The second half of the 20th century was a particularly rich time in American poetry, especially among women. Just consider who was writing then:
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Marianne Moore, Maya Angelou and Adrienne Rich among them. And none more notable than Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).
Among many awards, Bishop received the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, the National Book Award in 1970, the International Prize for Literature in 1976. She taught poetry at Harvard and had a rare “First Look” contract with The New Yorker. She wrote eloquently . . . but often about death and despair.
Bishop was born in Worcester, Mass. She lost her father and then her mother, both before she was five years old. She was raised by relatives in Nova Scotia and later Boston. In Walnut Hill preparatory school she began writing poetry and also composed some essays on Tennyson. (Thank you!) She later reported that her writing went through “a Shelley phase, a Browning phase, and a brief Swinburne phase.” She was a competent pianist and was thrilled to meet Sergei Prokofiev after a concert in Boston. This concert and one by pianist Myra Hess inspired her to write a sonnet quite promising for a young schoolgirl:
I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!
There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.
* * *
Bishop loved to travel, and she had some inherited income from her father, “enough to go places.” She lived or visited for a time in France, Spain, Ireland, Italy and most especially Brazil, where she lived for more than fifteen years. Here is an eye-opening poem she wrote about her arrival in Brazil.
Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery;
impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?
Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.
So that’s the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,
but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen.
And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward,
myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,
descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters
waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans.
Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!
Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen’s
skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy,
a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall,
with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.
Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall
s, New York. There. We are settled.
The customs officials will speak English, we hope,
and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,
but they seldom seem to care what impression they make,
or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,
the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps—
wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter
do when we mail the letters we wrote on the boat,
either because the glue here is very inferior
or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.
* * *
Bishop’s longtime stay in Brazil came about from her establishing a romantic relationship with a Brazilian heiress named Lota de Macedo Soares. The resulting poetry was sometimes too overt for “The New Yorker,” which otherwise regularly published Bishop’s poems. The year was 1952. Today would be quite different.
It is marvelous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvelous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.
In later years, Bishop had a second major attachment, this to a Harvard secretary named Alice Methfessel.
* * *
A small sidebar. Bishop’s mentor and friend through thirty-eight years was Marianne Moore, and they first met at the New York Public Library when Bishop was still a student at Vassar. That they met just outside the reading room at the Library meant that Moore took her seriously. If Moore expected not to like somebody, she’d arrange a meeting at the Information Booth in Grand Central Station. No seats and a quick available exit.
* * *
Bishop wrote often about experiences of grief or longing. And the more she referenced personal details, the more she took refuge in rhyme and traditional poetic forms to mask the emotion. Here is one that does just that, her signature and most famous poem, “One Art.” The antique form she uses here is called a villanelle: five three-line stanzas with a concluding four-line stanza.
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.
* * *
* * *
The life of a major poet is rarely a straight line, and Elizabeth Bishop had her share of achievements and disappointments. I think her life was quite full, but she said to her friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell: “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
One of her finest poems is an elegy she wrote about Lowell who died in 1977. It could equally well apply to her.
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 horse’s 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 they’re 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.
* * *
VIDEO. Our video offers live performances of my two favorite Elizabeth Bishop poems. First, Katie Couric and friends present “One Art,” printed above. And then Helena Bonham Carter reads beautifully the “Letter to N.Y.”
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: ELIZABETH BISHOP
