Nongzaimayum Tanzeem Alee Shah

Sri Venkateswara College

20079708015 II
120302202
The idea of 'home' in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry.

10-08-2021

Nongzaimayum Tanzeem Alee Shah

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Nongzaimayum Tanzeem Alee Shah

Poetry II 120302202

August 10, 2021

The idea of 'home' in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry.

“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the

edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.”1

“I've never felt particularly homeless, but then, I've never felt particularly at home. I

guess that's a pretty good description of a poetʼs sense of home. He carries it within him”.2

Elizabeth Bishop had a traumatizing childhood that left her with a lingering sense of

alienation. The unavailability of a stable and loving home and the constant movement from one

relative’s care to another turned her into, in Helen Vendler’s words a ‘foreigner everywhere’

marking her with the unease and anxiety associated with travel. A sense of dislocation and

unrest, an ambiguity about the idea of home and belonging as well as the awareness of its

constant presence colours her poems. The Brazil section of her poetry collection Questions of

Travel, of which ‘Arrival in Santos’ and ‘Questions of travel’ are a part, explores these

paradoxes a tourist encounters on their contact with the exotic, picking apart the idea of home as

a spatially fixed point.

As an expatriate who found a home in Brazil, Bishop occupied a unique vantage point to

observe and report ‘the experience of cultural contact’ as both accomplice and critic (Eva-Marie

Kröller 87). The speaker in ‘Arrival at Santos’ shifts in and out of this persona. Contrary to her

expectations of the vibrancy of an exotic world, the speaker is greeted by a muted and

commonplace port that turns out to be operating on proasic details and practicalities just as any

other place. The adjectives used to describe the landscape - ‘impractically shaped, self-pitying,
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sad and harsh, feeble, uncertain’ - hint more at the unsettled state of mind of the traveller rather

than the scene just arrived at. The lines

‘…..your immodest demands for a different world,

and a better life, and complete comprehension

of both at last,’

point not just to the weight of expectations imposed on the land but to an attempt at

understanding the self through these travels, such that the speaker seems to be searching for it in

the unfamiliar. Bishop is showcasing through the disgruntled traveller the conflicting impulses of

the tourist that, failing to witness anything exotic to meet their expectations, turns to the familiar

markers of modernity such as the ‘brilliant flag’ and the ‘strange and ancient craft’ to appropriate

the foreign. This theme is explored further through both a distancing and an identification with

the fellow passenger Miss Breen in the next stanzas.

We are told that for Miss Breen, home is at Glen falls, New York. The use of ‘we’ implies

a bond between the speaker as westerners in a foreign land. It should be noted that the rhetorical

emphasis on home -‘there we are settled’- fails to hide the anxiety of dislocation travel creates.

Failing to find wonderment in the surroundings, the speaker finds it in Miss Breen’s ‘six foot

tall’ frame and ‘bright blue eyes’. The list of necessities(bourbon, cigarettes, soap, stamps) and

the expectation that the customs officials will speak english represents the tourist with their

cultural baggage, imposing on the exotic to be more like home itself i.e searching for the comfort

of familiarity. Here the travellers become agents of modernity(Kaplan 5-10) confirming and

legitimizing the social reality of dichotomous constructions such as First/Third Worlds,

developed/ underdeveloped, center/periphery(Sandra 6) The poet is questioning the tourists’

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unwillingness to be open to the experience of another culture and people, as if travel to them was

only, “to view conditions or practices that might just as well be viewed ‘at home’”(Kaplan 59).

Soaps, stamps and letters serve as a reminder of the difference and distance between

home and the foreign and thus reinforcing the dislocation a traveller feels. The disillusionment

with the port and the inability to relate with the culture moves the tourist to drive ‘to the interior’

in search of more exotic locations and to a deeper exploration of the self. The speaker in the title

poem Questions of travel picks up on this physical and spiritual drive.

As opposed to the flatness, here the speaker finds annoyance at the overabundance and

fullness of presence. The numerous waterfalls, the slow moving clouds and the running water

hint at a dynamism in nature and the passage of time. The conflation of nature (mountains) and

ships as ‘slime-hung’ and ‘barnacled’ conveys the idea of travel, voyage and decay, leading

inevitably to the idea of home as a place removed from the current place and time in the next

stanza.

Distanced from the place one comes from/calls home and alienated in the place just

arrived at, the tourist feels disoriented in the constant rush from one place to another, raising the

question if perhaps one could travel in the mind with imagination instead. Though she questions

the impulse to watch strangers in a play and the voyeuristic aspect of travel to the exotic, she is

however also delighted at the tiniest green hummingbird and an old stonework, however alien

and impenetrable it may be. While noting the desire for consumption that leads to superficial

packaging of cultures, the next stanzas tell us it would have been a pity “not to have seen,” “not

to have had to stop,” “not to have heard,” “not to have pondered,” “never to have studied,” and

“never to have listened” to the surprisingly quaint and mundane experiences she lists. The shift
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here is from travel as dislocating and anxiety inducing to illuminating and joyful thus

complicating the questions surrounding travel.

In the final quotes that closes the poem we arrive back at the question introduced earlier

about home and the imagination. Bishop doesn’t provide us an answer to the question but leaves

us with the possibility of finding a place to belong if we are willing to be open about different

cultures and possibility of finding home in the ‘uncertain’. Home for her becomes a discovery of

the self within the imagination and one’s surroundings, limited only by the attitude we carry in

travel. The concluding question encapsulates the indeterminacy of the notions of home, a place

that no one can specifically pinpoint, but one that remains present nonetheless, often defined by

artificially imposed restrictive models as in ‘Continents, city, country, society.’

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Notes

1. James Vinson quoting Elizabeth Bishop in Contemporary Poets, third ed., 1980

2. Elizabeth Bishop’s reply in an interview with Alexandra Johnson. (102) “Geography of

the Imagination.” and available at

https://bluedragonfly10.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/conversations-with-elizabeth-bishop/

Works cited.
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Almeida, Sandra. (2010). The politics and poetics of travel: the Brazil of Elizabeth Bishop and P.

K. Page. Ilha do Desterro. 10.5007/2175-8026.2009n57p105.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke

UP, 1998

Kröller, Eva-Marie. “First Impressions: Rhetorical Strategies in Travel Writing by Victoria

Women.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 21.4 (1990): 87-99

Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1988.