Elizabeth Bishop 2009

I agree with this assessment of Bishop’s poetry. Her poems on the syllabus certainly pose interesting questions about identity, awareness and one’s place in the world, indeed the universe, and they do so by means of a unique style. This style is influenced by Bishop’s acute awareness of the poet’s craft and her ability to work with both traditional forms (sestina and sonnet, for instance) and free verse. The questions that interested me most are those posed in ‘Questions of Travel’. These fascinated me because Bishop dedicated so much of her life to travel, yet in this poem she questions the motives behind travel and exploration. One stylistic feature that is characteristic of Bishop is the conversational tone and it is evident in the opening lines, as she states ‘There are too many waterfalls here’. The question raised in my mind is ‘How can there be “too many” waterfalls?’ Surely the waterfalls are a sight of natural splendour? Yet, reading on, we see that everything in this place of natural beauty over-powers the poet - the streams are crowded, they hurry ‘too rapidly’, there are ‘so many’ clouds. Why is this? She says that the streams and clouds ‘keep travelling, travelling’ and this poses the question of her own travels; has travel become as monotonous as the relentless waterfalls or is it a type of addiction or compulsion for the poet? This question poses more questions when we consider the poet’s alcoholism and the part played by addiction in her life. The questions raised in the next stanza address themes, which are central to her poetry - home, exclusion, and the quest for new horizons. Bishop wonders if the idea of a place is more satisfying than the place itself - ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’ This apparently simple question is loaded with difficulties for Bishop as ‘home’ was never a simple concept for her. She is acutely aware of herself as an outsider in this culture and feels she is ‘watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres’.Bishop describes the urge for travel as a ‘childishness’ and the image of travellers rushing to ‘see the sun the other way around’ is an image of thrill-seekers consuming views and experiences without understanding or insight (‘inexplicable and impenetrable’). I find this very relevant, as we live in a society, which is obsessed with consuming things and experiences, often at the expense of understanding. This image also prepares us for the question at the heart of this poem:‘Oh, must we dream our dreamsand have them too?’I found this question very interesting because dreams are not reality and there are other references to illusion in this poem - ‘strangest of theatres’ and ‘pantomimists’. The question of why we travel and explore is not explicitly answered in the poem but one wonders if it has something to do with flight or escape from reality. The disparity between the real and the imagined is alluded to again in another thought-provoking question: ‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us comeTo imagined places, not just stay at home?’All of our preconceived, modern ideas about travel - choice, freedom, excitement, broadening of horizons, understanding of other cultures -  are turned on their head and challenged in the questions raised here about travel. In both ‘Questions of Travel’, and ‘The Prodigal’, Bishop deals with being away from ‘home’ and returning. In both poems, the idea of returning is difficult and complex; Bishop is not even sure where home is: ‘Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?’ Her sense of displacement is much stronger than her sense of belonging. Similarly, in ‘The Prodigal’, the alcoholic in exile must struggle with ‘uncertain staggering flight/his shuddering insights, beyond his control’ before he can face the journey home. A stylistic feature of Bishop’s work, which I really enjoyed, was her tendency, in some poems, to move from sensory description of the apparently mundane to profound awareness and insight, even epiphany. This can be seen in ‘In the Waiting Room’ where Bishop begins with a description of a dull dentist’s waiting-room, ‘full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines.’ This is a scene from everyday life in Worcester, Massachusetts. The setting is ordinary, yet the title denotes a place of anticipation and expectation, and raises questions. What can the young Bishop be anticipating or expecting? What is to come? The National Geographic - a magazine we could easily expect to see in any waiting-room - transports the child, in her imagination, to ‘the inside of a volcano’, a far cry from the blandness of the dentist’s waiting-room.  The images of other races and civilizations are both horrifying and compelling but the child cannot stop reading them. However, the real moment of epiphany is prompted by the piercing scream of Aunt Consuelo inside the dentist’s room. What surprises is, not the scream, but the reaction of the young Bishop:‘What took me by surpriseWas that it was me:My voice, in my mouth....I -we- were falling, falling..’Whatever it is that connects Elizabeth to her aunt’s pain is explored and questioned throughout the poem. The sensation of falling cannot be logically explained but perhaps it represents the child’s falling from one state of awareness into another more disturbing and unsettling awareness of self. The child tries to make sense of it and control her own sense of who she is:‘But I felt: you are an I,You are an Elizabeth,You are one of them.Why should you be one too?I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was.’In these lines, we see that events outside of the child cause her to look inward for meaning (similarly, in ‘At the Fishhouses’ Bishop observes the world around her and then plumbs the depths of her own consciousness). At this moment, ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘them’ seem indistinguishable to the young poet. What connects these entities? Can the aunt in the waiting room, screaming from pain, the ‘dead man slung on a pole’, the explorers and the ‘black, naked women with necks/wound round and round with wire’ be somehow connected to Elizabeth? The child-poet probes deeper, questioning ‘what similarities...held us all together/or made us all just one’. This question is not answered but the reader might surmise that a common, shared humanity forms the basis for this link or connection, which the child is grappling with. The poem’s movement from the mundane to the profound is a feature of Bishop’s work, which is unique and intriguing.The ability to portray scenes accurately and realistically is another feature of Bishop’s work. What makes this unique is Bishop’s ability to find radiance and beauty in these gritty, shabby settings without ever romanticising them or overlooking the squalor in which people often find themselves. For instance, in ‘The Prodigal’, the ‘brown enormous odour’ and the ‘glass-smooth dung’ cannot be ignored but the filth can be relieved by a lantern and its ‘pacing aureole’.In ‘Filling Station’ the poem itself is almost ‘oil-soaked, oil-permeated’ and the ‘greasy sons’ are ‘all quite thoroughly dirty’, yet this filth does not disgust. Objects like the doily, ‘embroidered in daisy stitch with marguerites’, the taboret, the ‘extraneous plant’ all suggest a feminine, dainty presence among this very masculine, ‘grease-impregnated’ setting. The incongruous presence of these items raises the question of ‘somebody’. Who is this ‘somebody’ who waters the plant, embroiders and arranges Esso cans in order and why does this leave the poet with the sense that ‘Somebody loves us all’? We can guess at the identity of this nurturing, benign presence in the poem but it poses many questions about the poet’s sense of home and family, not least because the family life depicted is so different from that experienced by Bishop. The movement from physical description to contemplation and questioning is at work in ‘At the Fishhouses’ where ‘The air smells so strong of codfish/it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water’. In keeping with her unique style, Bishop will not romanticise the objects before her: ‘melancholy stains, like dried blood/where the ironwork has rusted’ but she will find beauty amidst squalor and share it with the reader:‘There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty...’Like her younger self in ‘In the Waiting Room’ observing the pictures in the National Geographic, the poet observes something (the water) and soon finds herself immersed in her own response to what she has seen. The water is ‘cold dark deep and absolutely clear’ and the cold seems to invade every area of her consciousness, commanding her respect and fear. The poet fears the water and with good reason:‘If you should dip your hand in,your wrist would ache immediately,your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn’.When the poet compares the water to knowledge, she raises interesting questions about knowledge and its impact on us. By linking this knowledge with history and ‘the cold hard mouth/of the world’, we are left with the sense that, for Bishop, knowledge meant pain. Having read and contemplated this poem, one question raised in my mind is the extent to which this knowledge is drawn from Bishop’s own life experience. Once more, Bishop’s uniqueness can be seen in her ability to move with ease from the physical to the philosophical and to pose difficult questions along the way. In response to the above poems, I would concur with the view that Bishop poses interesting questions by means of a unique style.

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