 |
| young Elizabeth Bishop |
A wayward traveler fell in love with her. And he loved her more than his life. The flower welcomed the traveler. They had an enchanted time together. Then something happened. The lover died. The flower was grief-stricken. She could not live another day.
A second traveler arrived. Flower was nurtured back to health. To joy. To ecstasy. They had an enchanted time together. Then something happened. The traveler died, too. Now the flower was devastated. Until....
Shortly afterwards, a third traveler trotted on the horizon....
It had never been a time of peace or affluence. A war between angels and fallen angels raged on. A famine engulfed one country after another. The flower could not look that far. She lived her days counting losses; she thrived in perpetual guilty laments. Which became her swan songs.
Well, that's the life and poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
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One Art
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.
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1. "Naturally born guilty"
Elizabeth's father died of some kind of kidney disease when she was only eight months old. mother never recovered from the shock and had been in and out of mental hospitals since. Elizabeth forever remembered those early years of anxiety, confusion and fear. The last time mother returned home from hospital was particularly nightmarish. that day mother tried to put on a new purple dress after years in black. somehow the dress was all wrong and she let out a horrifying scream. she was promptly sent back to the hospital. this time for good. Elizabeth was five. she would never see mother again. and the scream - was it what she heard "in the waiting room"?
living in mother's hometown in Nova Scotia was a happy Elizabeth however, with simple but loving grand parents, aunts, uncles and village kids. but grandpa in Massachusetts wanted his granddaughter to have a proper education only New England could provide. by age seven, Nova Scotia became the home she could not return.
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First Death In Nova Scotia
In the cold, cold parlor
my mother laid out Arthur
beneath the chromographs:
Edward, Prince of Wales,
with Princess Alexandra,
and King George with Queen Mary.
Below them on the table
stood a stuffed loon
shot and stuffed by Uncle
Arthur, Arthur's father.
Since Uncle Arthur fired
a bullet into him,
he hadn't said a word.
He kept his own counsel
on his white, frozen lake,
the marble-topped table.
His breast was deep and white,
cold and caressable;
his eyes were red glass,
much to be desired.
"Come," said my mother,
"Come and say good-bye
to your little cousin Arthur."
I was lifted up and given
one lily of the valley
to put in Arthur's hand.
Arthur's coffin was
a little frosted cake,
and the red-eyed loon eyed it
from his white, frozen lake.
Arthur was very small.
He was all white, like a doll
that hadn't been painted yet.
Jack Frost had started to paint him
the way he always painted
the Maple Leaf (Forever).
He had just begun on his hair,
a few red strokes, and then
Jack Frost had dropped the brush
and left him white, forever.
The gracious royal couples
were warm in red and ermine;
their feet were well wrapped up
in the ladies' ermine trains.
They invited Arthur to be
the smallest page at court.
But how could Arthur go,
clutching his tiny lily,
with his eyes shut up so tight
and the roads deep in snow?
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2. "leaves' fossils"
grandpa's big mansion in Worcester Massachusetts was a miserable place for Elizabeth. she was constantly lonely, depressed and sick (she had asthma). it was so bad that she was sent to stay with the eldest sister of her mother's. In a poor Italian neighborhood of Boston. Elizabeth was grateful to be with aunt Maud and her collection of books - "Aunt Maud saved my life." This move would become the pattern of her life: forever hopping into homes of others'.
Elizabeth finally assumed resemblance of a normal kid's life when she attended High School and then Vassar College of Liberal Arts. her talent in writing was evident. she published frequently in student newspapers, and in her last couple of years at Vassar, appeared in national journals. besides literature, Elizabeth also took three years of piano classes - she would have majored in music had she not been terrified by obligatory recitals. she was very shy. the most momentous event in her college years was being introduced to poet Marianne Moore, who would become her mentor and life-time friend. after graduation, with the small trust fund left her by her father, Elizabeth was free to "work" as an aspiring writer/poet.
Bob Seaver appeared to be the only boy friend she'd more or less committed to. they met each other through a Vassar classmate of hers and had a "fitful" courtship. once the two of them spent joyful time together in Nantucket. She also visited his Pittsfield, MA, home now and then and was accepted by his parents. a few years after college, in early 1937, he proposed and she declined. the last thing she heard from him was a post card. "go to hell, Elizabeth." it said - days after he shot himself dead.
emotionally during the same years, Elizabeth seemed to be more fixated on Margaret Miller, her Vassar classmate, who was to become painter and art historian. her journals were full of Margaret, like this one:
"Margaret was as sweet as sherbet in her pink blouse today. her face had that soft look about it, as if she had slept an extra hour or two, and her eyes a clear original color that they blend for themselves out of several colors never in eyes before hers."
later in the same year Seaver committed suicide, Elizabeth and her friend Louise Crane embarked on their second European trip. they unexpectedly ran into Margaret Miller in UK and the three girls went to Paris together. one day, they took a ride in Louise's car to visit churches. to avoid a collision with an incoming car, Louise lost control, the car rolled and all three of them were thrown out. Elizabeth and Louise were unscratched, but Margaret lost her right forearm forever. "leaves' fossils" was how Bishop remembered it.
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 |
| Elizabeth and Louise Crane. brbl-dl.library.yale.edu |
(later dedicated to Margaret)
Each barge on the river easily tows
a mighty wake,
a giant oak-leaf of gray lights
on duller gray;
and behind it real leaves are floating by,
down to the sea.
Mercury-veins on the giant leaves,
the ripples, make
for the sides of the quai, to extinguish themselves
against the walls
as softly as falling-stars come to their ends
at a point in the sky.
And throngs of small leaves, real leaves, trailing them,
go drifting by
to disappear as modesty, down the sea's
dissolving halls.
We stand as still as stones to watch
the leaves and ripples
while light and nervous water hold
their interview,
"If what we see could forget us half as easily,"
I want to tell you,
"as it does itself -- but for life we'll not be rid
of the leaves' fossils.
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3. "ELIZABETH KNOWS BEST."
in 1934, the year they were introduced by Fannie Borden, Vassar librarian and Moore's childhood friend, Elizabeth was 23 and Marianne Moore 47. Bishop fresh out of school, Moore already a well-published poet, not yet famous but well-connected.
Marianne lived in New York with her mother, the widowed Mrs.Moore, who was also her chief poetic critic.
mother&daughter immediately took Elizabeth under their wings. Elizabeth would go visit their home, invite them out for dinner or take Marianne to circus or art shows. they lived close enough for Marianne to occasionally take care of her cat when Elizabeth travelled.
and she did travel, even move around the world, all the time. before "arrival at Santos", Brazil, Elizabeth seemed not capable of staying in one place for long, especially not in New York. so she and Marianne also corresponded for almost 40 years. it started as Bishop being timid and looking upon Moore for professional guidance. Moore took the role of mentor and consistently recommended Bishop to editors, new poetry journals, or literary fellowships. Then entered a phase in which Bishop would mail her drafted poems to Moore and mother&daughter would dutifully pore over them, providing ever detailed comments and editing.
in 1940, a critical point was reached. by then, Bishop had already written some of her finest and defining poems: "the map", "man-moth", "imaginary iceberg", etc, and grew mature and confident with their publication, while Moore and mother's critique had slowly turned possessive. Bishop was being bothered by the brutal war going on in Europe. for once, she ventured out of her introspective musings and wrote a highly charged and expressive - but no less layered - poem called "roosters". the Moore ladies were alarmed. with effort and sincerity, they completely revised and sanitized the poem (even changed the title "roosters" to "the cock", thinking the latter more classic.)
Elizabeth replied with a painfully nuanced letter, but the bare bone was "I may sound like "ELIZABETH KNOWS BEST" and you are of course right; but I will stick to my version, thank you. by the way, may i keep yours, too? it's so interesting...."
thus abruptly her apprenticeship was terminated: no more poems to be mailed back and forth. it is remarkable, almost mystifying, that the friendship survived. the women continued to care for each other, Moore promoting Bishop here and there and Bishop showering love with chatty letters and gifts (and telling occasional jokes about the old maid to her more contemporary friends).
Moore won Pulitzer prize in 1951 and became a celebrity in her late years. Bishop got hers in 1956; her reputation seems to grow more after her death.
(Moore once wondered and asked Bishop about her influence on the latter (there was none the other way around). others often point to the similarly accurate descriptive style as one. Bishop would only readily admit that Moore's poetry opened her eyes on subject matters (no more "love", "sorrow" poems). otherwise they couldn't be more different, she believed. reading too much into Bishop and not enough of Moore, I do agree with her).
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| Marianne Moore |
At four o’clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock
just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo
off in the distance,
then one from the backyard fence,
then one, with horrible insistence,
grates like a wet match
from the broccoli patch,
flares, and all over town begins to catch.
Cries galore
come from the water-closet door,
from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,
where in the blue blur
their rustling wives admire,
the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare
with stupid eyes
while from their beaks there rise
the uncontrolled, traditional cries.
Deep from protruding chests
in green-gold medals dressed,
planned to command and terrorize the rest,
the many wives
who lead hens’ lives
of being courted and despised;
deep from raw throats
a senseless order floats
all over town. A rooster gloats
over our beds
from rusty iron sheds
and fences made from old bedsteads,
over our churches
where the tin rooster perches,
over our little wooden northern houses,
making sallies
from all the muddy alleys,
marking out maps like Rand McNally’s:
glass-headed pins,
oil-golds and copper greens,
anthracite blues, alizarins,
each one an active
displacement in perspective;
each screaming, “This is where I live!”
Each screaming
“Get up! Stop dreaming!”
Roosters, what are you projecting?
You, whom the Greeks elected
to shoot at on a post, who struggled
when sacrificed, you whom they labeled
“Very combative ...”
what right have you to give
commands and tell us how to live,
cry “Here!” and “Here!”
and wake us here where are
unwanted love, conceit and war?
The crown of red
set on your little head
is charged with all your fighting blood.
Yes, that excrescence
makes a most virile presence,
plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence.
Now in mid-air
by twos they fight each other.
Down comes a first flame-feather,
and one is flying,
with raging heroism defying
even the sensation of dying.
And one has fallen,
but still above the town
his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down;
and what he sung
no matter. He is flung
on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung
with his dead wives
with open, bloody eyes,
while those metallic feathers oxidize.
St. Peter’s sin
was worse than that of Magdalen
whose sin was of the flesh alone;
of spirit, Peter’s,
falling, beneath the flares,
among the “servants and officers.”
Old holy sculpture
could set it all together
in one small scene, past and future:
Christ stands amazed,
Peter, two fingers raised
to surprised lips, both as if dazed.
But in between
a little cock is seen
carved on a dim column in the travertine,
explained by gallus canit;
flet Petrus underneath it.
There is inescapable hope, the pivot;
yes, and there Peter’s tears
run down our chanticleer’s
sides and gem his spurs.
Tear-encrusted thick
as a medieval relic
he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick,
still cannot guess
those cock-a-doodles yet might bless,
his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness,
a new weathervane
on basilica and barn,
and that outside the Lateran
there would always be
a bronze cock on a porphyry
pillar so the people and the Pope might see
that even the Prince
of the Apostles long since
had been forgiven, and to convince
all the assembly
that “Deny deny deny”
is not all the roosters cry.
In the morning
a low light is floating
in the backyard, and gilding
from underneath
the broccoli, leaf by leaf;
how could the night have come to grief?
gilding the tiny
floating swallow’s belly
and lines of pink cloud in the sky,
the day’s preamble
like wandering lines in marble.
The cocks are now almost inaudible.
The sun climbs in,
following “to see the end,”
faithful as enemy, or friend.
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4. "It's marvelous to wake up together."
1940s were transitional years for Elizabeth. she seemed to be exploring and accepting her sexuality; she traveled far and wide but couldn't settle down. relationships were made and unmade. home was where she was not.
for the relatively long stretch of years, Elizabeth lived in Key West. she and Louise Crane bought a house there. soon afterwards, however, the exceedingly wealthy Louise abandoned Key West altogether. Elizabeth moved in with Marjorie Stevens to her place. While at Key West, she also developed intimate friendship with Pauline, ex-wife of Hemingway's, and her two sisters. For a couple of years, Elizabeth dated Tom Wanning - her last attempt to establish a "normal" relationship.
the two most important figures in Bishop's life made their entrances in 40's, too, but their stories had to wait.
Marjorie was wife of a navy man before she became Elizabeth's earnest and loyal care-giver. she worked to support Elizabeth, watched over her diet and drink, and accompanied her in a long trip to Mexico. Bishop was content for a few years, grew agitated and finally agonized in indecision during her stay in New York in early 1946. to help her make up her mind, Marjorie wrote to ask Elizabeth not to come back to Key West again. she then obliged to destroy all the letters Elizabeth wrote her (while Elizabeth kept her letters by Marjorie).
it's not evident what the deep affection was, but Marjorie was one of many who had doted on Elizabeth. she seems to be the ultimate feminine ideal everyone would rush to love, to care and to protect.
Anaphora is a poem subtly alluding to their life together. Bishop dedicated it to Marjorie after her death in 1959.
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Anaphora
Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory;
such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
'Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed? ' Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
instantly, instantly falls
victim of long intrigue,
assuming memory and mortal
mortal fatigue.
More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
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.
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5. "battered and shiny like the moon"
bishop took a freighter to Brazil at the end of 1950, with a vague idea: go around the world and write about it, too. it was half planned with a scholarship grant and half dreamed - she had always wanted to go to South America.
arriving in Rio de Janeiro, Elizabeth was greeted by Mary Morse, an old Bostonian friend, and her lover Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares (Lota). she saw them a few years earlier in New York and got an invitation. Lota immediately offered their Rio apartment to Elizabeth to "stay as long as you want". and days became months and months became years.
to Elizabeth, Lota must be like Louise Crane and Marjorie Stevens combined: a Louise with Marjorie's dedication or a Marjorie with Louise's wealth. added to that was Lota's big heart, artistic talent and enormous energy. Lota was from a wealthy and politically-connected aristocratic family in Brazil. she owned lands, properties and arrays of servants. she was also a self-taught architect. when Elizabeth arrived, she was busy designing and building a large house for Mary and herself in Petropolis, a city 60 miles from Rio.
with the shift of her affection, the original "Fazenda Samambaia" (the Giant Fern Farm) house became Elizabeth's with a specially added studio near a waterfall. Mary got another house built for her down the road.
Elizabeth did not care about Brazil but loved this living arrangement: Lota taking care of large concerns and servants waiting upon daily needs - in an "atmosphere of uncritical affection". it reminded her of her childhood in Nova Scotia, which she was finally able to scrutinize and write about. strangest thing. having to settle all the way down in the South to re-connect with her Northern root.
some ten years passed in peace and happiness. Elizabeth became Aunt of a growing household: another grandchild from Lota's stepson (she adopted the polio-stricken boy on a whim when she was buying a dog from a family); another daughter Mary adopted; sons and daughters of servants; cats and dogs.
living such an idyllic life, Bishop was not any more productive, but her second poetry book in almost 10 years, a combination of her first one (a thin volume) with a few new poems (very few), was published and won her the Pulitzer prize in 1956. she became known in US and Brazil.
1960s were chaotic times for Brazil. Lota became heavily involved in The political up-downs and was given the power, unfairly, to design a park, modeling on the Central Park in NY, on Rio's large landfill. her enormous energy finally found an outlet, through fierce political and every other fights, and eventually drained in bringing out her beautiful dream. In the now called Parque do Flamengo, Lota is not acknowledged.
Elizabeth tagged along between Rio and Petropolis, lost her patience, and side-tracked to Ouro Preto 300 miles away. there she had a brief affair with Lilli Correia de Araujo, an old friend of theirs and local lesbian celebrity. the affair was brief but so intense that Elizabeth impulsively bought a rundown house across the street:
Dear Lilli, I liked this view,
I also liked to visit you,
but scarcely could prolong my stay,
so bought the house across the way:
number twenty-eight. Now you
must visit me and see my view.
Lota became suspicious and tried to intervene, but this was only the first step Bishop took to move away from Lota and Brazil. In 1966, despite Lota's protest, she took the English Department chair, vacated by poet Ted Roethke, of University of Washington in Seattle. with no experience and no interest in teaching, Elizabeth nonetheless survived the year and even had another affair, this time with Suzanne Bowen, a young woman student half her age.
back in Brazil was a long nightmare. deception and guilt on Elizabeth's side; wrath and desperation on Lota's. the confrontation rose to white heat when Lota intercepted a letter from Suzanne Bowen (all other letters were carefully addressed to Lilli and then relayed to Elizabeth by phone). among terrible fights, they broke up, reconciled and then broke up again.
On July 3, 1967, Elizabeth flew to New York. On Sept 19, Lota showed up, too, with gifts for Elizabeth's friends. They had a "peaceful and affectionate" night together. Early in the morning, Elizabeth found Lota passed out with drug overdose.
Lota left Bishop their Rio properties and Mary Samambaia. Also in her will was this quotation from Voltaire: if there is a god of love, he will forgive me.
this poem recorded the happier time of their life together:
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 |
| Lota Soares |
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
-- Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
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6. "I seem to spend my life missing you."
Bishop's first slim poetry book in 1946 received largely positive reviews; but it was hard to match what Robert Lowell had to say - he already compared her to Kafka. he followed his words up with a life-long devotion and helped her whenever and wherever, recommending Elizabeth for Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Harvard professorship, awards, travel grants...he even made Harvard pay Bishop extra when he sold their correspondences to the university.
Lowell was regarded as the last public poet of America. six years younger than Elizabeth, his first book, also published in 1946, earned him the Pulitzer Prize. in contrast to Bishop, Lowell was exceedingly prolific, conjuring up poems and critical reviews as if catching rabbits from the thin air: another stanza, another, and another... he also taught students at Harvard, advised the Congress in DC, lectured the public around the country and connected with poets in every corner...equally visible was his frequent, almost regular, residence in the Mclean Hospital for mental breakdowns...he is the very image of a poet as a poet is thought to be. handsome, too, with an air of loss or wonderment.
three marriages and who knows how many other encounters. but Elizabeth was the love of his life. or the "great might have been". or the one he must "write entirely for". and write they did. to "dearest Elizabeth" and "dearest Cal". in some five hundred letters. letters beyond friendship. letters of love - Platonic love - with its exclusivity, tension, mutual admiration, trust and care. they served as muse and literary critic to each other. and they watched over each other through artistic triumphs and moral failures.
most of their actual meetings were disastrous, if not disasters. Lowell simply could not behave properly in the presence of Elizabeth. she was the very trigger of another breakdown or the timing was always wrong.
but etched in Lowell's heart was that one sunny day in 1948 when he and Elizabeth were alone - their respective partners at the time left together - for one day on the shore in Stonington, Maine. after a long swimming and an "awful" New England dinner, Elizabeth said, jokingly, "When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived." that was the moment he knew - "just a matter of time" - that he would propose to her.
he never did. he wrote "Water":
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 |
| Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell |
Robert Lowell
It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,
and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,
and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.
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.
The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.
One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.
We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.
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twenty-nine years later, Elizabeth lived across that water in North Haven, Maine. she loved it there and entertained her friends in the summer. Robert wanted to come, but she said no. if only she could have known -- Lowell died suddenly of heart attack on Sept 12, 1977.
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North Haven
In Memoriam: Robert Lowell
I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse1s tail.
The islands haven't shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have--
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south, or sidewise--
and that they1re free within the blue frontiers of bay.
This month our favorite one is full of flowers:
buttercups, red clover, purple vetch,
hackweed still burning, daisies pied, eyebright,
the fragrant bedstraw's incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.
The goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the white-throated sparrow's five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.
Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.
("Fun"--it always seemed to leave you at a loss...)
You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue...And now--you've left
for good. You can't derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.
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7. "Your eyes are awfully blue"
Elizabeth found Brazil after Lota's death a different place - "the atmosphere of uncritical affection" had turned into critical disdain. even her letters to Lota were lost, allegedly burnt by Mary Morse. no time to dip into her own guilty conscience, Elizabeth moved to San Francisco one month later. she was joined by Suzanne Bowen, her one time student in Seattle, who was by then divorced with a baby boy. in 1967, Elizabeth was 56 and Suzanne 25.
but San Francisco was the forefront of a changing America in late 60s. Elizabeth found herself to have migrated from a foreign country to an alien land. she counted on Suzanne as her practical and cultural assistant while providing the latter financial support. Suzanne did all that and more. she prepared and designed Bishop's "Complete Poems", updated from the earlier "Questions of Travel" (1965) of poems and translations from her Brazil years. it was published in 1969 and won her the National Book Award.
with much trouble, she Elizabeth sold Lota's Rio properties and channelled the money to renovate her Ouro Preto house. when she started to dream in Portuguese, the two moved there to give Brazil another try.
the house was in a dire unfinished condition. nothing - money, materials or labor - could be accounted for. Lilli was the evident scapegoat. the rest of the town despised them. isolated in a hostile place, Elizabeth and Suzanne were both out of their elements and began in-fight. when the house finally became beautiful as Elizabeth had envisioned, their relationship was irreparable. then Elizabeth did something utterly selfish - she had Suzanne thrown into a hospital for a perceived "nervous breakdown". she might have really believed that Suzanne required professional help, but Elizabeth had no desire to ever see her again.
Lowell secured a Harvard position for Bishop to get "out of here alive". so after almost sixty years, Elizabeth came home. alone. old. asthmatic, alcoholic, and depressed....
things almost immediately started to look up. Elizabeth met Alice Methfessell, the twenty-six years old housing assistant at Harvard. simply put, Alice was a Suzanne without complications. in Bishop's more affectionate words, she had "awfully blue eyes", "joking voice", "funny face". Elizabeth was finally secure and fairly happy, even able to work and write poems again. those poems became part of her last book "Geography III", published in 1976.
the really Suzanne also came to Boston, showing up at Bishop's classes or apartment. fearful of becoming the "villain in a melodrama", Elizabeth assisted her college application and paid part of the tuition (with bitterness). Suzanne later became a medical doctor.
the constant fear Elizabeth had now was losing Alice and living an old miserable life alone. the only time Alice seemed to drift away triggered such a panic that led to the writing of her most widely-read poem "One Art". the "disaster" was averted as Alice broke her engagement and accompanied Elizabeth loyally till her sudden death, of cerebral aneurysm, at the age of 68.
a less Bishop-like, more "confessional" style love poem was found in her notebook after her death.
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Breakfast Song
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I've grown accustomed to?
—Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it's true.
It's just the common case;
there's nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.
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8. "flying wherever"
in the last couple of years before her death, Elizabeth planned to bring a closure to her life with Lota. Only a sketch of an intended book-length "Elegy" was done, which would have included Lota's "reticence and pride", her "heroism, brave & young", her "beautiful colored skin", "the gestures (which said you didn't have)", her "courage to the last, or almost to the last - "; "regret and guilt, the nighttime horrors", "WASTE".... (from Brett Miller)
Bishop published many of her poems in New Yorker, which had a first refusal contract with her. this sonnet was submitted over one year earlier, but was not published until three weeks after her death. it was not the last poem she wrote but sounded just like a final review for her life. and no one could say more or better.
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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!
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9. a few words on Bishop's poems
at the beginning it was the rhythmic ebb and flow of words. mostly beautifully done. so i could read on, simply enjoying that.
then i saw the meticulous details described with patience. what stood out, what so unlike others' poems, however, was that those details impressed me as strange, unfamiliar and unsettling. to the point that i had had much difficulty to relate to or comprehend them right away. "moose" is less so, but "at the fish houses" is a good example. to have a contrast, i even re-read a couple of times "stopping at the woods on a snowy night. to remind me what accessibility is. then i started to appreciate her complexity, her attempt to convey what is non-obvious, uncertain, drifting or mysterious in her mind. it is that which directed her eyes to certain specifics in nature or life.
another aspect is her refrain from resolution. even "moose", which is a relatively simpler piece. the sudden appearance of her was the cause for exclamation - yes - but it was only whispered. then she was passed off.
at the end of "fish houses", she says,
"it is like what we imagine knowledge to be", instead of "it is like what knowledge to be".
it's like nothing is certain and everything has a shadow for her. and then she wanted to capture only THAT!
and in her her short "sonnet", i was caught by her "flying everywhere" and thought it would have to be flying "high" "up" or "no more" for any given poet.
here is what Harold Bloom has to say:
She is so meticulous and so original that she tends to be both under-read and rather weakly misread. Most frequently she is praised for her "eyes," as though she were a master of optics. But her actual achievement is to see what cannot quite be seen, and to say what cannot quite be said.
I think I understand her.
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References
1. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of it by Brett C. Miller, 1993
2. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: an Oral Biography by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, 1994
3. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone, 1989
4. Elizabeth Bishop (Bloom's Major Poets) by Harold Bloom, 2002
5. Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, 2010
6. Online essayshttp://baihua.org/face/bxh.gifThere once lived a mysterious flower. She was intensely beautiful and vulnerable. Her kind of beauty was ineffable and her lonely sadness irresistible.
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