Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Bishop died in Boston, a little over 50 miles from the town where she began her life. However, the relative proximity of these two locations belies the fact that Bishop was, in fact, a wanderer, a traveler, an explorer. In truth, her whole life is filled with such contradictions. Seeking a secure and stable home, Bishop was almost always displaced, in motion. Given to deep introspection, she loathed the confessional or indulgent in her own writing; working in a literary/auditory medium, she possessed a painterly eye, and many of her poems are conspicuously visual; striving to complete poems that were as close to fact as memory permitted, she often used reality as a springboard to the fantastic.

Though in her later years Bishop focused intently on her childhood, we have relatively few objective accounts of it. Most information is found either in her recollections in letters, her autobiographical stories, or her poetry. We do know that Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, to William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, both of Canadian ancestry. William Bishop was a prominent, well-educated builder from a prosperous middle-class family. According to letters from her father announcing her birth, Elizabeth was a welcome addition to a loving home. Nevertheless, this happiness was short lived.

William Bishop died of Bright’s disease (a general catch-all diagnosis in the early 1900s for any sort of kidney-related disease) when Elizabeth was only eight months old. The reality of the loss, however, goes much deeper than Thomas Bishop’s death. While Elizabeth was obviously deprived of her father from a young age, she lost both parents with his passing. Whether her mother was mentally unstable before her husband’s death is not certain, but she suffered a mental breakdown after it and never fully recovered. As a result, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop was only a shadow in young Elizabeth’s life, and though she lived until 1934, the majority of her life was spent in institutions, and she never was able to care for her daughter.

With her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent breakdown, Elizabeth returned with her mother to live in Great Village, Nova Scotia, with the Bulmers. The time spent as a young girl under the care of her grandparents heavily influenced Bishop’s writing. Because of her mother’s frequent hospitalizations, Elizabeth saw herself essentially as an orphan in an isolated, tight-knit community, a “guest,” attended to by older relatives; Great Village later represented for her an idealized childhood and the strong family connections that she attempted to recreate throughout her life. One of the most direct accounts of Bishop’s impressions of that period appears in her short story “In the Village” (Collected Prose 251-274).

Set against the pastoral backdrop of the comforting, peaceful village and told from a child’s perspective, the story details a mother’s release from a mental institution and her subsequent return to it at the story’s end. The story emphasizes the child’s fears and uncertainty about her mother’s intrusive presence through two primary opposing symbols: the beautiful, rhythmic clang of a hammer against a blacksmith’s anvil (life in the village) and the unsettling dread contained in a woman’s scream (her mother). Life in Great Village also stirred in Bishop a love for nature and the outdoors, although she suffered from numerous lung-related infections and was prone to long bouts of bronchitis. As a result, formal education was difficult.

Whatever stability Bishop might have known as a child was overturned after her mother’s final hospitalization in 1916, when Elizabeth was forcibly removed from Great Village by her paternal grandparents to live with them in Worcester, Mass. Though well intentioned in their desire to see her raised in the best that they could afford her, Bishop never fully overcame the shock and loss of the life in Great Village. While she lived with her father’s parents for less than a year, it marked her deeply. She recounted this sense of displacement in her memoir “The Country Mouse” (Collected Prose 13-34). In Worcester, she truly was isolated—assigned formal playmates chosen by her grandmother, raised by servants. Here she began to evidence the debilitating and chronic asthma that plagued her throughout her adult life.

In 1918 Bishop’s mother’s eldest sister, Maude, liberated young Elizabeth from her grandparents’ household. By all accounts, they were forced to concede she was miserable with them and allowed Maude to take Elizabeth to see whether she could do better. While conditions in Maude’s home were certainly not “privileged” in any respect, Bishop was always indebted to her aunt Maude’s generosity and expressed deep affection for her.

She also credited Maude’s love of literature and her “teeming bookshelves” as early influences for her writing. Under Maude’s care, Elizabeth blossomed, winning her first recognition (a five-dollar gold piece) as a writer at age 12 for an essay on Americanism. She was also able to reunite with her Bulmer grandparents, returning summers to Great Village to spend time with them. Her father’s family maintained a strong, active presence in her life; a generous bequest from her father’s estate financed her formal education, first at Walnut Hill School for Girls and later at Vassar, where she graduated in 1934.

Apart from completing college, 1934 was a pivotal year in Bishop’s life: Her mother died and Bishop was introduced to Marianne Moore. A fellow alumna of Vassar, Moore was a graduate of the famous class of 1933, which served as background for Mary McCarthy’s autobiographical novel The Group. Moore and Bishop shared a love for animals and nature, with a strong penchant toward the unusual, and their first outing together was to the circus to see the animals and feed the elephants. Animals play an important role throughout many of Bishop’s poems including poems titled after their subject, such as “The Rooster,” “The Armadillo,” and “The Moose.” Animal symbolism figures prominently also in poems such as “At the Fishhouses,” where a playful seal works as a means of revelation.

Moore also encouraged Bishop greatly in her efforts toward a career as a poet, serving as a mentor and sponsor. In her memoir, “Efforts of Affection,” Bishop indicates that Moore’s influence left her “inspired, determined to be good, to work harder . . . never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it” (Complete Prose 137). Like Moore, Bishop was meticulous in the execution of her work, often taking decades to produce a finished poem. Unlike Moore, however, she was reticent to present herself to the public, and it was not until her later years that she followed Moore’s pattern of writing, teaching, and giving public readings; however, this course seems to have resulted more from financial necessity than from desire. Under Moore’s patronage, Bishop’s first poems were published in 1935 in Trial Balances, an anthology of new poets introduced by more established writers.

From 1935 to 1945, Bishop lived primarily in Key West and New York and traveled extensively through Europe, Mexico, and Morocco. Her companion and lover for a majority of this time was Louise Crane, another friend from her Vas- sar years. Unlike Bishop, who had limited financial resources, Crane came from a wealthy background and attracted many bright and influential people from the worlds of art, literature, and music into her circle.

Through Louise Crane, Bishop met Billie Holliday, her inspiration for the poem “Songs for a Colored Singer.” Crane also introduced Bishop to the woman who would later provide the most significant personal relationship in her life—Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop kept extensive journals of her travels from this time, working and publishing poems primarily in the New Yorker and the Partisan Review. Key West gave Bishop a setting for a number of notable poems, including “The Fish” and “The Bight.” The house where she lived with Louise Crane in Key West became the first of the “three loved houses” in “One Art.” However, her health still caused problems, primarily due to her asthma and an ever-increasing dependence on alcohol.

In 1946 Bishop was selected to receive the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her manuscript North and South. Bishop had received a recommendation for the award from Marianne Moore, and the honor carried with it a cash prize of $1,000 and publication of her book of poems. North and South was greeted with great acclaim and established Bishop as a major new American poet. Some of her best-known works including “The Man-Moth,” “The Fish,” “Florida,” and “The Map” appear here.

Apart from the acclaim, an additional benefit Bishop received from the publication of North and South was that it called her to the attention of her fellow poet the literary critic RANDALL JARRELL, who reviewed the book. Jarrell introduced Bishop to her second important mentor and friend, Robert Lowell. Whereas Marianne Moore had influenced Bishop in the way she approached her poetry, Lowell was a much more practical mentor. He helped Bishop understand how to obtain financing through fellowships and grants so that she could continue her work; she was awarded her first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. Because her family’s legacy was limited, Bishop learned to rely on these monies to support her, and when they proved insufficient in her later years, she turned to teaching. Lowell helped Bishop secure and persuaded her to accept the position of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1951, a precursor to today’s poet laureate consultant in poetry.

After her time in this position, Bishop received the first Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellowship in Poetry from Bryn Mawr College. Using this money, Bishop fulfilled a lifelong desire to travel to South America with plans to sail up the Amazon. When she fell ill in Rio de Janeiro after eating the fruit of a cashew tree, she was nursed back to health by one of the acquaintances she was visiting, Lota de Macedo Soares. However, when Bishop was well enough to resume travel, Soares declared her love for Bishop, asking her to stay, promising to build her a writing studio in the home she was constructing north of Rio in the Brazilian countryside. Bishop later wrote of Soares’s offer, “It just meant everything to me.” Bishop lived with Soares from 1952 until 1967, moving first into Soares’s home in Samambaia and later into a home Bishop purchased in Ouro Preto, Brazil. As did the residence in Key West that she shared with Louise Crane, the homes she shared with Lota de Macedo Soares would also figure in her poem “One Art” as the second and third of her “three loved houses.”

With the stability and love Soares provided, Bishop entered into one of the most happy and productive periods of her life. Bishop loved Bra- zil—not only for the beauty of the country, but also for the warmth and generosity of the people. The freedom she enjoyed with Soares allowed her to explore new themes and forms in her work. She began to incorporate childhood memories, and she published her autobiographical short story “In the Village” in the New Yorker in 1953. She also learned Portuguese well enough to translate The Diary of Helena Morley, a classic Brazilian memoir of a 12-year-old girl from a rural mining village, published in 1957. Helena Morley was a personal favorite for Bishop, who identified strongly with the story of the young heroine’s isolation and resilience; unfortunately, the book did not enjoy commercial success. Conversely, a joint effort with the editors of Life magazine, where she provided the text for a pictorial book, Brazil, published in 1962, was extremely lucrative for Bishop, but artistically unsatisfying.

Her most important work of this period occurred in 1955, when Bishop submitted her second book of poems, A Cold Spring, for publication. When the publisher feared that the 20 new poems were insufficient material for a whole volume, Bishop suggested that they be included with a reissue of North & South. The new work, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, included such notable poems as “At the Fishhouses,” “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” and “The Bight.” The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1956.

Though Bishop was happy in her personal life with Soares, political strife in Brazil drove a wedge between them. Empowered by the newly elected governor of the region, Soares became consumed with efforts to reclaim a large section of land (roughly the size of New York’s Central Park) and build a “people’s park.” When the opposing parties in the government met her efforts with resistance, Soares turned her attention from Bishop to focus more fully on her project. However, the failed effort to construct the park ultimately undermined her health as well as straining her relationship with Bishop, who turned (as was her custom) to alcohol for relief in times of stress.

Bishop received a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in 1964 and published her third book of poems, Questions of Travel, in 1965. This was not sufficient, however, to relieve the financial stress that Soares had placed on them.

Because Soares had depleted most of their savings in her efforts to build the people’s park, Bishop decided to accept a teaching offer from the University of Washington in 1966. Soares refused to accompany her to the United States, and when Bishop returned after two semesters as writer in residence, their troubles worsened. Soares was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis and her health deteriorated rapidly, forcing her to resign as head of the park project. Bishop’s health was also fragile, and her heavy drinking only contributed to the problems. Doctors recommended a separation for the two, hoping it would allow Soares to recover. However, when Bishop returned to New York, Soares followed shortly thereafter and on her first night with Bishop in the United Stage took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills.

Devastated, Bishop tried to resume life in Brazil, though she was treated badly by former friends and relations there, who held her partially responsible for Soares’s death. While she did not publish new work during this time, her next book, a collection entitled The Complete Poems, appeared in 1969 and was awarded the National Book Award for poetry.

Recognizing that life in Brazil without Soares was impossible, Bishop moved back to Boston, where she settled permanently. She also began to teach at Harvard, invited by Robert Lowell to teach his courses while he was on leave in England. Brazil still figured prominently in her work, however, and after years of struggle to overcome her grief, in 1976 Bishop produced her final volume of original poetry, Geography III.

The book combines much of what is distinctly Bishop—precise description, dreamlike visions, and childhood revelations. Containing some of Bishop’s most well known poems, “The Moose,” “In the Waiting Room,” “One Art,” and “Crusoe in England,” the book was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is dedicated to Alice Methfessel, whom Bishop met after moving to Boston, and who became the final important love relationship in her life.

That same year Bishop became the first American and the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Though she expressed a strong desire to retire, finances would not allow her to, and Bishop continued to teach and give public readings of her poetry until her sudden death of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1979. She was buried in Worcester, her gravestone inscribed with words she chose for her epitaph, the final lines from her poem “The Bight”: “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful” (Complete Poems 61).

“The Man-Moth” (1936)

“The Man-Moth” is a fantastical tale of a mysterious underground creature seeking the Moon, troubled by dreams, riding backward on the subway through the night. He is part loner, part urban dweller, but in many ways he is a representation of the artist, whose vision and self-sacrifice provide the basis for the regeneration of others. Said to be inspired by a newspaper misprint of the word mammoth, the poem also uses details taken from Bishop’s journal notes while living in New York City.

The world of “The Man-Moth” is a world of shadow, similar to the setting of “The Weed,” where everything happens at night, in the darkness. The poem concerns two main beings: Man lives above the Earth but cannot see the Moon, aware only of the light cast by it, his shadow, “only as big as his hat” (line 2); Man-Moth emerges from his home underground to investigate the Moon, “a small hole at the top of the sky” (line 14). As does Harold Lloyd, clambering up the side of a building in the silent film Safety Last, the Man-Moth scales the skyscrapers of the city in an effort to push his head through the “pinhole” in the sky into the light beyond. Watching from below, Man knows this effort is impossible; Bishop tells us “he has no such illusions” (line 22). However, “what the Man-Moth fears most he must do” (line 23).

Though the Man-Moth’s quest is futile, Bishop does not present the lonely creature as an object of ridicule. Indeed, the journey is described in cyclical terms: This happens each time, and the Man-Moth continues in the persistent belief that each time he will succeed. When the Man-Moth returns to the underground, he boards a subway train, “facing the wrong way / and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, / without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. / He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards” (line 29-32).

If we look at Bishop’s own life and her progression as an artist, the poem is eerily prescient. Bishop knows the artist always travels looking backward; however, for her, experience and memory do not provide refuge, but troubled visions instead. In the same manner, “Each night [the Man-Moth] must / be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams” (lines 33-34). It is sad that, there is no destination for the creature—or for the artist; instead, implies Bishop, both are always in motion, and even in rest, there is no satisfaction.

Though the idea of death, and permanent rest, is appealing as the Man-Moth rides backward through the night, in the “pale subways of cement he calls home” (line 20), he understands “he does not dare look out the window, / for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison / runs there beside him” (lines 36-38). Death, or more accurately suicide, even though it offers a chance of escape, is seen as an indulgence. Bishop tells us the Man-Moth “regards it as a disease / he has inherited the susceptibility to” (lines 38-39).

In the final stanza of the poem as we encounter the Man-Moth directly, Bishop reveals her view of the value of the artist: “If you catch him; / hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, / an entire night itself” (lines 41-43). As a reward for this contact, the Man-Moth offers up the only thing he has to give: “one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting” (line 45). But, says Bishop, the gift is not offered easily: “If you’re not paying attention / he’ll swallow it” (lines 46-47). For Bishop as an artist, the willingness to offer up her “eye,” the pain associated with truth, would much more easily be swallowed. She may offer her artistic vision of the world to others in the same manner the Man- Moth reluctantly offers the tear, but contained in the offering is water, “cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink” (line 48).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Read Bishop’s poem “The Weed.” As you read it, what comparisons can you make to ideas in “The Man-Moth”? How does Bishop attempt to define herself as an artist in both poems?

2. Bishop introduces the third rail of the subway track, the electric rail that runs above the regular track, as a symbol of death. But just as the third rail of the subway is deadly to anyone who might touch it, it also provides power to propel the train. How does the idea of death “energize” the artist?

3. The tear that the Man-Moth offers to anyone willing to hold a light up to his eye seems to have regenerative powers. Why do you think that Bishop shifts from a third-person view in the poem to second person at this moment? How does this work in with the idea of the Man- Moth as a representation of Bishop’s poetry or art in general?

“The Unbeliever” (1938)

Though Bishop was not religious, certainly not Christian in any traditional sense, she was grounded in Christian theology, and Christian symbols and themes populate much of her work. In “The Unbeliever,” Bishop addresses no-belief as a belief system but also suggests that faith itself is little more than willed ignorance.

Beginning the poem with a reference to the quintessential Puritan handbook, Pilgrim’s Progress, Bishop’s Unbeliever sleeps atop a mast above the sea. He knows that his perch is precarious, dangerous, but he chooses to keep “his eyes fast closed” (line 2). Contrasting the Unbeliever’s fear and desire to stay asleep, Bishop introduces two alternate points of view, illustrating how sight and perception are related to belief. First, we hear from a cloud that imagines that he is founded on marble pillars and never moves. Looking down into the sea, he has all the justification for his beliefs that he needs: “Secure in introspection, he peers at the watery pillars of his own reflection” (lines 14-15).

Next a gull supposes that the air itself is “like marble” (line 18) and that he will forever be buoyed by “marble wings on my tower-top fly” (line 20). If the cloud envisions a world where he never moves, the gull sees the world as unceasing movement toward heaven. What links the two disparate points of view is the fact that they are so obviously misguided but that they believe what they believe absolutely.

In the last stanza of the poem the gull reads the dream of the Unbeliever: “‘I must not fall. / The spangled sea below wants me to fall. / It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all” (lines 23-25). Though the Unbeliever is mistaken that the sea is hard as diamonds in the same way the cloud thinks he is perched atop a marble pillar or that the gull thinks his wings are marble, the Unbeliever is correct in his fears—the sea poses the threat of death and destruction.

“The Unbeliever” is unusual for Bishop, in that she never injects herself into the poem. Unlike “The Man-Moth,” where we can discern Bishop’s admiration for and identification with the Man-Moth, in this poem she chooses to give each point of view his own speech, clearly identifying each perspective, but not claiming one for herself. Though the Unbeliever is not a source of ridicule or disdain as are the arrogant, foolish cloud and gull, neither is he a source of inspiration. His choice paralyzes him; though he may have more true knowledge than the other voices in the poem, his knowledge does nothing to liberate or rejuvenate him.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Like “The Unbeliever,” Pilgrim’s Progress, written by John Bunyan, is told in the form of a dream where Christian seeks his salvation on a pilgrimage to heaven. Along his journey, he encounters many obstacles that test his faith as well as many characters who are useful in showing him the difference between right and wrong. Why do you think Bishop uses a reference to this overtly Christian text to begin her poem? How can some of the images such as “marble towers” work to identify the cloud or the gull with Christianity? Is the identification complimentary or derogatory?

2. In his book on Elizabeth Bishop titled The Unbeliever, Robert Dale Parker says that the poem consciously evokes Ishmael in Moby-Dick (33). In Melville’s story, Ishmael recounts the dull, almost hypnotic chore of sitting atop the mast to scan the sea in search of whales. Because of the extreme height and the instability of the perch, Ishmael warns that it is not a good job for an introspective, reflective man, who might lose himself in his thoughts and possibly fall to his death. How does this idea of introspection as danger work into themes expressed in “The Unbeliever”?

3. Read “A Pit—but Heaven over It” by Emily Dickinson. Compare the ideas expressed by Dickinson to those by Bishop. What similarities are there? Where do they differ?

“The Fish” (1940). For Discussion or Writing

Shortly after moving to Key West, Bishop discovered her love for fishing, and her notes from this period detail an outing when she landed a 60-pound amberjack. The excursion, which provides the basis for “The Fish,” is more than just a fish tale of “the one that got away,” however. When T. S. Eliot first spoke of the “objective correlative,” he used the term to explain the foundation by which artists use a given external situation, experience, or object to produce an emotion that is otherwise inexplicable; as the description of the sensory experience ends, the emotional response to it commences.

“The Fish,” as do other poems that appeared in North and South including “Florida” and “The Weed,” uses description of a particular event, place, or object to produce just such an emotional response. Unlike “Florida,” however, where the description of the place is more contained and less symbolic, or “The Weed,” where the representation is more obvious—“In that black place, thought I saw / that each drop contained a light, / a small, illuminated scene” (Complete Poems 21)—“The Fish” marks a step forward for Bishop.

In this poem she not only uses her keen eye for detail, but also shows that she “sees” what is not directly observable: “I thought of the coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers, / the big bones and the little bones, / the dramatic reds and blacks / of his shiny entrails” (lines 27-31). As Carol Frost notes in “Elizabeth Bishop’s Inner Eye,” “What else is at work concerns . . . the inner eye’s power to generate, focus, manipulate, and enhance visual images in the mind, and the poem shows the future of that power” (250-251).

Inserting herself into the poem through a first- person narrative point of view, Bishop moves from impartial direct observation to internal speculation and identification as she describes “his gills . . . breathing in / the terrible oxygen /—the frightening gills, / fresh and crisp with blood” (lines 22-25). In the same manner that observation leads to identification, close description of the image and events leads to transformation. In the final part of the poem, as “victory fill[s] up / the little rented boat” (lines 66-67), the fish becomes a metaphor of survival, suggesting the poet herself may overcome adversity. In this way, Bishop suggests that the act of observing and detailing, the act of creating art from experience, sets in motion deeper levels of change and new ways of being.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. In her poem “Poetry,” Marianne Moore says that in reading a good poem, “One discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine. / Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise. . . ” She also exhorts poets, saying, “nor till the poets among us can be / ‘literalists of the imagination’—above insolence and triviality and can present / for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ shall we have / it.” What does Moore mean when she says that poets must be “literalists of the imagination”? How does “The Fish” work in respect to this idea? Has Bishop created an “imaginary garden with a real toad” in her description of the fish where readers can discover a place for the genuine? How so?

2. In what ways is Bishop’s real fish anthropomorphic? How does she use feminine images to complement or contrast the description of the fish?

2. Bishop delighted in telling friends that the poem was as close to the actual event as she could make it, changing only the number of hooks and lines in the fish’s mouth from three to five. But the poem is much more than a mere recounting of a fishing trip. How does the poem differ from a straightforward prose rendition of the event? How does Eliot’s “objective correlative” apply to the poem?

3. As an imagist, Bishop used many of the same techniques as poets such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Read Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro,” and/or Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Why do the poets focus on a single image or item? How does description in these poems work to help us understand larger concepts?

“At the Fishhouses” (1948)

“At the Fishhouses” first appeared in the August 9, 1948, issue of the New Yorker, a product of notes Bishop made while traveling in Nova Scotia the previous summer. The poem not only marks a return to Bishop’s homeland as a place for material, but also points to her interest in studying herself in relation to the landscape and the people who inhabit it with her.

In his literary biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, Brett Millier proposes the poem marks a shift in Bishop, moving from observer (as evidenced in earlier poems such as “The Map,” published a decade earlier) to geographer, a role that requires a more informed and intimate contact with the landscape. She labels her notes for the poem “GM,” which Millier tells us has been suggested as “Geographical Mirror” and was “part of [Bishop’s] attempt to find herself in land and sea” (182). Indeed, Bishop describes the coastal setting in terms of a mirror, early on: “All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over” (lines 13-14).

Nova Scotia had been home to her mother’s family, and Bishop explored the connection to family in the poem. The narrator meets an old man who “was a friend of my grandfather” (line 33). Together, as they sit talking in the cold light at the edge of the sea, Bishop paints a Wyethesque landscape, her emphasis on the painterly visuals; she highlights such items as the rusted ironwork, decaying fish, lobster pots covered in a shining film of scales to show how time has weathered the village. While the “steeply peaked roofs” of the houses attempt to oppose the eroding effects of time, its deteriorating effects seem nonetheless inevitable. The narrator and the old man talk about “the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring” (lines 34-35).

Bishop not only focuses on the landscape around her, but also considers that which cannot be seen, which remains hidden beneath the sea. In the final lines, Bishop also confirms another aspect of her “geographical” inspection—not only does time destroy: Flux is inevitable, all around us, putting us inside history, “our knowledge . . . historical, flowing, and flown” (line 84).

In the second half of the poem, Bishop shifts her attention to a friendly, familiar seal playing in the water just offshore as she has seen him do before. Bishop notes her religious background and makes a strong connection with the seal, saying, “like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him Baptist hymns” (line 53—54). Though the reference to hymn singing displays Bishop’s self-professed love of hymns, Bishop does not appear interested in immersion in the religious sense. Her desire is to be immersed in experience, the constant flow, just as the seal dives into the icy water, “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear” (63). For Bishop, the water beneath the surface is cold: “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 (lines 73-75). It is a source of truth and nourishment: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free” (lines 79-80).

Whereas a mapmaker is concerned with relationships of objects in relation to one another, the geographer looks at the texture of landscape in its totality. With “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop moves into the emotional landscape of her own life experience.

For Discussion or Writing
1. During her life Bishop expressed great admiration for and a fascination with the writings of Charles Darwin:

One admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (Stevenson 66)

In this passage, Bishop could be describing herself as the narrative voice in “At the Fish- houses.” Where is she like Darwin: lonely, eyes fixed on facts and minute details? Can her concentration in the poem be perceived as “useless”? How does it contribute to a “self- forgetting”?

2. What part does religious symbolism play in the poem? Does Bishop use the religious symbolism ironically? How so?

3. Look at the way Bishop uses another animal, the seagull, in “The Unbeliever.” How does this compare with the seal in “At the Fishhouses”? Compare the images of the sea as it is portrayed in both poems.

4. Read Bishop’s earlier poem “The Map.” How does Bishop’s depiction of landscape differ in this poem from “At the Fishhouses”?

5. Look at Bradford House, painted by Andrew Wyeth. How does Bishop use language to conjure images, moods, and emotions similar to those found in the painting?

“Questions of Travel” (1956)

“Questions of Travel” belongs to the general category of Bishop’s poetry that could be called travel poems. As does “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” it uses observations made while traveling to provide a context for the poem. “Questions of Travel” is not so concerned with experience and history, however, and considers other, more personal issues such as the ideas of expectation, displacement, and home.

As the title poem of the volume, “Questions of Travel” is the third poem in the section of the book entitled “Brazil.” The poems in this section are less individualized than poems appearing in the second section: “Elsewhere,” which deal more with Bishop’s childhood and other experiences that helped shape her life. However, the poems in the Brazil section are “detached” almost by necessity, as if exploring the physical landscape of her new home allowed the freedom to explore other, more private themes.

The poems that open the “Brazil” section— “Arrival at Santos” (Complete Poems 89-90); “Brazil, January 1, 1502” (Complete Poems 91-92); and “Questions of Travel”—all deal with various issues arising from living in an unfamiliar environment. While the poems may be concerned with externals of place, they do demonstrate a clear progression and Bishop’s increasing identification with the country. The first, “Arrival at Santos,” published shortly after Bishop arrived in Brazil, details the contrast between expectations and reality of the traveler. We see the country through Bishop’s eyes, as an outsider: “Here is a coast; here is a harbor” (line 1).

Everything is viewed as an oddity, curious, strange: “So that’s the flag. I never saw it before. / I somehow never thought of there being a flag” (lines 15-16). The narrator (Bishop) seems disdainful of the port city, concerned more with introducing the comforts of home into the new locale, trying to make the new place as much like the old as possible. However, if the judgment on the port city deems it “inferior,” the poem ends with Bishop’s looking deeper into Brazil: “We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior” (lines 39-40).

The second poem, “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” details a different arrival, the landing of the first Portuguese explorers at the Brazilian bay they believed to be the mouth of a great river, which they named Rio de Janeiro (River of January). Here, though, Bishop imagines the reaction of these new arrivals to the foreign landscape, and it is not the disappointed expectations of tourists disembarking in a busy port city. Instead, these explorers see what they have expected to see and nothing more. For them, Brazil is a savage, godless setting waiting to be tamed and civilized. As “they [rip] away into the hanging fabric, / each out to catch an Indian for himself” (lines 49-50), the true beauty of the locale is lost on them. However, as they conquer the land, Bishop suggests they are not able to tame it completely and are doomed to disappointment, the objects of their pursuit “retreating, always retreating” (line 53).

“Questions of Travel” deals again with expectation and disappointment, but this time, the point of view is that of the insider—the traveler who has cho - sen to stay. But now, the sights have overwhelmed the narrator of the poem when she laments, “There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams / hurry too rapidly to the sea” (lines 1-2). Those waterfalls, like “mile-long, shiny, tearstains” (line 6) force her to reconsider her decision to travel in the first place: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” (line 15).

But Bishop acknowledges that “surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road” (line 31), to have missed the firsthand experience, to have let her impressions of place been formed by others, which she calls “the whittled fantasies of wooden cages” (line 52). Though she asks the question “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?” (lines 60-61), Bishop ultimately embraces her decision to travel, understanding that flux is the most permanent of conditions.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. At the end of the poem, Bishop references a quote by the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote, “All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own room.” In the poem, she asks whether he “could have been not entirely right?” Using the poem for support, how does she demonstrate her claim?

2. Read “Arrival at Santos” and “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” How does Bishop change in her attitude toward Brazil from these poems in “Questions of Travel”? Why do you think she chose to go back in time in the middle poem? How does this add to her insights into Brazil?

3. One of the major themes in “Questions of Travel” is the idea of expectation versus reality. Read “Arrival at the Waldorf” by Wallace Stevens, which was written after Stevens returned from a trip to Guatemala. What do you think Stevens means when he says, “The wild poem is a substitute. . . . After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” How do Stevens and Bishop compare actual experience and art created from experience?

“Filling Station” (1964)

In her poetry in general, Bishop moves toward a rejection of what she thought of as typical “Dickinson” feminine domain: themes of love, human and divine. However, the role of the feminine still figures as a powerful force in many poems; we see just such an examination of feminine influence as a force of order in “Filling Station.” Written in midcareer, “Filling Station” belongs to the category of Bishop poetry Bonnie Costello describes in Questions of Mastery as “immediate beholders . . . record[ing] feelings and emotions in direct observation rather than detached reflection or description” (37).

The point of view in the poem is distinctly feminine, as evidenced in its opening statement, “Oh, but it is so dirty!” (line 1). Uncharacteristically judgmental, the poem introduces the masculine world of the filling station as disturbing and potentially dangerous: “Be careful with that match!” (line 6). When the owner of the station is introduced, he appears brutish, wearing “a dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit” (lines 7-8). However, he is also introduced as “Father,” assisted by two sons, and when the narrator reveals, almost as in confidence “(it’s a family filling station)” (line 12), the tone of the poem shifts from disparaging to questioning.

Conspicuously feminine objects invade the space: a wicker sofa, a doily, a begonia. Not only do they contrast the masculinity of the station itself, with its hard cement surfaces, they seem to absorb and soften it. Bishop describes the wicker furniture as “crushed and grease-impregnated” (lines 17-18), suggesting an abiding female presence that works to counterbalance the male forces: oil-soaked, greasy, saucy. It is the appearance of the feminine that makes the narrator question what life lies within the station—why the plant, why the doily? Costello proposes that Bishop sees this feminine force as both creative and life affirming.

From the objects themselves, the narrator concludes there must be a creator—a “somebody,” as Bishop names her, who cares enough to decorate and order this world: “Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody watered the plant” (lines 34-35). It is the recognition of this unique feminine presence, possessed with both a desire and the ability to transform ugliness into beauty, harshness into civility, that provides the final realization for the poet. The transformative feminine force is both maternal and beneficent, and though the force is never fully revealed, Bishop takes comfort in the final notion that “Somebody loves us all” (line 41).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. In the fourth stanza of the poem, Bishop notes that certain objects at the filling station are “part of the set.” How does she use this idea of artifice to illustrate her notions of intrusion and reconciliation within the space?

2. Certain objects have distinctly feminine associations or descriptions. Others, such as the “hirsute” begonia, are more ambiguous. List objects that might be more masculine in their conno- tations—what is the attitude portrayed toward these objects?

3. Read Bishop’s poems “Pink Dog” and “Faustina, or Rock Roses.” How does Bishop deal with gender in these poems as compared to “Filling Station”? How does the notion of class and class sensibilities work in conjunction with or opposition to ideas of gender in these poems?

“Sestina” (1964). For Discussion or Writing

It may seem ironic that “Sestina” appears in Questions of Travel, since like “In the Waiting Room,” it is a memory poem of childhood. But as in another poem from the same volume, “First Death in Nova Scotia,” Bishop seems to say to us that memory is a landscape unto itself and worthy of exploration.

Originally titled “Early Sorrow,” the poem depicts a scene probably drawn from Bishop’s childhood, the time immediately after her mother’s removal from the Bulmer house in Great Village. The child in the poem draws pictures of “inscrutable” houses, while the weeping grandmother looks on and oversees the daily tasks of the household. Underpinning the poem are the unspoken loss of the unnamed mother and the inability to express grief openly.

While the grandmother believes her tears to be hidden, the fact that they are reported to us makes it obvious they are not. However, the third-person narration of the poem coupled with the naive childlike perceptions create detachment in the poem, making it difficult to discern who is speaking, unless we can identify the voice as the adult Bishop looking back on the scene. Bishop once told her friend Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived” (qtd. in One Art x).

This would help to explain the relative isolation of both characters, and that even as they go about their normal routines, it is impossible to overcome the sadness that permeates the world around them. Bishop seems to say that the very activities they participate in—making tea, drawing pictures, telling jokes— are futile attempts to stave off inevitable sorrow.

Using the sestina (song of sixes) form, in which six words are repeated in a rolling pattern of six stanzas and a concluding three-line envoi, Bishop places emphasis on the repeated words: grandmother, child, stove, almanac, house, and tears. The importance of these simple nouns helps the author, as the child, create a “rigid drawing” of the past. It is the child, now grown, who must attempt to express that which has been repressed and unspoken for so long.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Read “First Death in Nova Scotia” and compare the first-person narrator to the third-person narration used in “Sestina.” How does the voice in each poem help Bishop inject the reader into the world of the poem? What would be the effect if Bishop inverted these voices, using first-person point of view in “Sestina” and third-person point of view in “First Death in Nova Scotia”?

2. Both poems detail loss, and in both poems, common objects demand our attention. How does Bishop use these objects to signify a greater understanding of the world?

3. Define inscrutable. Why do you think that Bishop uses that adjective to define the drawing of the house? How does the word apply to the idea of the poet trying to recapture a moment from the past and the poem as a representation of memory?

“In the Waiting Room” (1971)

Though this poem did not appear until late in Bishop’s career (published in her last volume of poetry, Geography III), its roots are in her earliest memories. Set in 1918, toward the end of her troubled stay in her paternal grandparents’ home, the incident that underlies the poem is detailed in the final paragraphs of Bishop’s memoir “The Country Mouse”:

After New Year’s, Aunt Jenny had to go to the dentist, and asked me to go with her. She left me in the waiting room, and gave me a copy of the National Geographic to look at. It was still getting dark early, and the room had grown very dark. There was a big yellow lamp in one corner, a table with magazines, and an overhead chandelier of sorts. There were others waiting, two men and a plump middle-aged lady, all bundled up. I looked at the magazine cover—I could read most of the words—shiny, glazed, yellow and white. The black letters said FEBRUARY 1918. A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over me. I felt . . . myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday.

I felt I, I, I, and I looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs. “You’re in for it, now,” something said. How had I got tricked into such a false position? I would be like that woman opposite who smiled at me so falsely every once in a while. The awful sensation passed, then it came back again. “You are you,” something said. “How strange you are, inside looking out. You are not Beppo [her Aunt Jenny’s bull terrier], or the chestnut tree, or Emma [Bishop’s playmate and friend], you are you and you are going to be you forever.” It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I a human being? (Complete Prose 32-33)

The poem’s construction is typical for Bishop in that it moves from detailed description in the first half to revelation in the last. However, it also marks a departure for her in that it is the first poem in which Bishop names herself as a character in the poem: “But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth’ (line 60). The climax of the poem and the prose piece is a rite of passage—at once a realization of individuality, but with that realization recognition of the isolation that individual identity entails. However, with this recognition of self is a second epiphany, that of a connectedness to the world around her, specifically to herself as a woman: “Why should I be my aunt, / or me or anyone? / What similarities— / . . . held us all together / or made us all just one?” (lines 75-84).

Bishop ends the poem with the notice “The War was on” (line 95). Since the poem is set in 1918, the reference to the First World War is obvious. Yet, there would also seem to be a second layer of conflict implied. War has been declared within the young poet, a war of individual identity and expectation for her both as a woman and as a member of the human community.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare the prose account of the events Bishop describes in “The Country Mouse” to those in the poem “In the Waiting Room.” Which details has she omitted, altered, enhanced? Also, the poem seems to build to a new level of understanding not contained in the prose version. How so?

2. Look at the various ways Bishop shifts perspective in the poem, focusing our attention “inward” or “outward.” How does this shift contribute to the meaning of the poem?

3. A “rite of passage” is defined as a journey from innocence to awareness. What is young Elizabeth’s rite of passage? Can you recall a similar experience in your own life when you underwent a shift in your perspective to see yourself and the world in a new way?

“The Moose” (1972). For Discussion or Writing

If any poem can be called definitive, “The Moose” may arguably be the definitive Bishop poem. Taking 20 years to complete, it is Bishop’s longest poem and unquestionably combines notable representative elements of other poems from throughout Bishop’s career. As she did with “The Fish,” Bishop claimed that the events narrated within “The Moose” happened almost exactly as she relayed them, altering only minor details of the story’s arrangement, and as she does in “The Fish” and “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop uses interaction with nature and more specifically, an animal, as a means to revelation.

She utilizes travel as a theme much as she does in “Questions of Travel” and the idea that when we are displaced, we are in some ways most at home. As in “Sestina” and her short story “In the Village,” Bishop uses “The Moose” to combine ideas of family and loss. And as she does in “The Unbeliever” and “The Man-Moth,” dreamy visions are a means to revelation.

The first six stanzas are one long sentence describing a bus trip from Nova Scotia to Boston—as it happens, the beginning and end points of Bishop’s own life. As the bus makes its way through a richly described landscape in the late afternoon, it is portrayed as a battered traveler, with its “dented flank / of blue, beat-up enamel” (line 30). The travelers inside the bus develop an informal community, and as they look out of the bus into the early evening, they observe a variety of communities, each hinting at the lives led by the individuals who dwell in them.

But the glimpses into these other worlds are fleeting: “Five islands, Five Houses, / where a woman shakes a tablecloth / out after supper. / A pale flickering. Gone” (lines 58-61). The attitude is amiable, almost adventurous, as the travelers enter the wood, the fog, the night and settle into a surreal state: “A dreamy divagation / begins in the night, / a gentle, auditory / slow hallucination . . .” (lines 87—90).

In this section of the poem, the passengers are cocooned within the foggy night, within the bus, within their own worlds. A conversation identified in the poem as “Grandparents’ voices” (line 96) relates personal details from a couple’s life that Bishop likens to intimate exchanges that happen late at night, “Talking the way they talked / in the old featherbed” (lines 121-122). Yet the conversation is, at the same time, universal, and Bishop describes the old couple “talking, in Eternity” (line 98).

The conversation covers a catalog of disasters: “deaths, deaths and sicknesses” (line 103); there is even mention of someone “the family had / to put . . . away” (line 113-114), echoing Bishop’s mother’s removal to an institution. But in the list of sorrows, there is also recognition: “A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, / that means ‘Life’s like that, / We know it (also death)’” (lines 118-120). Bishop indicates that it is impossible to avoid loss; more importantly, she says that loss does not function as a vehicle of transcendence; we need merely accept it as a necessary natural condition.

The reverie of the night is interrupted when the bus driver stops to look at a large moose that has wandered into the middle of the road. Emerging from “the impenetrable wood” (line 134), the moose becomes a symbol of home:

Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses), A man’s voice assures us “Perfectly harmless . . .” (lines 139-144)

Again, as in the earlier passages, there is a sense of shared experience and community among the travelers, but in sharp opposition to the melancholy and sadness of the earlier passages, the moose creates wonder and delight:

Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly, Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? (lines 151-156)

But the journey continues, and though the travelers are granted one last look backward at the moose, they press on into the night, the world of the outer experience and inner reflection combined in “a dim / smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline” (lines 156—159).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Bishop wrote in a letter to Anne Stevenson:

My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see. But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy—to make life endurable. (quoted in Travisano 204-205)

How does “The Moose” support the idea that we must laugh at life instead of being overwhelmed by it?

2. Since “The Moose” contains many elements common throughout Bishop’s poetry, choose one element from the poem to compare how Bishop uses that same idea or technique in another of her pieces.

3. In an article for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Judith Crews, a specialist in comparative literature and languages, notes that in ancient cultures “Trees and forests . . . took on symbolic divine characteristics, or were seen to represent superlative forces such as courage, endurance or immortality. They were the means of communication between worlds.” Does Bishop use the woods to represent “superlative forces”? If so, then how? Emerging from “the impenetrable wood,” can the moose be seen as a divine messenger in the poem?

“One Art” (1976). For Discussion or Writing

The general theme of the poems in Geography III, where “One Art” appears, is the reconsideration of life and experience. As Thomas J. Travisano notes in Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, Bishop asks that we see her “not in terms of that life’s particular circumstances and decisions . . . , but in terms of its chosen way of thinking and seeing, in terms of a whole bundle of latent assumptions, commitments, and predilections that bind the person and the artist” (176).

To construct the poem, Bishop chose the villanelle, a fixed form consisting of 19 lines in total. In a villanelle, composed of five tercets and a final quatrain, only two rhyme sounds occur, and the first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated, alternately, as the third line of subsequent stanzas until the last, when they appear as the last two lines of the poem. Bishop varied slightly from the form in that she did not repeat lines entirely through the poem but did repeat the final rhyming words—master and disaster.

The use of these two words points toward the underlying theme of the poem—Bishop’s desire to master both the art of creation and form as well the art of loss. The poem begins ironically, as she observes, “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” (lines 1-3). The second stanza suggests that impermanence is the state of being we must all learn to accept as Bishop exhorts the reader to “lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent” (lines 4-5).

However, as the poem progresses and the catalog of items “lost” increases, they become more personal and self- referential. Knowing that Bishop spent her life in motion and was a traveler by nature heightens the pathos when what is lost are “places, and names, and where you meant / to travel” (lines 8-9). The switch to second person you in these lines is not only a summons to the reader, but directly references her own loss of persons and places over time.

While Bishop notes the objects lost to her, she only hints at the greater losses they represent. Brett Millier, author of Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, says that in writing the poem, “the poet is giving herself a lesson in . . . losing” (506-507). The loss of a mother’s watch implies a sentimental keepsake but does not mention the sorrow over the loss of the mother herself. The loss of the three loved houses alludes to the houses themselves, but not to the life lived within them. In the final quatrain, Bishop again uses the second person, but this time it is not directed toward the reader or even herself: “—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied” (lines 16-17).

Though some critics have speculated that this might be a reference to Alice Methfessel, her last love, it seems also to envelop the loss of Bishop’s beloved Lota. In the final lines of the poem, Bishop again addresses herself (Write it!) (line 19), confirming her reticence to address such personal matters in such a public way. However, she also seems willing, within the liberating confines of her art to do so, as if mastering this level of disclosure might be a greater, though ultimately beneficial form of losing.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Why do you think Bishop chose a fixed form for this poem? How does the form help contribute to the meaning of the poem?

2. Read Theodore Roethke’s villanelle “The Waking.” How does Roethke’s use of waking and learning compare to Bishop’s idea of mastery and losing?

3. Look at the poem “Dreams” by Langston Hughes. He urges readers to “hold fast,” while Bishop seems to offer just the opposite advice. What comments do you imagine he would offer Bishop on “One Art”?

4. Joseph Campbell discusses a ritual in which individuals relinquish items in order to pass from one stage to the next. Each item represents something of larger meaning to the person (as eyeglasses could be used to represent a love of reading). What items would you choose if you were asked to participate in the ritual of seven things?

“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (1948)

Though the poem draws on events and recollections from her journals written at Vassar and from Bishop’s travels in Morocco in 1948, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” did not appear until much later, published in 1955 as a part of the collection A Cold Spring.

Divided into three sections or movements, the poem details three different methods of “travel” as a means of gaining knowledge, though each carries with it a certain set of limitations. There is first the orderly study of cataloged details from the concordance; then is the hectic and untidy insight gained from direct observation and experience; finally, there is the insight gained from fictions, the imagined recollections and remembrances resulting from the first two.

The gravity with which the episodes are outlined in the concordance creates a longing in the author for the tidiness they represent. But there is also recognition that with order entails a certain lifelessness and artifice: “Always the silence, the gesture, the speck of birds / suspended on invisible threads above the Site, / or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads” (lines 17-19). Though drawn from real experience and ritual, the notations in the book are unable to capture the vitality of the experiences, “the human figure / far gone in history or theology” (lines 14-15). The absence of life is highlighted by emphasis on details such as the tomb and the dry well; without real people inhabiting the landscape, it is easy to impose meaning, to exchange experience for order.

The author is not content with mere arrangement of details, however, and the page with its comforting anonymity gives way to firsthand observation, which is anything but somber. Just as the second passage begins with a boat crossing, so the poet crosses into experience. Here, “pock-marked prostitutes / [balance] tea trays on their heads, / and [do] their little belly dances; [fling] themselves / naked and giggling against our knees / asking for cigarettes” (lines 51-54).

Whereas the concordance was marked with reverential silence, the observed world is characterized by noise and activity. However, there is a price to pay for this exuberant, though totally transient life, and in the middle passage, Bishop confronts “what frightened me most of all” (line 55). As she encounters the grave of a Muslim prophet, she searches for meaning only to be rewarded with dust, and “not even the dust / of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there” (lines 62-63). There are no revelations to be had, “everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’” (line 65).

It is in the third section that she attempts to reconcile the worlds of the dignified, permanent, ordered concordance and the vitality of the real event. She knows it is the artist who must muster the courage to look deeper, to attempt to discern meaning from experience; similarly, it is the artist who must look at history and imagine it as human experience. As she turns back to the “heavy book,” she questions “Why couldn’t we have seen / this old Nativity while we were at it?” (lines 68-69).

The answer, she understands, is that this level of observation is not available to us in reality, but only in imagination; thus the flame that lights the grotto is “unbreathing.” But in this new reimagining, she proposes, old illusions and myths would be destroyed; in this new way of seeing, the holy family is transformed into “a family with pets” (line 73). Bishop also recognizes that this level may not be gained freely, though what is gained may be greater than what is lost. She ends the poem on a deliberately ambiguous note, as we look “our infant sight away” (line 74). Bishop leaves us with the notion that this third way of experience could destroy innocence, as we exchange artifice for insight. Conversely, it may also allow us to preserve what is