in 1785 when ‘crash! the cruel coulter passed/ Out thro’ thy cell’.
And it is a matter of the profoundest phonetic satisfaction that the exclamation ‘Och’ should be at the centre of this semi-visionary final stanza. For if ‘wee’ is the monosyllable that takes possession of the cultural and linguistic ground at the start, ‘och’ is a kind of nunc dimittis positioned near the end. ‘Och’ springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds that (in the words of Robert Frost) ‘haven’t been brought to book … living in the cave of the mouth’;3 and while it is certainly a cry of distress, it is by no means a venting of self-pity. If ‘ouch’ is the complaint of the ego, ‘och’ is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, and on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women in extremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.
Finders Keepers Page 40
