Source of book: I own the complete Elizabeth Bishop.
March is Women’s History Month, and, in addition to my
official selection (stay tuned), I like to read works by female poets. Well,
actually, I always like that. My first two poetic loves were Emily
Dickinson and Christina
Rossetti. I fell in love with Elizabeth
Barrett Browning in my teens. I have enjoyed a number of poets of the
distaff set over the years. I think that because poetry was considered an
acceptable outlet for intelligent and educated women in a time when more
“serious” pursuits were off limits, many of the greatest minds ended up
writing.
I discovered Elizabeth Bishop as an adult, thanks to the
work of former poet laureate Robert
Pinsky, and both his Favorite Poem Project and his anthology, Essential
Pleasures, which I highly recommend as an introduction to a wide range
of poetry. You can read my post about Bishop’s North
and South here. I won’t duplicate the biographical material from the
previous post, but you can read more about her life there.
A Cold Spring is a
short collection, as are all of Bishop’s works. She wasn’t a prolific writer,
but what she did write is quite polished. I’ll just hit a few highlights.
First, her longer poem, “At the Fishhouses” is a tour de
force of evocative description. In typical Bishop fashion, there is a sharp
edge to things - she isn’t conventionally “nice,” and her descriptions bring to
life the stinks and not-so-picturesque decay of her subjects. Cold, bitter,
briny, and not quite safe. For example, this little bit:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and
your hand would burn
as if the water were a
transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with
a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first
taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your
tongue.
It is like what we imagine
knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly
free,
drawn from the could hard mouth
of the world, derived from the
rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and
since
our knowledge is historical,
flowing, and flown.
The whole poem is beautiful, in that not-exactly-nice sort
of way.
In a similar way, the titular poem, “A Cold Spring,” gives a
brilliant series of descriptions, but in an unexpected and edgy way. Here is
the opening:
A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees
hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their
characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless
hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of
sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the
after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed to feel gay.
I am particularly fond of the phrases “a grave green dust”
and “a chill white blast of sunshine.” Unforgettable and brilliant.
These poems seem to have been written primarily about her
native New England, rather than her adopted home of Florida. The sea is a constant companion, as
are the denizens of small villages. But Bishop was such an introvert that she
scarcely seems to interact with the people. She communes with nature, and sings
to the animals. Here is one particularly nice introverted poem.
“The Bight”
(On my birthday)
At low tide like this how sheer the
water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl
protrude and glare
and 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.
One can smell it turning to gas; if
one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning
to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off
the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly
off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans
crash
into this peculiar gas
unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to
show for it,
and going off with humorous
elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds
soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors
on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till
they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming
in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and
hooks
and decorated with bobbles of
sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire
along the dock
where, glinting like little
plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung
up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are
still piled up
against each other, or lie on their
sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever
will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old
correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of
marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.
I do not get the impression that Bishop thought much of the
big city. The next poem was written about her sojourn in New York City, and the title refers to the
cross street of her apartment.
“Varick Street”
At night the
factories
struggle awake,
wretched uneasy buildings
veined with pipes
attempt their work.
Trying to breathe,
the elongated nostrils
haired with spikes
give off such stenches, too.
And
I shall sell you sell you
sell
you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me.
On certain floors
certain wonders.
Pale dirty light,
some captured iceberg
being prevented from melting.
See the mechanical moons,
sick, being made
to wax and wane
at somebody’s instigation.
And
I shall sell you sell you
sell
you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me.
Lights music of
love
work on. The presses
print calendars
I suppose; the moons
make medicine
or confectionery. Our bed
shrinks from the soot
and hapless odors
hold us close.
And
I shall sell you sell you
sell
you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me.
That haunting refrain: “And
I shall sell you sell you / sell you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me.”
It isn’t just about the city, but about consumerism, where we are all for sale.
There is a solid argument to be made that cities have changed quite a bit since
the 1940s. If anything, the factories have moved out to rural locations, and
the political center of environment-destroying capitalism is now the small town
in “red” states. My home city of Los
Angeles, while still smoggy, is objectively much
cleaner than it was when I was a kid. But Bishop captures a moment, and a
feeling, and an idea of the individual as a cog in the money machine, that
still haunts us today.
I’ll end with this short poem, perhaps my favorite in the
collection. It is both introverted and deeply personal, and features Bishop’s
skill at moving from the universal to the personal, from the nature metaphor to
the details of a relationship. It is believed to have been written for Bishop’s
lover, Lota Soares.
“The Shampoo”
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.
Everything in this poem, from the line length to the like
breaks at key moments, is carefully set up to enhance - and provide - the
meaning. Again, we see the unexpected descriptions of nature, such as lichens
as “explosions.” There is the contrast between the slow movement of time in
nature, and the brevity of our own lives. I adore the description of gray hairs
as “shooting stars...in bright formation.” Readers who want a more in-depth
analysis of this poem might enjoy this
one, by Kala Dunn.
I find Bishop to be rewarding every time I read her poems.
They are best read aloud and savored.
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