Zachariah Pickard - Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description-McGill-Queen's University Press (2009)

elizabeth bishop’s poetics
of description
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Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics
of Description
zachariah pickard
McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009
isbn 978-0-7735-3505-3
Legal deposit second quarter 2009

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
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This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada

Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the
financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Pickard, Zachariah, 1976–

Elizabeth Bishop’s poetics of description/Zachariah Pickard.
Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 978-0-7735-3505-3
1. Bishop, Elizabeth, 1911–1979 – Criticism and interpretation.

I. Title.
ps3503.i785z75 2009 811′.54 c2008-906400-3
This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/14 Sabon.

for je
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 3
1 Imagery 14
2 Surrealism 38
3 Epiphany 58
4 Water 73
5 War 98
6 Narrative 125
7 Travel 148
8 Description 172
Conclusion 189
Works Cited 201
Index 209
Acknowledgments
This book was made possible through the financial support of

the University of Toronto and the Social Sciences and Humani-
ties Research Council of Canada. It was made what it is by the
many people who read and discussed part or all of it with me. I
am particularly grateful to John Reibetanz, Malcolm Wood-
land, and Jessica Wilson, who read and commented on each
chapter as it came to light, but I would also like to thank Sarah
Brouillette, Andrew Kaufman, Jeffery Donaldson, my readers
at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Matthew Sewell, Nicholas
Bradley, Kendall Shields, Gillian Gass, Alexander Willis, and,
especially, Toni and Michael Pickard, for their help, interest,
and support.
A version of chapter 2 has appeared in Studies in the Hu-
manities, and I thank Malcolm Hayward and Tom Slater
both for publishing it and for allowing me to use the material
here. A version of chapter 3 has appeared in Twentieth-
Century Literature for which I am similarly grateful to Lee
Zimmerman and James Martin. An essay that shares some
material with chapter 5 has appeared in American Literature,
and I am grateful in the same ways to Priscilla Wald and Hous-
ton Baker Jr. I would also like to thank Sonya MacDonald,
Chatham Ewing, and John Hodge at Washington University in
x Acknowledgments
St Louis for their help and for permission to quote from

Bishop’s unpublished letters.
Excerpts from The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop,
copyright (c) 1984 by Alice Helen Methfessel; The Complete
Poems: 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright (c) 1979,
1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel; One Art: Letters by Elizabeth
Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux, copyright (c)
1994 by Alice Methfessel, introduction and compilation copy-
right (c) 1994 by Robert Giroux, reprinted by permission of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, llc.
Excerpts from “Dimensions for a Novel” and “Time’s An-
dromedas” included in the Vassar Journal of Undergraduate
Studies; “Gerard Manley Hopkins” included in the Vassar Re-
view; “Seven-Days Monolouge” [sic] included in Con Spirito;
and unpublished letters written by Elizabeth Bishop to Anne
Stevenson, copyright (c) 2009 Alice Helen Methfessel, re-
printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on
behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate.
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used for Bishop’s work:
cp Complete Poems: 1927–1979. New York: Noonday,

1983.
cpr Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar,
1984.
dl The Darwin Letter, written to Anne Stevenson, 8–20 Jan-
uary 1964. Elizabeth Bishop Papers. Washington Univer-
sity, St Louis.
oa One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Noon-
day, 1994.
Unless otherwise noted, all italics and emphases appearing in

quotations are from the originals. All ellipses in works by
Bishop are mine, unless otherwise noted.
[ ] indicates that part of a word has been cut.
elizabeth bishop’s poetics
of description
Introduction
Finding a title for this book has been a struggle. Any honest
title would have to include the word “description,” and noth-
ing is more likely to glaze the eyes of a potential reader than
this seemingly innocuous term with which Bishop has so often
been associated. However, it is description that I want to dis-
cuss, first briefly in this introduction and then at considerable
length over the course of what follows. As it is generally used
in regard to contemporary poetry, the word “descriptive” is
drab at best and more often derogatory. Applied casually to
Bishop, it expresses something that anyone will grant but that
few are interested in thinking about too closely: that her po-
etry is often concerned with the objective aspects of the physi-
cal world and that it conveys them to the reader with unusual
force and clarity. Applied with more malign intent, “descrip-
tive” implies a limiting obsession with brute reality, a lack of
imagination that prevents Bishop from seeing beyond the here
and now. This second, derogatory sense of the word usually
lurks in the background, and even those who label Bishop de-
scriptive with the best intentions are eager to move on. The
risk always remains that, under the microscope, description
will prove indelibly tied to the dull and mundane. As such,
“description” has become a ubiquitous but invisible word in
Bishop scholarship – oft used but rarely discussed. The central
4 Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description
purpose of this book is to rectify that situation by asking what,

exactly, description means to Bishop. However, my goal is not
to talk about her more obviously descriptive poems so much as
to bring out description’s role as a basic fact of her intellectual
method. My topic, then, is not so much description as an iso-
lated action but description as a way of looking at the world.
What this deeper notion of description means is, first and
foremost, a commitment to physical reality, to facts. But this
commitment does not imply a rejection of the many other
things – ideas, feelings, characters – that a poet might seek to
address. Rather, for Bishop, the world of physical facts is the
only possible means of reaching those other, loftier realms.
When William Carlos Williams orders himself to “Say it, no
ideas but in things” (Paterson 6), he is forcing himself, as the
imperative mood of the phrase suggests, to give something
up, to choose the harder, more rewarding route. For Bishop,
there rarely seems to be any choice: there simply are no ideas
but in things. The only way she can achieve her larger goals
is through attention to the seemingly mundane aspects of re-
ality. In her own words, whatever it is that “one can never re-
ally see full-face but that seems enormously important” is
only available to us through the examination of the objects
we can see full-face; it is only through an unusually close
scrutiny of “facts and minute details” that we can “catch a
peripheral vision” of what lies beyond them (dl). To over-
simplify by assuming an everyday empiricism, there are vari-
ous experiences – aesthetic, moral, intellectual – to which we
aspire but to which we have no direct access. What is avail-
able to us is physical reality, and it is only by focusing dili-
gently on it that we are able to arrive at anything else.
Indeed, “scrutiny” will be as crucial a term in this study as
“description.” If description is the mode of Bishop’s writing,
then scrutiny is the intellectual activity that underpins it.
That phrase about whatever it is one “can never really see
full-face” is from a 1964 letter in which Bishop proposes
Introduction 5
Charles Darwin as an aesthetic role model and which, conse-

quently, has become known as the Darwin Letter. I have taken
from this letter the underlying argument of my study, and so I
would like to quote its central passage here, at my beginning:
Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-

more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected
moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of
whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that
seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly
irrational – and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin,
one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of
his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or au-
tomatic – 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 min-
ute 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. (dl)
In many ways, this entire book amounts to an exploration

of this one paragraph, and many of the particular topics and
ideas that concern me – surrealism, epiphany, morality, scru-
tiny – are to be found in these few lines. But the simplest,
most fundamental idea they contain has to do with the rela-
tionship between the study of the physical world and access
to some more ethereal realm. The single overarching pro-
posal to which all of my arguments contribute is simply this:
to begin with a perfectly useless concentration and end by
sliding off into the unknown is the fundamental pattern that
underlies Bishop’s art of description. In many ways, the
chapters of this book seek out this one basic pattern in a va-
riety of contexts, pointing to the ways in which it inflects
her treatment of a variety of topics: imagery, psychology,
epiphany, knowledge, morality, narrative, travel, and, fi-

nally, description itself.
Such is the largest and purest strain of my argument. How-
ever, there is more to Bishop’s poetry than things and ideas:
there is also the poet herself, with all her various personae.
The particular way in which she injects herself between
things and ideas – her particular form of poetic subjectivity –
plays into the question of whether or not she can properly be
considered a postmodern poet. The first generation of Bishop
scholarship, extending from Anne Stevenson’s 1966 study
through David Kalstone’s seminal Becoming a Poet (1989)
and including works by Robert Dale Parker and Thomas
Travisano (both 1988), reads Bishop’s poetry in the context
of her predecessors and contemporaries, as the subtitle of
Kalstone’s book, Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore
and Robert Lowell, suggests. In the early 1990s, however,
Bishop scholarship took a new turn, and Bishop was put for-
ward as an early figure in the development of postmodern
poetry. Beginning with works by Bonnie Costello (1991),
Victoria Harrison (1993), and Susan McCabe (1994), and
extending through books by Marilyn Lombardi (1995), Sally
Shigley (1997), and Kim Fortuny (2003), the tendency in
Bishop studies has been to argue not only for the relevance of
gender, race, class, and sexual orientation but also, and more
importantly for my purposes, to suggest that Bishop’s poetics
is inherently postmodern in its decentred subjectivity. At this
point, the study of Bishop’s poetry has settled into the as-
sumption that Bishop is postmodern in most things – but this
is an assumption with which I am not entirely comfortable.
Bonnie Costello’s formulation of what makes Bishop post-
modern reveals the bias that underlies this line of thought:
while her definition of postmodernism is relatively standard
– she emphasizes its preference for indeterminacy and its
doubts about the primacy and coherence of the human sub-
ject – her definition of what postmodernism is not reveals a
Introduction 7
profound distaste. For Costello, postmodernism is a reaction

against high modernist “idealism” with its “static, hierarchi-
cal view,” its “conservative attitude,” and its embrace of
“norms,” “static orders,” and “illusions” (5). Those being
the options, there is little choice but to label Bishop a post-
modernist, and those are, for Costello as for many others, the
options. An argument framed along these lines transforms
“postmodern” into a term of praise, and that makes it diffi-
cult for a critic who admires Bishop’s poetry to withhold it.
As such, even though Costello begins by suggesting that
Bishop is locked in a tug-of-war between “the desire for mas-
tery” over the observed world (modernism) and an aware-
ness of “the dangers and illusions to which such desire is
prone” (postmodernism) (2), her readings of individual po-
ems consistently show Bishop’s desire for mastery being
swept away to reveal a “directed resistance to idealism and
its quest for mastery over nature’s plurality and flux” (3).
For Costello, Bishop’s urge towards mastery and control is a
weakness she repeatedly overcomes.
While I have hesitations about Costello’s conclusions and
their influence on Bishop studies, her initial observation
about the conflicting urges at play in Bishop’s poetry is per-
ceptive. And so I have tried, in many ways, to follow it
through by emphasizing both Bishop’s profound respect for
the world around her and her interest in using it to gain ac-
cess to some more transcendent, idealist realm. As Costello
points out, poetry “is one of the few places where limited
mastery is possible” (2), and that limited mastery is a crucial
part of the argument I make here. Implicitly, such an argu-
ment presents Bishop as neither postmodern nor modernist
but, rather, as an individual whose conflicting interests sus-
pend her somewhere between or beside the two. But that is
about as much as I will say explicitly about the matter. The
debate over Bishop’s place in literary history is an important
one, but it is one that can quickly crowd out other topics.
And so, while I have addressed it briefly here, and while it

comes up again at the end of chapter 1, I will seek to mini-
mize discussion of Bishop’s postmodernism (or lack thereof).
My aim, instead, is to define and discuss Bishop’s poetic
practice in the terms and categories that arise from within it.
When these terms intersect with the postmodern, I do, of
course, make note of that fact, but my goal is to arrive at a
sui generis portrait of this most sui generis of poets.
As a result, the majority of this study is devoted to two
things: Bishop’s unusual focus on the physical world (scrutiny)
and her unusual ability to convey it to her reader (description).
The first of these is essentially thematic or intellectual in na-
ture; the second is more formal. The theme of scrutiny is the
subject of most of what follows, and it is really Bishop’s un-
derlying engagement with the world around her that occu-
pies me in the central chapters of this book. The more formal
question of how exactly she presents the world within her
poetry is the focus of my first and last chapters, and descrip-
tion in the literal, rhetorical sense thus provides an introduc-
tion and a conclusion to a longer, more wide-ranging
discussion of the intellectual habits and inclinations that un-
derlie it.
In still more concrete terms, the structure of the book is as
follows: in my first chapter, I begin by setting out a relatively
straightforward idea about different kinds of imagery and
their relationship to description, which, in turn, leads me to a
set of preliminary conclusions about how Bishop interacts
with the world through her poetry. The strictly formal nature
of the discussion, however, risks pushing my characterization
of Bishop too far in one direction, towards an account of her
mastery over the objects she describes that is every bit as lop-
sided as is Costello’s vision of flux. The rest of the book slowly
evens things out by moving beyond the rhetoric of the poems
into the ways they engage with a variety of larger questions.
The remaining chapters can be divided into three sections,
Introduction 9
each of which has a particular thematic focus and each of

which takes as its starting point a lesser-known prose work
that, like the idea of description, is more often mentioned in
Bishop scholarship than it is examined. Though the bulk of
this study is given over to close readings of Bishop’s poetry, it
is these prose works that give it shape and direction.
In the first section, which includes chapters 2, 3, and 4, I use
Bishop’s Darwin Letter to move beyond the realm of form and
into a discussion of Bishop’s relationship to the actual physical
world. Chapter 2 reads Bishop’s Darwin Letter in the context
of surrealism and tries to pinpoint her exact understanding of
the relationship between the conscious and unconscious
minds, the world of the senses and the world of the imagina-
tion. Chapter 3 extends this discussion into her particular no-
tion of epiphany, once again turning to the Darwin Letter, but
this time within the context of Darwin’s own form of natural
history and certain familiar modernist ideas about science.
Chapter 4 settles down to read through two poems very care-
fully in order to extract their implicit argument about empiri-
cal and abstract knowledge. Taken as a group, these three
chapters, and especially the chapter on surrealism, go a long
way towards problematizing the portrait of Bishop that I lay
out in chapter 1. The argument I make about the mind in these
chapters is about the mind outside of the poem, the mind that
encounters the real world and then writes about it. Obviously,
this mind is not the same as the persona that appears within
and behind the poems, and these chapters help to show that,
however empowering the implications of Bishop’s description
are for the relationship between the speaker of a poem and the
objects it describes, Bishop’s ideas about the proper relation-
ship between a real mind and the real world are considerably
more modest.
Chapter 5 comprises a section unto itself, in which I use
Randall Jarrell’s 1947 review of Bishop’s first collection of po-
etry to examine her relationship to a different sort of world
altogether – the historical world of human beings and their often

unsavoury doings. Jarrell’s review allows us to understand how,
exactly, Bishop is able to address the larger, tainted political and
historical world without ever seeming to lift her eye from the
more innocent world of things. Again, the gains made in this
chapter necessitate a revision of the powerful, controlling role in
which I originally cast Bishop: if Bishop’s intense, controlling fo-
cus within her poetry turns out to be a product of forces beyond
her control, then any argument about the empowering nature of
that focus needs to be carefully reconsidered.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 form my final section, in which I intro-
duce the question of time by examining one of Bishop’s under-
graduate essays, “Time’s Andromedas.” Chapter 6 seeks to
elicit and clarify the essay’s account of time’s relationship to
narrative before it examines a handful of poems that engage
that particular issue. In chapter 7, I narrow this topic down by
focusing on the ways that Bishop’s travel poetry, and particu-
larly the first three poems of Questions of Travel, rephrase her
ideas about time and narrative in terms of the opposition be-
tween travel and tourism. Not surprisingly, many of the
themes and arguments regarding scrutiny and control that
come up throughout this book resurface in both of these chap-
ters, and indeed Bishop’s attitude to both narrative and travel
are extensions of the basic intellectual method – the method of
scrutiny – that I trace throughout. Finally, in chapter 8, I ex-
tend my discussion of Bishop’s engagement with different no-
tions of time in a more rhetorical direction, taking up, once
again, a more formal notion of description and trying to estab-
lish a set of terms and ideas that takes into account all that this
study establishes. This last chapter answers the more forceful
argument of the first, thereby bringing the book full circle and
presenting a balanced portrait of Bishop’s descriptive art. My
conclusion restates this more balanced portrait and deals
briefly with two topics on which I am elsewhere silent: ek-
phrasis and critical methodology.
Introduction 11
At the largest level, all of this is meant to lead my reader

not only to a new-found appreciation for the role of descrip-
tion in Bishop’s poetry but also to a new understanding of
the fundamental habits of thought that structure it. Bishop’s
thinking is best understood through that most maligned of
intellectual devices, the binary, and throughout this book I
isolate in Bishop’s poetry and thinking familiar sets of bina-
ries and demonstrate her particular form of intellectual slip-
periness in dealing with them. The discussion of ideas and
things with which I began this introduction is a good exam-
ple of what I mean. The Bishopesque manoeuvre is neither to
deny the validity of the binary (ideas and things are indeed
distinct) nor to validate one of its terms (she is not privileging
things over ideas). Rather it is to insist that both terms are
very real, very important, and very different but connected in
a strange and unexpected way (we must turn our backs on
ideas before we can reach them through things). As is not
surprising for a poet interested in scrutiny and description,
this strange and unexpected connection inevitably involves
some form of attention. The Darwin Letter argues that we
must focus on details in order to see, peripherally, some
larger meaning, and this basic pattern is repeated in a variety
of contexts throughout this book: the conscious and uncon-
scious mind, empirical and abstract knowledge, politics and
aesthetics, travel and tourism. Bishop’s larger goals are al-
ways latent, always hiding just behind the physical world,
and her poetry is an extended meditation on how and where
and why to look – a meditation that takes up many of the fa-
miliar binaries that populate our minds.
To bring out that basic intellectual pattern is my largest
goal. In a more concrete sense, however, this book offers the
first serious attempt to think through Bishop’s dedication to
description – a task that is long overdue. It also presents de-
tailed examinations of several under-examined texts – the
Darwin Letter, Jarrell’s review, and “Time’s Andromedas.”
More fundamentally, however, my focus differs from much

that has been written about Bishop in that I am particularly
interested in her earlier poetry. Bishop criticism, as a whole,
has tended to favour the later, more autobiographical work,
but I lean towards the more obscure, less personal – and
more descriptive – poems of Bishop’s first two collections.
Further, while this book offers a number of things that are
new to Bishop studies, it also offers something, albeit implic-
itly, to the study of twentieth-century poetry more generally.
Description is, as I suggested at the beginning of this intro-
duction, a tough sell, and, not surprisingly, very little has
been written on the role of description in the development of
twentieth-century poetry. Even less has been written about
the formal facts of modern descriptive poetry and the ques-
tion of how, exactly, poets go about writing it. This book is
about Elizabeth Bishop, and I have answered none of these
questions any further than is necessary to say what needs to
be said about her poetry; however, there is a great deal here
that could, with some modification, be applied elsewhere.
Certainly, my first and last chapters, which deal with the
more formal aspects of Bishop’s poetry, contain terms and
ideas that could anchor a more wide-ranging poetics of de-
scription. And those chapters – 2, 3, and 5, most particularly
– that read Bishop’s art of description against the work of
other twentieth-century artists could give rise to a more com-
prehensive historical account of the work descriptive poetry
has done throughout the century.
But this book is neither a history nor a poetics of descrip-
tion. It is, rather, an investigation of the role that description
plays in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and so I have tied
myself to her oeuvre in much the way that, in her version of
him, Darwin ties himself to the “facts and minute details” of
the physical world (DL). There is a great deal of work to be
done on the question of poetic description, but it falls under
the heading of ideas, and my interest here is primarily in
Introduction 13
things, by which I mean the poems themselves. I hope, like

Bishop, to reach through those things to ideas, but it is with
the things that I begin, and this affects the sorts of ideas that
I can reach. Inevitably, I will build up a set of theoretical con-
structs as I go, but they will be as “home-made” as Crusoe’s
flute (cp 164), constructed from the raw materials indige-
nous to Bishop’s oeuvre. And so, in my first chapter, I begin
with the rawest materials of all and ask that simplest of ques-
tions: how does Bishop achieve the clarity of description for
which she has become so famous?
1
Imagery
Throughout this book, I use the word “description” in a

number of different senses – some familiar, others less so. I
want to begin, however, with the simplest and most concrete
sense of the word, the sense derived from the rhetorical fig-
ure of descriptio: the attempt to bring things before the
mind’s eye, to make the leap from textual to visual. My goal
in this chapter is not to present an account of how poetry
does so – a question well beyond the scope of a single book-
chapter – but to study the effect that doing so has on a par-
ticular poem, “The Man-Moth.” And so, rather than deliver
a historical account of poetic description or a theoretical ex-
amination of the relationship between word and picture, I
am going to begin with a relatively fine distinction between
imagery that helps bring an object before the reader’s eye and
imagery that serves other purposes. (I am using the words
“image” and “imagery” here in the everyday sense of “figu-
rative language” and as shorthand for the common substitu-
tive tropes in their various forms: metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, simile, personification, allegory, symbolism.)
Reading “The Man-Moth” with this distinction in mind re-
veals a number of interesting things about the poem, but it
also helps to show how Bishop’s famed exactitude and accu-
racy create an unusual imbalance of power between herself,
Imagery 15
her readers, and the objects depicted in her poetry. So while

my starting point is modest, even minute, my conclusions are
both local and far-reaching: this chapter ends with an at-
tempt to schematize Bishop’s poetics, to lay out a map of the
relationship her poetry implies between the world, the poet,
and her audience.
Exactitude and accuracy have long been attributed to
Bishop’s poetry and a quick look through the early reviews of
her first collection, North & South, shows how uniformly her
first critics pick up on her “naturalist’s accuracy of observa-
tion” (Schwartz and Estess 182), her “keen eye for small phys-
ical detail” (184), “the splendor and minuteness of her
descriptions” (186), and her “unusually acute respect for fact”
(190). But the first attempt to examine the source of Bishop’s
accuracy is Nancy McNally’s 1966 essay, “Elizabeth Bishop:
The Discipline of Description.” McNally suggests that “the
most important factor in the precision of Miss Bishop’s de-
scriptive phrases is undoubtedly the remarkable visual clarity
of their images,” which “attempt to represent as closely as pos-
sible the actual appearance, sound, or texture of what is being
described rather than to interpret its significance” (190–1).
McNally’s example is “The bull-frogs are sounding, / slack
strings plucked by heavy thumbs” (191; the quotation is from
“A Cold Spring,” cp 56), which she suggests is “less useful as
an indication of what to think of the bull-frogs than as a device
to recall vividly and exactly what they sound like” (191). The
distinction between imagery that tells the reader what to think
and imagery that helps the reader to see or hear is an interest-
ing one, and McNally has hit on something characteristic of
Bishop’s oeuvre. However, McNally’s argument needs some
qualification. The frog image may be “less useful as an indica-
tion of what to think of the bull-frogs,” but surely a reader
could draw certain conclusions about these frogs based on the
adjectives “slack” and “heavy” or the simple fact that they are
likened to guitars. Implicitly, McNally is assuming that no one
is interested enough in frogs qua frogs to think in this way. But

the frogs are part of a larger description of a landscape that
balances imagery of stasis and torpor – “trees hesitat[ing]” and
“leaves wait[ing]” – with images of action and lightness –
“deer” that practise “leaping” and “fireflies” that “rise” “ex-
actly like the bubbles in champagne” (cp 55–6). In this con-
text, then, the slack heaviness of the frogsong is not purely
descriptive, or, to put it another way, insofar as it is descriptive,
it plays into a larger thematic description of spring rather than
a smaller empirical description of frogs. And so it seems un-
wise to read that particular image only in terms of “the actual
appearance, sound, or texture of what is being described” and
altogether ignore “its significance.”
This qualification can be extended almost indefinitely,
since what I have just argued about those frogs can and gen-
erally will be argued about any other image. Indeed, a large
part of the critical discourse surrounding Bishop’s work con-
sists of attempts to rescue particular images from McNally-
ian “accuracy.” Much as one might be impressed by Bishop’s
ability to bring a sight before her readers’ eyes, it is hard to
resist the urge to push for a more meaningful interpretation
of any given image. McNally herself argues that the image of
skin hanging “in strips / like ancient wallpaper” in “The
Fish” (cp 42), though “helpful in conveying an accurate no-
tion of the fish’s color to anyone with memories of Victorian
parlors … is even more useful in evoking the associations of
deterioration which usually surround such memories” (192).
The truth is that although McNally’s argument feels right in
an intuitive sense, few critics would be willing to admit that
the poet they study is entirely uninterested in the significance
of objects.
But while McNally may need some revision, her argument is
worth taking up. Certainly some images, whether or not they
may imply other things, are more vividly visual than others (or
auditory or tactile or olfactory or gustatory – I am using sight
Imagery 17
as shorthand for all the senses), and certainly some images are
barely visual at all: an attempt to picture “what we imagine
knowledge to be” is largely beside the point (cp 66). Clearly,
different images function differently in terms of visualizability,
and to think about Bishop’s poetry in these terms can help give
some content to the critical commonplace that Bishop is, as
Bonnie Costello puts it, “a visual poet” (5).
In order to make full use of McNally’s argument, however,
two things are needed. First, it is important to eliminate the
either/or aspect of McNally’s thinking and to settle on a more
fluid way of talking about the visualizability of imagery; sec-
ond, a term less cumbersome than “visualizability” needs to
be found. To eliminate the binary aspect of McNally’s notion
we need only think of images as functioning on more than
one level or existing along a spectrum rather than in one of
two mutually exclusive categories. That way we can address
the fact that any given image will have some descriptive effect
and some impact in terms of significance, while simultane-
ously separating these functions out in order to speak intelli-
gently about each. To find useful terms, we can look to T.S.
Eliot’s 1929 essay on Dante. Eliot writes that Dante’s attempt
“to make us see what he saw” results in a “peculiarity about
his comparisons which is worth noticing” (spr 210). As an
example, Eliot selects a passage from Canto XV of the In-
ferno, in which Dante, “speaking of the crowd in Hell who
peered at him and his guide under a dim light” (spr 210), de-
scribes how they “sharpened their vision (knitted their brows)
at us, / like an old tailor peering at the eye of his needle”
(15.20–1; Eliot’s translation, 210). For Eliot, the “purpose of
this type of simile is solely to make us see more definitely the
scene which Dante has put before us” (210). For contrast, he
quotes Antony and Cleopatra – “she looks like sleep, / As she
would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace”
(5.2.345–7) – and, after dissecting the image in detail,
concludes that where “the simile of Dante is merely to make
you see more clearly how the people looked,” “the figure of
Shakespeare is expansive rather than intensive; its purpose is to
add to what you see” (210). Leaving aside Eliot’s McNallyian
suggestion that Dante’s simile is meant “solely” or “merely” to
make the reader see more clearly, I want to fasten onto Eliot’s
terminological distinction between expansive and intensive im-
agery. Eliot’s terms then serve to back up McNally’s discussion
of Bishop’s characteristic use of figuration: with her character-
istically sharpened vision, Bishop tends more towards intensive
than expansive imagery.
The intensive/expansive distinction presents a means of
talking about Bishop’s imagery in a general way, and, were
someone to tally things up, it seems likely that her intensive
images would outnumber her expansive images considerably.
But that is not to say that expansive imagery plays no role in
Bishop’s poetry at all since some of her most memorable lines
fall squarely on the side of expansion. There are comparisons
that help us see but also add something else, like armoured
Christians that are “hard as nails, / tiny as nails, and glint-
ing” (cp 92) or an armadillo that resembles a “weak mailed
fist / clenched ignorant against the sky” (cp 104); there are
also images that leave the senses behind for a more intangible
feeling, such as when the “waiting room” begins “sliding /
beneath a big black wave” (cp 161); and there are also those
that subordinate sensation to something altogether more ab-
stract, such as the quotation mentioned above from “At the
Fishhouses.” So while images that are predominantly inten-
sive may enjoy a numerical advantage, it would be risky to
argue that they do more work than predominantly expansive
ones or that what matters about Bishop’s poetry is always to
be found in its intensive imagery.
That being said, there is still something noteworthy about
Bishop’s use of intensive imagery: she seems to use it more than
or differently from most poets. Part of what sets her use of in-
tensive imagery apart is that she applies it not only in such
Imagery 19
likely places as her early, highly descriptive landscape poems

(“Florida,” “A Cold Spring,” “Cape Breton”) but also in more
unlikely and unusual places like “The Man-Moth,” a poem in
which intensive imagery plays a strangely fundamental role. It
is one thing for a poet to use guitar imagery to make frogsong
real to her readers – everyone has heard a frog, and everyone
has heard a guitar. When it comes to describing an invented
creature like the Man-Moth, however, to producing what John
Hollander might call “notional” description (4), the intensive
image’s work becomes both harder and more essential.
“The Man-Moth” (cp 14–15) must accomplish a difficult
task, and it must do so quickly: it must establish and illus-
trate an invented landscape in which its invented creature
can do whatever it is he does. Bishop handles this challenge
by adopting a tone of brisk self-assurance:
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
Bishop offers no details that might help a reader to decide

where, and “above” what, “Here” is, waiting until the second
stanza before allowing it to slip out that “Here” is on “the
surface” “above” whatever is “under the edge of one of the
sidewalks.” By spending that first stanza describing “Here”
rather than explaining or locating it, Bishop treats it no differ-
ently than she treats Cape Breton or Florida. But “Here” is
different from Cape Breton or Florida. Her reader can infer a
certain amount from the titles of those two poems; a great deal
of this poem must be built from scratch.
And so she uses intensive imagery as a form of visual
shorthand to erect what Robert Lowell calls the poem’s
“whole new world” (Plimpton 347):
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to

the moon.
What she is describing – the way a person’s shadow falls

when the source of light is directly overhead – is hardly re-
markable, but she goes about the description in a remarkably
careful way. In consecutive lines, she first establishes the
shadow’s size, then its location, and then how it makes the
person look, and each of these facts is founded on a precise
visual image. The shadow is as big as a hat, and, if the moon
is directly overhead and the person is relatively slender (or
the hat relatively big), such would literally be the case. The
shadow lies at the person’s feet like a doll’s circle, and again
this is visually perfect: Bishop is referring to tiny dollhouse
dolls, mounted on round, flat bases in order to stand up
straight. The last image of the inverted pin once again pres-
ents the fundamental visual shape with clarity, but it also
brings the moon back into play since as long as the moon is
casting the shadow, the relation of person, shadow, and
moon will be lined up in the magnetic way that Bishop de-
scribes. The doll, pin, and man-standing-on-hat images rein-
force each other visually in terms of their overall shape – a
round base, supporting a longer, upright structure – and the
doll and pin images further share the visual effect of objects
held stiffly upright. And so, not only does Bishop give her
reader a key to the appearance of the objects before his or
her view, she also establishes the particular spatial relations
between them and their more general visual feeling. She even
specifies a point of view. The emphasis on the smallness of
the shadow, the comparison to a doll, and the final pin image
help to establish the scale on which the poem is to be visual-
ized: we are not to see this person up close, but from some
distance and a slightly elevated viewpoint, like that of a child
looking down into a dollhouse. In a very few lines, Bishop
has set up this imaginary scenario with great precision and
Imagery 21
vividness; everything is arranged and framed such that a

reader could easily sketch it.
What I have just described is merely the way in which inten-
sive imagery does its work, the way that, true to its name, it in-
tensifies a description, bringing it before the reader’s eyes. But,
as I suggested earlier, describing an imaginary landscape is dif-
ferent from describing a realistic one since it is more difficult
to make the reader see a scenario that is neither familiar nor, in
this case, really plausible. The moon is rarely bright enough to
cast so distinct a shadow, especially in an urban setting where
ambient light is common, nor is it ever directly overhead un-
less one lives near the equator. These, however, are relatively
soft objections, and it is no great testament to Bishop’s powers
that she can push them out of a reader’s mind. Later she uses
intensive imagery to familiarize much more outlandish sights.
When the Man-Moth crawls up the buildings with his
“shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him,”
the strength of the simile helps to make believably present (and
moth-like) the sight of someone crawling up a vertical wall –
something of a challenge in the pre-Spider-Man era. But she
goes even further than this, not only making an implausible
world real but also making a misunderstanding of that im-
plausible world just as much so. When she takes us inside the
Man-Moth’s mind and shows him imagining himself able “to
push his small head through that round clean opening / and be
forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light,”
the notion that the moon is not a bright object but an opening
into a brightly lit space suddenly becomes vividly real, as does
the strange appeal of being squeezed like paint into an endless
brightness. Bishop has created a misunderstanding of an un-
real world, a Man-Moth’s-eye view of a universe that is al-
ready foreign to our own, but her persistent use of intensive
imagery makes it all intensely real.
Whether or not these uses of figurative language have ex-
pansive aspects to them – and certainly the inverted pin
magnetically attracted to the moon has immense thematic

relevance to the rest of the poem – they do a considerable
amount of intensive work, making an otherwise bizarre
poem possible. As Flannery O’Connor suggests, “the per-
son writing fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to
concrete detail” because “the greater the story’s strain on
the credulity, the more convincing the properties in it must
be” (97). In this context, intensive imagery functions differ-
ently than it does in a realistically descriptive poem. Where
intensive imagery adds highlights to a poem like “Cape
Breton,” it forms the base of a poem like “The Man-
Moth,” establishing and enabling a space within which
complicated concepts can be developed. To put it this way
is also to highlight a crucial difference between these two
sorts of poems. “Cape Breton” is a description of a real, or
at least realistic, landscape, and topographical poetry is a
legitimate and familiar genre requiring no justification be-
yond the attempt to portray the picturesque. It can, of
course, be read as a paysage moralisé, but it need not be.
“The Man-Moth,” on the other hand, is a description of an
invented thing, which raises the question of why Bishop has
deployed her intensive imagery in order to bring it before
the reader’s eyes. If that imagery enables a space in which
concepts can be developed, the reader might reasonably ex-
pect those concepts to be made manifest, or, to put it an-
other way, the reader might expect to be able to read the
poem allegorically.
In his essay on Dante, Eliot suggests a relationship be-
tween intensive imagery and allegory. After associating
Dante and Shakespeare with their respective figurative pref-
erences, he argues that “as the whole poem of Dante is, if
you like, one vast metaphor, there is hardly any place for
metaphor in the detail of it” (210). Earlier, he comments,
similarly, that Dante “employs very simple language, and
very few metaphors, for allegory and metaphor do not get on
Imagery 23
well together” (210). Implicitly, Eliot is equating metaphor

with expansive imagery and simile (his word is “compari-
son”) with intensive imagery, and while this equation makes
a certain intuitive sense, especially in relation to Bishop, who
shows a preference for both simile and intensive imagery,
there is no real reason why metaphor or simile should align
strictly with one form of imagery or another. Leaving this im-
plication aside, however, his basic point is a good one. Alle-
gory is inherently expansive in that it implies a direct
relationship between an object in the poem and a thing out-
side of the poem, most often an abstraction, and this under-
lying relationship is not based on visual similarity since one
of the terms – the abstraction – has no particular visual exis-
tence. This inherent expansiveness makes the use of expansive
imagery within an allegory superfluous or even confusing. On
the other hand, insofar as allegory seeks to make abstractions
concrete, intensive imagery can be particularly useful, making
the concrete representations of abstract principles even more
concretely visible.
Eliot’s point is hardly more than an aside, and I do not wish
to overstress it. To construe it as a rule would be foolish, and I
am not even certain that it works as a characterization of how
allegories are generally written. But the relationship, however
tenuous, between allegory and intensive imagery is provoca-
tive in terms of Bishop’s early poetry, which is characterized by
what would appear to be a considerable use of both. More to
the point, this particular connection provides a way to begin
to talk about the strange sort of semi-allegory that seems so
prevalent in North & South. A number of poems in Bishop’s
first collection, such as “The Man-Moth,” “The Weed,” and
“The Unbeliever,” look like allegory but do not do the work
that allegory generally does; they present fully realized alter-
nate worlds that seem to have been constructed to allow a par-
ticular, significant narrative to play itself out, but they never
quite indicate their purpose in doing so.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

suggests that, insofar “as a composition is allegorical, it
tends to signal the ambivalence or allusiveness of its
lang[uage] and to prescribe the direction in which a reader
should interpret it” (Preminger 32). In other words, an alle-
gory must both signal its desire to be interpreted on two lev-
els (its “allusiveness”) and indicate on what level, exactly, it
should be interpreted (its “direction”). In practice, however,
allegories vary widely in the extent to which they do so. The
Pilgrim’s Progress is crystal clear on both counts; The Faerie
Queene is slightly more open-ended in terms of direction;
Animal Farm’s allusiveness only comes into focus after the
reader picks up on its direction; and a text like Kafka’s Meta-
morphosis signals its allusiveness but refuses to settle on a
particular direction. On this sliding scale, those of Bishop’s
poems that I am calling semi-allegorical are closest to Kafka:
they signal their allusiveness without prescribing their direc-
tion very clearly. The mere existence of the Man-Moth defa-
miliarizes everything around him, pushing the reader
towards a second level of signification. The reader expects a
Man-Moth to mean something in a way that a fish, say, need
not. “The Fish” can simply be a fish; “The Man-Moth” can-
not simply be a man-moth.
But the Man-Moth does not mean so easily, and readers
and critics have been struggling for decades to pin an identity
on him. Most commonly, critics have suggested that the
Man-Moth “might stand for the poet” (Millier 99), “the
alienated artist” (Travisano, eb 30), or “the artist as addict”
(Lombardi 115); alternately he has been likened to “the
muse, the creative power that flits away” (McCabe, eb 78);
noting the urban setting of the poem, some have suggested
that he embodies “the terrible fear living in the city involves
for the extrasensitive” (Millier 99) or that he is “perhaps a
symbol of the repressed psyche of urban man” (Costello 51);
more vaguely, some have argued that he is “an embodiment
Imagery 25
of difference” (Harrison 59), “the unknown or the uncon-

scious” (Doreski 129), that his activities “symbolize human
anxiety and compulsion” (Travisano, eb 30), and that “the
poem becomes an allegorical commentary on human ambi-
tion and the restraint of ambition by fear, especially fear of
failure” (Parker 40). I, too, add my own interpretation, albeit
a rather abbreviated one, in the next chapter. That critics
have so resolutely agreed in the desire to read the poem alle-
gorically, but differed so much in their particular allegorical
readings of it, suggests that the poem signals its allusiveness
very well indeed, while simultaneously refusing to signal its
direction in the one-to-one way that allegory is generally
thought to do.
Seeing a poem that seems to do half the work of allegory,
critics have tried to supply the other half, but it might be pos-
sible to read the poem non-allegorically, as a purely intensive
exercise meant to make the reader see something without tell-
ing him or her what to think about it. It may, however, be too
much to ask a reader to read the poem on the same level as
Bishop’s other primarily intensive poems and to enjoy its
strange urban landscape in the same spirit as the more famil-
iar rural landscape of “Cape Breton.” A more workable
model is to be found, however, in “The Fish.” Robert Lowell
declared himself “very envious” of that poem, claiming that
all of his “fish become symbols, alas!” (quoted in Goldensohn
166). And if it is true that the success of “The Fish” depends
on Bishop’s ability to keep the fish a fish rather than a symbol,
it may prove useful to extend the interpretive strategies that
critics have brought to bear on this more realistic poem to a
reading of “The Man-Moth.” Generally, “The Fish” is read in
psychological terms as an exercise in perception and descrip-
tion, and, in this way, the locus of meaning is shifted from fish
to fisher. A similar manoeuvre, a shift in focus from the Man-
Moth to the poem’s speaker, results in a reading of “The
Man-Moth” that differs from the more familiar allegorical
interpretations, making it, like “The Fish,” a demonstration

of the process and power of description.
The question to ask, in such a reading, is not so much what
the Man-Moth means as how the speaker is presenting him
and what the implications of that presentation are. This new
focus, in turn, requires a new explanation of the work that the
poem’s intensive imagery is doing. As a tool of description,
rather than allegory, the intensive imagery enables Bishop to
establish the poem’s visual reality not in order to reach some
abstraction outside of the poem but to explore more difficult
aspects of the poem itself. Once she has established the poem’s
initial scenario with the series of figurative descriptions of
“Man,” she can go on to a much more ephemeral discussion
of the moonlight’s effect on his subtler faculties:
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast

properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
This passage describes a sensation that is explicitly indescrib-

able – “neither warm nor cold” and “impossible to record”
– but its intangibility is balanced by the extreme visibility of
what comes before it. Similarly, when, at the poem’s conclu-
sion, the reader is shown how to obtain a tear from the
strange black-eyed monster, Bishop’s imagery asserts that all
is normal and clear:
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye.
Such an image refuses to treat the Man-Moth as an oddity, as

something for which there is no language, as incommensura-
ble with our experience and observations. On one level the
Imagery 27
metaphor suggests an inexpressible void, “an entire night it-

self,” bottomless and deeply foreign, but, on another level,
it renders that void accessible, almost mundane: each of us
tightens the haired horizon of night when we close our lashed
eyelids to go to sleep. The trick to reading this poem non-
allegorically is to resist the temptation to correlate its strange
world to the real world, immersing oneself instead in the ex-
perience of the poem in much the same way one immerses
oneself in the experience of “The Fish.” Bishop is very care-
fully using intensive imagery to render tangible a complicated
reality full of ineffable sensations and strange experiences.
Not surprisingly, this sort of non-allegorical reading corre-
lates well with the presence of intensive imagery since intensive
imagery is as much a part of description as it is of allegory.
There is a strange sort of circularity at work here. One source
of our desire to read “The Man-Moth” allegorically is its de-
scriptive efficacy since, as readers, we do not know what else
to do with a detailed description of an imaginary object. But
the same thing that pushes us towards allegorical interpretation
enables us to escape it since the same technique that makes an
allegorical world concrete can give a non-allegorical poem a
self-sufficiency that renders allegorical interpretation superflu-
ous. The best way to see this effect is to look at a poem that is
similar to “The Man-Moth” in some ways but that does not
use intensive imagery to produce an effective and fully realized
visual scheme, a poem that does not give the reader any option
other than to read it in terms of allegorical meaning.
“The Gentleman of Shalott” presents an unusual figure,
who, like the Man-Moth, looks on first glance as if he is in-
tended to mean something in an allegorical manner. Unlike
“The Man-Moth,” however, “The Gentleman of Shalott”
avoids imagery and figurative language altogether as well as
any sort of realized landscape or narrative embodiment. (Ask
yourself where or in what position the Gentleman is, or what
he looks like, beyond the mere fact of symmetry.) As a result,
the poem remains an intellectual puzzle instead of a visible

scene in the mind – what Randall Jarrell calls a “witty mirror-
image poem” and an example of “the most outlandish inge-
nuity” (“Poet” 498). A reading, then, that turns its back on
allegory in favour of description is left with very little. Ironi-
cally, however, this absence of intensive imagery also makes
for awkward allegory. Because the Gentleman never descends
from abstraction to concreteness, he cannot, as Angus Fletcher
suggests all allegory must do, “get along without interpreta-
tion” (7). The poem, due, among other things, to its lack of
intensive imagery, fails both as description and allegory, re-
maining a puzzle that neither of the interpretive strategies I
have been looking at in this chapter can solve.
At the opposite extreme, even a poem like “The Unbe-
liever” (cp 22), which bears many marks of allegory – its title,
its reference to Bunyan, its unusual situation, and its emblem-
atic talking gull and cloud – can be read non-allegorically
thanks to its descriptive strength. The poem begins with pow-
erfully intensive imagery:
He sleeps on the top of a mast

with his eyes fast closed.
The sails fall away below him
like the sheets of his bed,
leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper’s head.
Though the poem is no clearer than “The Gentleman of Sha-

lott” in terms of meaning, it is considerably clearer visually,
and, as a result, a non-allegorical reading can be surprisingly
effective, with the final nightmare lines striking full on the
reader’s emotions:
“I must not fall.

The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.”
Imagery 29
Whatever the Unbeliever does not believe in – and, again, this

is a topic of some debate – the reader is firmly in possession of
the reality of his fear and the precariousness of his position.
The vivid, visual reality of the poem, the same thing that could
render it effective as allegory, makes it possible to read the
poem in a non-allegorical way as a portrait of a real, terrified
individual who does not so much mean, as it were, but be.
And so Bishop’s use of intensive imagery does more than
simply vivify her poems. It functions as a fundamental part
of her poetics, a building block for poems that are not at first
glance descriptive. However else we may choose to read
“The Man-Moth,” it can be read as an act of description, an
example of the ways in which description, through intensive
imagery among other things, permeates Bishop’s poetry and
characterizes her poetics. But while reading the “The Man-
Moth” descriptively removes the need for allegorical mean-
ing, it also removes some of the openness that an allegorical
reading of the poem can preserve. Insofar as the poem pres-
ents an allegory it presents a very broad one, one that comes
closer to Goethe’s notion of symbolism, with its ideas “end-
lessly effective” though always “out of reach” (17: 904).
Read allegorically, the Man-Moth can be both effective and
out of reach; he can mean many things. Read descriptively,
he means much less and is confined to a narrower field, re-
duced to an object of description. And so description, in this
sense, has an interesting and unexpected tethering effect.
A standard account of what a descriptive poem like “The
Fish” does is based on the notion of defamiliarization. Look-
ing at the fish through the lens of literary description, and es-
pecially through the lens of intensive imagery, causes the
speaker and the reader to see him clearly for the first time
rather than dismiss him familiarly as being just a fish. But
“The Man-Moth” functions in the opposite direction, and the
use of intensive imagery has a familiarizing effect, taking away
the expanse of the unknown that the Man-Moth summons up
and rendering him approachably real. These two different ef-

fects are like the division of labour behind the Lyrical Ballads:
while Coleridge tried to present “persons and characters su-
pernatural” in such a way as to give them “a semblance of
truth,” Wordsworth tried to “give the charm of novelty to
things of every day” (168–9). Like Coleridge and Wordsworth
starting at opposite ends and working towards the middle,
“The Fish” and “The Man-Moth” approach a descriptive me-
dian from opposite directions. Seen in this light, intensive im-
agery has a centripetal force, pulling the objects with which it
is concerned towards a perfect balance of unfamiliar familiar-
ity and creating a moment of perfect mental clarity.
Up until now, I have been dealing with this process in a
sort of vacuum, reading intensive imagery as a poetic tool
that affects genre and, therefore, critical interpretive strate-
gies. I have been treating it as an aspect of a poem that exists
in self-sufficiency, in a world made up only of poems and
critics. But Bishop’s use of intensive imagery has implications
outside of this hermetic poetical world, implications that
reach out in at least two directions: towards the objects a
poem describes and towards the reader reading that descrip-
tion. In what remains of this chapter, I take up each of these
things in turn and, in so doing, examine Bishop’s particular
form of poetic subjectivity and the role that control plays in
its formation. We are familiar enough with talk of Bishop’s
control over herself and her language, but I would like now
to extend that discussion into her control over the world
around her, including her reader.
If intensive imagery brings objects to a perfection of unfa-
miliar familiarity, fixing them firmly in the reader’s mind, then
this fixing effect has some interesting implications in terms of
the poet’s relationship to the objects of description. Both “The
Man-Moth” and “The Fish,” for example, relate to the physi-
cal world through notions of capture. Just as “The Fish”
(cp 42–4) begins with the words “I caught a tremendous fish”
Imagery 31
(my emphasis), the speaker of “The Man-Moth” tells the

reader what to do if he or she should “catch him.” Insofar as
these poems imply a particular relationship between the ob-
serving subject and the object of observation, the self-other re-
lationship at the heart of description, they point to a certain
triumph, a demonstration of the observer’s power. Bishop has
caught the Man-Moth and extracted his tear, and she is teach-
ing the reader how to do the same. The fish, with his “five old
pieces of fish-line,” like “medals with their ribbons,” is, as the
military imagery suggests, a veteran of many such battles. To
have been the one to catch him is a thing worthy of celebra-
tion, and so it is shortly after the speaker’s description of these
medals that “victory fill[s] up / the little rented boat.” If, in
“The Man-Moth,” she describes the indescribable, here she
catches the uncatchable. And, although she foregoes keeping
and eating him on the literal level, this does not prevent her
from serving up his “white flesh / packed in like feathers” to
her readers on the level of imagery.
To put things in terms of triumph and victory seems to
posit a rather adversarial relationship between observer and
observed, a relationship that many critics have found dis-
comfiting. A common reading of “The Fish,” for instance,
involves a form of identification: the speaker’s imaginative
involvement with the fish brings her closer to him, and she
comes to understand and respect him, so that, contrary to the
poem’s explicit language of capture and victory, there exists
an implicit reading wherein, as Bonnie Costello puts it,
“there is no struggle, and the victory is not exclusive” (64).
Such a reading puts a great deal of weight on the fact that the
speaker releases the fish in the end, but one might also read
the poem in less conciliatory terms and suggest that the
speaker has, by the end of the poem, used the fish up in a
way that makes eating him superfluous. Similarly, a reading
of the Man-Moth that emphasizes sympathy or connection
between speaker and object must elide the uncaring act of
holding “a flashlight to his eye” and forcing him to hand

over “his only possession.” The truth lies somewhere in the
middle: on the one hand, both “The Man-Moth” and “The
Fish” use intensive imagery to capture and transmit their re-
spective creatures; on the other hand, both poems are charac-
terized by a certain interest in them.
To say so seems straightforward, but there is a certain
amount at stake here. A considerable amount of the critical
discourse that surrounds Bishop’s work is based on com-
plex and often one-sided accounts of the relationship be-
tween speaker and object inherent in her descriptive poetry.
To a certain extent, this is a product of chronology: book-
length studies of Bishop began to appear with some fre-
quency in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at a time when
what now look like overly essentialist theories of gender
and sexuality were commonly used as a basis for theories of
poetic subjectivity. Susan McCabe, for example, using
Nancy Chodorow’s argument about “the ‘more permeable
ego boundaries’ of feminine identity” as a “fundamental
paradigm informing the assertions in [her] book,” argues
that “Bishop’s apparent objectivity and naturalism really
represent an absorption of the self in the environment and a
dismissal of any sense of a unified self” (eb 3). In a similar
way, Victoria Harrison bases her book-length account of
Bishop’s work on the idea of “the mutuality and multiplic-
ity of subject-subject [rather than subject-object] relation-
ships” (7), and while her concept of subject-subject
relationships is ostensibly based on Jamesian Pragmatism, it
often seems rather to stem from a set of ideas about lesbian
subjectivity. For example, citing Luce Irigaray (46), she
reads “The Map” as a work of covert lesbian erotica, char-
acterizing its account of “intimacy without a phallus” as
“an intimacy of shared and exchanged subject positions”
(45). Regardless of its applicability to the poem in question,
an argument that reduces the grounds of differentiation
Imagery 33
between individuals to the presence or absence of a phallus

does justice to neither the complex grounds of human sub-
jectivity nor the complexity of lesbian relationships and so
forms an unstable base for an account of Bishop’s particular
way of relating to the physical world. At the time of their
publication, both of these studies were part of a trend that
has had a liberating effect on literary criticism; however, it
is necessary at this point to negotiate a more nuanced ac-
count of Bishop’s relationship to the external world, an ac-
count that is based on Bishop’s poetry rather than her
gender or sexual preference. To argue that Bishop’s habit of
fully realizing the objects she describes implies a reduction
of her self to their level (Harrison) or an absorption of her
self into them (McCabe) simply does not agree with the evi-
dence to be found in “The Man-Moth” or “The Fish.” The
fish is a truly excellent fish, and Bishop’s speaker is clearly
impressed with him, but he is nonetheless a fish and a sepa-
rate entity, and to say so implies neither reprehensible ob-
jectification nor reactionary ego-reinforcement.
To do justice to the way that Bishop uses intensive imagery
to create and convey the objects and creatures and people
that populate her poems, it is necessary to strike some middle
ground between the triumphalism implicit in “The Fish” and
the dissolution explicit in Harrison and McCabe. Clearly, de-
scription is something that Bishop and her speakers do well
and do intentionally and do to some other entity. An evident
pride and pleasure in the power of intensive description fills
Bishop’s poetry – not only in poems like “The Fish” and
“The Man-Moth,” that are organized as demonstrations of
her descriptive power, but also in poems that engage in play-
ful displays of it: “The Sandpiper” runs along a “beach” that
“hisses like fat” (cp 131); “Crusoe in England” closes with
the description of the old beat-up umbrella that “folded up,
/ looks like a plucked and skinny fowl” (cp 166); “The End
of March” features the speaker’s
crypto-dream-house, that crooked box

set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?) (cp 179)
Each of these offhand intensive images has an expansive ele-

ment of edibility, as though Bishop’s capturing eye were pre-
paring each item for the reader’s consumption, which, in a
way, it is. Bishop’s relationship to the physical world is con-
sistently and inescapably potent; her eye collects and con-
trols. But, conversely, in those poems that engage particularly
seriously with particular objects, there is a certain effect of el-
evation and respect. Without compromising her own iden-
tity, and precisely by exerting herself over him in the way
that she does, Bishop does that fish a favour by regarding
him, if not as an equal or a subject, as an object worth look-
ing at very carefully.
In this sense, Bishop does not fit comfortably into the post-
modern paradigm of the decentred self, but neither does she
fit the Romantic paradigm of privileged poetic subjectivity.
Indeed, Bishop has come under fire from neo-Romantic crit-
ics like Robert Bly, who memorably, if rather harshly, accuses
her of producing poems in which the reader feels the “facts
of the outer world push out the imagination and occupy the
poem themselves” such that it “becomes heavy and stolid,
like a toad that has eaten ball bearings” (26). Bly’s language
is openly Romantic: the operative opposition is between
“facts” and “imagination,” with the latter being privileged;
a poem should embody an “intuition” through “experiences
private to the poet” (9); and it should communicate mo-
ments of “spiritual intensity” (8) through outbursts of “pas-
sionate spontaneity” (10). In Coleridgean terms, the poem
should express the imagination’s “repetition in the finite
mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am” (167)
rather than rest on the fancy’s manipulation of “fixities and
Imagery 35
definites,” of mere objects, which “(as objects) are essentially

fixed and dead” (167). Such is clearly not Bishop’s way.
Oddly, however, Bly is not talking about one of her more
concrete poems but, rather, “At the Fishhouses,” which, as
Bishop poems go, and especially as early Bishop poems go
(Bly is writing in 1963), is unusually concerned with intu-
itions of spiritual intensity, embodying them in a private ex-
perience and ending with a bout of passionate spontaneity.
But Bly’s choice of poem is telling: even at her most inti-
mately abstract, Bishop still seems cold and objective to him.
To a certain extent, Bly is right. Insofar as it does not speak
openly and passionately of a poetic self that intuits, Bishop’s
early poetry is relatively cold and objective. And, in this sense,
Bishop’s poetic subjectivity reads better in terms of rhetoric
than in terms of self-expression. The central goal of her poetry
is not so much to relate an emotional experience (though it
may) as to trigger one in the reader. To put it in these terms
adds a layer of meaning to the discussion of her use of intensive
imagery in that her intensive poetics is organized around con-
trolling the reader’s imagination directly rather than inspiring it
to vibrate sympathetically in the Romantic style. Intensive im-
agery is an essentially rhetorical process, and, not surprisingly,
Aristotle endorses the process of “bringing-before-the-eyes” in
his Rhetoric (245). But, along with much else that the Neo-
Classical period valued, Romanticism rejected such a rhetorical
approach, choosing to describe the effect of an object (often a
landscape) on the poet’s sensibility rather than the object itself,
effectively cutting the reader off from direct contact with the
physicality of the object described. Bishop reverses this process.
When Bly complains of “the outer world driving in, invading
the poem,” what he objects to is the way that relatively unme-
diated physical presence of the world is displacing the emo-
tional response from the poet to the reader.
To rework Bly’s imagery a bit, it is not the poem that is
toad-like but Bishop who stands in relation to her reader as
Milton’s Satan does to Eve when the angels find him “Squat
like a toad,”
Assaying by his devilish art to reach

The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams. (4.800–3)
(Note, however anachronistically, that Satan operates not on

Eve’s imagination but her fancy.) Like Satan, Bishop uses
rhetoric to control her reader, marching us along in lock-step
to her particular visual account. And once again control is
the central issue: just as intensive imagery allows Bishop to
fix and control the objects of description, so does it allow her
to control the reaction of her reader. To shift metaphors, she
reaches out, octopus-like, in many directions, holding the po-
etic object and the reader of poetry firmly in place, getting ev-
erything just where she wants it. And this, in the end, is where
Elizabeth Bishop is to be found in her poetry – not in the poem,
although she may well appear there, but behind it, controlling
it and us.
Of course, one can go too far with this argument. Bishop’s
poetry is not always so monumentally controlled and control-
ling, and there are more complicated arguments to be made
about some of the later, more biographically open poetry. But
even those poems that enact a loss of control, “One Art” being
the most obvious, can be read in these terms. Bishop merely
shifts her lens onto herself, or, rather, a version of herself, mak-
ing it the object of the poetry. Such a bifurcation can lead to
conflict, which can, in turn, seep into the poem in the form of a
strained command from one Bishop to the other to “(Write
it!)” (cp 178), or, more generally, in the imperative mode of the
poem as a whole. The poem, in this sense, maintains the same
control but allows the strain of doing so to show through.
This reading, however, is admittedly tenuous. Not only
does it extend my argument to its limit but it also exceeds my
Imagery 37
initial goals: there is no intensive imagery in “One Art,” nor

is it exactly descriptive. My purpose in this chapter is merely
to open the discussion of description, to begin the long pro-
cess of looking at what, exactly, it means to be a descriptive
poet and to write descriptive poetry. In the rhetorical sense in
which I have taken the word here, description has surpris-
ingly powerful implications for Bishop’s poetry: it places her
firmly in control of everything – of the objects of her poetry,
of her own language, of her reader. It makes her almost en-
tirely antithetical to the postmodernity that Harrison and
McCabe imply, so much so that it pushes her further and fur-
ther back, beyond Romanticism even, and into the world of
neo-Classical rhetoric. But such an account, like the one it
seeks to supplant, can only begin to do justice to the com-
plexities of Bishop’s poetry. If other critics have pushed
Bishop too far into postmodernism, I have here swung the
pendulum too far in the other direction and will spend the
rest of this book inching it slowly back towards the centre
until my position and the more familiar one have “resolved”
and “dissolved” in what Bishop calls a “dazzling dialectic”
(cp 185). And the first step along this path is to expand the
notion of “object” to include not only the objects that exist
within a poem but also the objective world that surrounds
the poet in her everyday life.
2
Surrealism
In the mid-1960s, while writing what would be the first full-

length study of Bishop’s poetry, Anne Stevenson sent Bishop
a rough outline of the book’s chapters. In it, Stevenson likens
Bishop to “the surrealists and the symbolists too,” propos-
ing that, like “Klee and Ernst,” she uses a great deal of “hal-
lucinatory and dream material” in the belief that “there is
no split personality, but rather a sensitivity that extends
equally into the sub-conscious and the conscious world”
(Stevenson, “Letter”). Bishop begins by agreeing, “Yes, I
agree with you. I think that’s what I was trying to say in the
speech above,” and then moves on to the famous Darwinian
paragraph, which I quoted in my introduction (dl). In this
sometimes cryptic answer, Bishop agrees with Stevenson
about the relationship between the conscious and the uncon-
scious but, without ever really saying so, denies sharing this
belief with the surrealists. The agreement is obvious – “Yes, I
agree” – but the denial is more complicated and much more
interesting. In order to understand Bishop’s rejection of the
surrealist label, two things are necessary: a general sense of
the relationship between surrealism and Bishop’s poetics,
and a careful reading of this one famous paragraph in the
context of the letter from which it is taken – with, that is,
“the speech above.”
Surrealism 39
My larger goal, which extends into the next chapter as well,

is to explore Bishop’s notion of the relationship between the
conscious and unconscious mind, the senses and the imagina-
tion. But first it is crucial to elucidate Bishop’s opposition to
surrealism – an opposition that is too rarely appreciated. In-
deed, despite her founding role in the world of Bishop criti-
cism, Stevenson is not the first writer to compare Bishop to
the surrealists and be rebuffed for it. In 1946, Bishop wrote
her publisher, concerned that a comment of Marianne Moore’s
comparing her to Max Ernst might make it onto the back of
her first book. She admits to having “once admired one of
Ernst’s albums,” “many years ago,” but she insists that
“Miss Moore is mistaken about his ever having been an influ-
ence” and points out that she has “disliked all of his painting
intensely” and is “not a surrealist” (oa 135). Twenty years
later, in her correspondence with Stevenson, she laments ever
having “mentioned [Ernst] at all” since he is “usually a
dreadful painter” (dl).
Bishop’s disdain for Ernst, however, masks a prior interest
in his work: she is on record admitting that “The Monument”
(Stevenson, eb 68) and “The Weed” (oa 478) are based on
his frottages, and she has also confessed to turning out frot-
tages “by the dozen” herself (quoted in Mullen 67). (A frot-
tage is an image produced by rubbing pencil lead over paper
placed on a rough surface like wood or plaster.) Similarly, her
assertion that she is “not a surrealist” seems to clash with the
presence, in some of her early poetry, of what Richard Mullen
calls “the magic, uncanniness and displacement associated
with the works of the surrealists” (63). To some extent, these
contradictions may reflect a simple narrative of maturation: as
a young artist, Bishop toys with surrealism only to reject it,
and, in her maturity, she feels embarrassed about her youthful
enthusiasm. But even this simple narrative raises the question
of what in particular Bishop finds objectionable in surrealism
and why, exactly, she leaves it behind.
In the most general sense, this chapter answers that ques-

tion by showing the extent to which surrealism clashes with
Bishop’s poetics of description. More concretely, by examin-
ing the grounds, complexity, and force of Bishop’s rebuttal of
surrealism, it corrects a persistent critical tendency to view
Bishop as, in Thomas Travisano’s term, a “postsurrealist”
(eb 45) – a tendency made possible by two persistent critical
practices: the habit of speaking loosely about surrealism and
the habit of reading the one famous paragraph of the Darwin
Letter outside the context in which it appears. So common is
this latter tendency that there is not, to the best of my knowl-
edge, a single critical examination of Bishop that seeks to ex-
plore what she is “trying to say in the speech above” and
how it might affect a reading of the rest of the letter. Correct-
ing these two common oversights brings out not only the full
force of Bishop’s rejection of surrealism but also her own no-
tion of the appropriate attitude towards the relationship be-
tween the conscious and the unconscious. The Darwin Letter
is really an attempt to reclaim aesthetic territory – the un-
canny, the unexpected – that the surrealists have effectively
co-opted and that we, as critics, have all too readily allowed
them to dominate.

In 1982, Richard Mullen published “Elizabeth Bishop’s Surre-
alist Inheritance,” the first attempt since Stevenson’s 1966
study to investigate Bishop’s relationship to surrealism. In it,
he takes great pains to point out that surrealism, in any but the
most general sense, implies more than mere strangeness and
that, while Bishop’s poetry may have certain affinities with
surrealism, she actually differs “fundamentally” from them
(64) on the question of “rational control” in the production of
art (67). In order to bring about a “crisis of consciousness”
(67), the surrealists emphasize techniques like collage, frottage,
and automatic writing – techniques that promote “uncontrolled
Surrealism 41
association” (66). Bishop, on the other hand, refuses to “sub-

vert logical control” over the artistic process (64). It is in this
way entirely possible for Bishop, like Ernst, to use “hallucina-
tory and dream material” (Stevenson, “Letter”) and still resent
being compared to the surrealists since, to the surrealist, it is not
enough to use oneiric material in order to write strange poetry –
one must allow the oneiric to write itself. Surrealism, properly
speaking, is not a matter of style or subject matter or tone so
much as a set of methods designed to minimize conscious con-
trol of style and subject matter and tone. Or so the surrealists
claimed. The relationship between the surrealist and the sub-
conscious – or, more precisely, the balance of power between
the surrealist and the subconscious – is much more compli-
cated, and there is a large distance between what the surrealists
propose and what they actually do. But before exploring those
complications, I need to establish some fundamental defini-
tions, to reinforce Mullen’s argument, and to clear up a certain
amount of confusion about what exactly surrealism is.
In his first manifesto, André Breton provides a dictionary-
style definition of surrealism:
surrealism, masculine noun. Pure psychic automatism

through which one attempts to express, be it verbally, be it
in writing, be it in any other manner, the true operation of
thought. Dictation taken from thought, in the absence of
any control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic
or moral preoccupations. (Manifestes 36)
At its core, surrealism is the attempt to remove reason, mo-

rality, and aesthetics from the creative process, to end all
“control exercised by reason” and all “aesthetic or moral
preoccupations.” For one brief moment in 1924, this defini-
tion was relatively clear and comprehensive, but the surreal-
ists, and especially Breton, were prone to self-contradiction,
and a long process of blurring began. In common parlance,
one now hears the word used as little more than a synonym
for “strange.” In the world of literary criticism things are no
better, and those who write about Bishop are often the worst
of all, reworking surrealism until it can be brought into
alignment with Bishop’s aesthetics.
That Bishop was once interested in surrealism is unquestion-
able, but to suggest that her poetics shows a lasting surrealist in-
fluence is questionable indeed. And yet many critics have done
just that, making it increasingly difficult to establish a clear and
usable understanding of Bishop’s relationship to the movement.
The most persistent of these is Ernesto Suárez-Toste, who has
published several articles aligning Bishop with what he calls,
following William Rubin, the “academic-illusionist-oneiric
branch of surrealism” (“Une Machine” 145). He opposes this
school of surrealism to the “automatist-abstract” school rep-
resented by Breton (145) in order to show that there are surre-
alists who do not wish to bypass conscious control and that
Bishop can be productively linked to them. But his argument
relies on several unsound assertions, foremost among which is
the idea that Ernst is a member of this anti-Bretonian school
and that “Bishop is attracted particularly to Ernst’s deviations
from mainstream surrealism” (“Straight” 187). To say that
Bishop is “attracted particularly” to Ernst, whom she calls a
“dreadful painter” (dl), is odd enough, but to characterize
Ernst’s aesthetics as anti-Bretonian is deeply problematic. Re-
ferring specifically to Ernst’s theories about frottage, Suárez-
Toste argues both that Ernst “does not imply that the artist’s
role became insignificant, to the extent that he disappeared
from the creative process, in a radically Bretonian fashion”
and that he stands “against radical Bretonian theories about
automatic writing or painting” (“Straight” 186–7). But Ernst
is explicit about the fact that frottage reduces “the active
part of what has been called up to now ‘the author’ of the
work to the extreme” (Ernst 244), and, as such, he declares
frottage “the true equivalent of what is already known by the
Surrealism 43
name of automatic writing,” (244). Indeed, echoing Breton’s

rejection of “reason” and “all aesthetic or moral preoccupa-
tions,” he claims that frottage excludes “all conscious mental
guidance (of reason, of taste, of morals)” (244). In his writ-
ings on frottage Ernst does everything he can to ally himself
with Breton’s particular form of surrealism, and so it is
hardly surprising that Bishop should turn on him. However,
the desire to see Bishop as a surrealist pushes Suárez-Toste to
misconstrue both Ernst’s aesthetics and Bishop’s relationship
to them.
But Suárez-Toste is not alone in insisting on the surrealists’
relevance to Bishop’s poetry. Lorrie Goldensohn, after devot-
ing considerable space to the surrealist question, concludes
that Bishop’s focus on “the elusive and strange richness in
much of what we blindly label the ordinary and the plainly do-
mestic … invites comparison with the surrealists” (120–1).
Similarly, Thomas Travisano, though he writes with clarity
about Bishop’s discomfort with certain surrealist ideas, con-
cludes that, as “one of the very first writers who could be
called postsurrealists,” Bishop substitutes “one kind of surre-
alist search” for another: “a casual, consciously controlled re-
vision of surrealism based on freshly seeing the unlikely
features of ordinary things” (eb 45). But a focus on “ordinary
things” or “what we blindly label the ordinary” is as foreign
to the stated goals of surrealism as is conscious control. Breton
admits that an artist could “certainly confer an entirely unex-
pected distinction on objects of the most vulgar appearance,”
but to do so is to “confine the magical power of figuration
with which some have been graced to the preservation and
fortification of things that would exist anyway,” which would
be a “sorry use of it [the magical power of figuration]” and an
“inexcusable abdication” (Le Surréalisme et la peinture 4).
When Bishop writes to Stevenson about the “always-more-
successful surrealism of everyday life” (dl), she is making a
joke at surrealism’s expense, one that Travisano takes at face
value. Both he and Goldensohn are guilty of doing in minia-

ture what Suárez-Toste does on a larger scale: redefining surre-
alism too loosely in order to keep the term in play.
More frequently, many critics who only treat surrealism in
passing have casually broadened the term beyond coherence.
Among the many non-surrealist artists that Bishop’s critics
have called surrealists, a reader will find Rimbaud, Baudelaire,
and Proust (Costello 26); Picasso, Chirico, and Pollock
(McCabe, “Stevens” 150); and even, mysteriously, Theodor
Adorno (Lombardi 172). This sort of thing is not pernicious
so much as self-defeating: without a concrete sense of what
surrealism is, any discussion of Bishop’s reaction to it be-
comes impossible. For this reason, I have focused my argu-
ment narrowly on the question of rational control in the
relationship between the conscious and the unconscious – the
question at hand in Breton’s initial definition and the sine
qua non of surrealism. Not surprisingly, considering Bishop’s
greater historical proximity to the movement, this question is
also the question that emerges from a careful reading of the
Darwin Letter. To take, as it were, a negative frottage of the
Darwin Letter is to reveal Breton and his manifestoes. Surre-
alism was many things, but what Bishop most objected to
was its fundamental tenet: the liberation of the unconscious
from conscious control.
It is easy, almost a century after the fact, to forget how
much in earnest the surrealists were about this liberation.
Breton’s blend of Marx and Freud casts the id as the op-
pressed proletariat and the ego as the oppressing bourgeoisie,
and much of the resulting rhetoric deals in revolutionary im-
agery. David Gascoyne, for example, in his Short Survey of
Surrealism (1935), the movement’s first English-language
manifesto, describes “man – l’homme moyen sensuel –
bound hand and foot not only by those economic chains of
whose existence he is becoming ever more and more aware,
but also by chains of second-hand and second-rate ideas” (ix).
Surrealism 45
The chain imagery, of course, is taken from Marx’s famous

rallying cry, and La Révolution surréaliste (the title of a sur-
realist review) was meant to be as serious in its way as La
Révolution russe: automatic writing is not a metaphor or a
way of talking about the poetic process; it is a way to serve
“a nobler cause” (Breton, Manifestes 39).
This type of rhetoric depends heavily on an oppositional
model of mind, on what Gascoyne calls “the flagrant contra-
dictions that exist between dream and waking life, the ‘unreal’
and the ‘real,’ the unconscious and the conscious” (x). And
while the purpose of the revolution is to “reduce and finally to
dispose altogether” of such distinctions (x), a revolution re-
quires something against which to revolt, and revolutionary
rhetoric inevitably relies heavily on the very divisions it seeks
to erase. As Roger Shattuck argues in his introduction to
Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surrealism, “the contradic-
tions” between conscious and unconscious, rational and irra-
tional “have been accepted and exploited” rather than
eliminated, and the “excitement of the surrealist object or
work is its attempt, not to obliterate or climb higher than the
big contradictions, but to stand firmly upon them as the surest
ground” (22). While Breton believes in “the future resolution of
these two states, which seem so contradictory” (Manifestes 24,
my emphasis), the surrealists rely heavily on the éclat pro-
duced by introducing the one into the other – “the magisterial
irruption of the irrational in all the realms of art, of poetry, of
science, in fashion, in the private lives of individuals, in the
public lives of peoples” (Ernst 264).
It is only by ignoring this fact, by confusing the surrealist
utopia with the surrealist method, that Stevenson can describe
Ernst as an artist who believes there to be “no split personal-
ity” (“Letter”). Bishop, however, recognizes the distance be-
tween theory and practice, claiming, in a notebook fragment,
that “Semi-surrealist poetry terrifies me because of the sense of
irresponsibility & [indecipherable] [wild?] danger it gives of
the mind being ‘broken down’ – I want to produce the oppo-

site effect” (quoted in Goldensohn 123–4). To break the mind
down into its components and set them against one another is
terrifying, irresponsible, and dangerous: the opposite of her
own aesthetic goals. But while this notebook entry is clear, the
Darwin Letter is more complicated in the way that it phrases
her rejection of the surrealist position.
Her opening discussion of “the always-more-successful
surrealism of everyday life” (dl) is antithetical to surreal-
ism’s disdain for what Gascoyne calls the “prison” of the
“real world” (ix), but it also suggests that there is no need
for the excesses of surrealism or for its revolutionary rheto-
ric. Without this justification, the surrealist attitude becomes
a perversion, a stubborn and unnecessary aggression that
Bishop will not tolerate. Earlier in the letter, in what appears
to be “the speech above” referred to at the start of the Darwin
paragraph (dl), she praises “Hemingway & Lawrence –
along with others – for living in the real world and knowing
how to do things” (dl). This ability to balance the everyday
with the aesthetic is crucial, and she accuses those who lack
such balance of “cruelty, ugliness, dullness, bad manners –
and general unhappiness” (dl). Her strongest praise in this
respect is reserved for Chekhov, who is “good as well as [a]
good artist,” and who “sacrificed nothing to his art” (dl).
This insistence on the importance of goodness over good art
also comes through in a 1972 letter to Robert Lowell, in
which she tries to convince him not to use excerpts from his
ex-wife’s letters in The Dolphin. Citing Hopkins to the effect
that “a ‘gentleman’ [is] the highest thing ever conceived –
higher than a ‘Christian,’ even, certainly than a poet,” she in-
sists that “art just isn’t worth that much” (oa 562).
But the surrealists sacrificed a great deal to their art and
could be surprisingly ugly and cruel in its pursuit. One of their
first endeavours was Un Cadavre, a pamphlet celebrating
the death of Anatole France. The notion of such a pamphlet is
Surrealism 47
unpleasant enough, but the last lines of it are awful: “A man

leaves few things behind: but it is revolting even to think of
this one that he ever was. There have been days when I dreamt
of an eraser to rub out human filth” (quoted in Nadeau 15).
Later, as the movement begins to falter, Breton writes that the
“simplest act of surrealism consists in going out into the street
with guns drawn and firing randomly and as often as possible
into the crowd” (Manifestes 74). A revolution requires excess,
and the surrealists, who explicitly rejected “all aesthetic or
moral preoccupations” (Manifestes 36), wanted neither to be
“good [nor] good artist[s]” (dl). But by calling into question
the necessity of such means to achieve the surrealist ends,
Bishop not only criticizes the worst of the surrealists’ moral
cruelty but also questions the need for many of their milder
aesthetic methods.
But not only does Bishop take issue with surrealist means,
she also qualifies and adjusts surrealist ends. By broadening
the definition of what it is one seeks to “whatever it is one
can never really see full-face but that seems enormously im-
portant” (dl), she moves the discussion beyond the surreal-
ist emphasis on specific areas of repression. Surrealism is
rigorously concrete in its goals: dreams are suppressed, so
one writes down “phrases [ … that] become perceptible as
sleep approaches” (Breton, Manifestes 29); the unconscious
is repressed so one goes into a “hypnotic sleep” (quoted in
Gascoyne 49); the irrational is oppressed so one imitates
“the most paradoxical, the most eccentric verbal manifesta-
tions” (Breton and Éluard, L’Immaculée 25). There is some-
thing surprisingly logical and straightforward about
surrealism: the irrational, the oneiric, the unconscious are all
right there – it is only a matter of “tuning in to them [les
capter]” like radio-waves (Breton, Manifestes 20). Crucial to
the surrealist program is the idea that, though one usually
sees such things out of the corner of one’s eye, one can turn
to face them. But for Bishop, this is not the case: what she
seeks is something broader and more elusive, something that

“can never really [be seen] full-face.” By leaving behind the
specificity of surrealist thought, Bishop moves beyond the
narrow surrealist agenda to what T.S. Eliot, in a similar
phrase, calls the “fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which
we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye
and can never completely focus” (spr 145). By limiting and
defining what it is they seek, the surrealists assert a certain
power over it: once it is identified, it becomes somehow
available to them. By refusing to define what it is she seeks,
and refusing, therefore, to promote a specific set of methods
for finding it, Bishop makes the surrealists look both simplis-
tic and overconfident.
And so, without ever saying so, and while seeming to agree
with Stevenson, Bishop dismantles surrealism and rejects it as
limited, misguided, unnecessary, and immoral. Stevenson, to
her credit, gets the hint and her book says only that “Bishop
came to Paris when Surrealism was popular among artists,
and it is certain that it influenced her a great deal … Yet
there was something too practical and common-sensical in
her make-up … which prevented her from surrendering
wholly to dreams” (eb 60). But this account does justice to
neither the complexity nor the force of Bishop’s rejection of
surrealism. In a few lines, Bishop manages to recast surreal-
ism as a movement that strives to liberate something that is
not even enslaved and which, in any case, is merely one as-
pect of a much larger, more beautiful realm. She makes the
surrealists look both rigid and extreme. She makes of them,
in a way, her inverse: a poet of craft and care, humility and
caution, she casts them as clumsy and careless, arrogant and
intemperate. The strength of this rejection speaks of a funda-
mental objection to surrealism, and, reading backwards with
this objection in mind, her early “surrealist” poems begin to
look less like imitations of surrealism or refractions of surre-
alist methods and more like attempts to reclaim territory the
Surrealism 49
surrealists have conquered, to redeem the oneiric and the un-

canny from their taint. Such a reading suggests that poems
like “The Man-Moth,” “The Monument,” and “The Gen-
tleman of Shalott” do much more than simply record the ar-
tefacts of an unconscious that waits patiently, ripe and open
for the artist. Rather, these poems suggest that the artist
must take what little the unconscious happens to offer up,
examine it carefully and gratefully, and make conscientious
use of it.
“The Man-Moth” (cp 14–15) claims to be based on a
newspaper typo (a surrealist starting point if ever there was
one), but the poem does more than merely revel in the acci-
dental. Instead, as I have argued above, it constructs a con-
crete landscape through a series of incredibly precise visual
images and tries, through a carefully constructed narrative, to
understand what a Man-Moth might be. Rather than abandon
him to his strangeness, Bishop takes pains to “catch him” and
“hold up a flashlight to his eye” in order to extract his “one
tear, his only possession.” For Bishop, it is crucial to search
and interrogate the strange because, if one is “not paying at-
tention,” it will “swallow” its secrets. If one “watch[es]” it,
however, if one brings the conscious mind to bear on uncon-
scious materials, the uncanny will reveal something of value,
will “hand it over.” From a surrealist starting point – a typo –
Bishop develops a lesson about the unconscious, about what
“you” should do when it pays its “rare, although occasional,
visits to the surface.”
“The Monument” (cp 23–5), whether it is based on a par-
ticular frottage of Ernst’s (Costello 121) or merely on the
idea of frottage (Page 202), puts a similar emphasis on scru-
tiny and examination, and the need to pull something from
the unconscious’s gifts. Ernst’s intention in frottage may have
been to erase his own authority, to reduce, as Bishop puts it,
the “artist-prince” to “bones” and bury them “inside” the
art-work, but for Bishop this denial of artistic agency cannot
render the monument a mere random thing, robbed of mean-

ing or purpose:
The monument’s an object, yet those decorations

carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all,
give it away as having life, and wishing;
wanting to be a monument, to cherish something.
For Ernst, to generate an image through frottage is an end in

itself, but for Bishop it is only “the beginning of a painting / a
piece of sculpture, or poem.” To abandon it to its strange ob-
jectness, as her complaining interlocutor would have them do,
is a dereliction. Instead, as with the Man-Moth, Bishop en-
joins the other speaker to “Watch it closely,” to allow it to be
a monument instead of a mere thing. Just as “The Man-
Moth” moves from typo to lesson, “The Monument” moves
from frottage to dialogue, from a deliberately meaningless art
object to a discussion of the importance of meaning in art.
If “The Monument” may be inspired by Ernst’s frottage,
“The Gentleman of Shallot” (cp 9–10) may be inspired by an
image Breton describes as coming to him before sleep: “a man
cut in two by a window” (Manifestes 31). But Bishop adopts a
journalistic tone – “He wishes to be quoted as saying at pres-
ent” – takes the image up and carefully works it through, ex-
amining it consciously rather than transcribing it faithfully.
And, consciously examined, the Gentleman becomes an image
of Breton himself: just as the Gentleman convinces himself
that he is only half a man and resolutely contents himself with
this “exhilarating” fact, Breton fixes his eye on only half of
the mind, the unconscious, and creates a rhetoric that makes
a virtue of this self-deception. Such a division, however, is
not only false but dangerous since “if half his head’s reflected,
/ thought, he thinks, might be affected.” Bishop’s point is that
half is not enough: it takes more than the unconscious to make
art; there really is no split.
Surrealism 51
In these early poems, Bishop does use a series of surrealist

starting points and does take up some surrealist productions,
but she carefully and resolutely turns them against surreal-
ism. All of these poems suggest that one cannot just abandon
these gifts to their own devices, these typos and dreams and
random rubbings. Rather, one must take them up and exam-
ine them in order to extract from them something useful in
life or in art. In an earlier letter to Stevenson, Bishop claims
to “use dream material whenever [she is] lucky enough to
have any” (20 March 1963), and this brief phrase suggests
two crucial differences between her practice and that of the
surrealists. By pointing to the role of luck, she denies the idea
that the unconscious is simply there, available to the poet; by
phrasing her comments in terms of use, she implies that to
cut dreams off from life and abandon them there, isolated
and on display, is no way to treat them. These two ideas are,
obviously, connected: the unconscious is not generous with
its materials, and the poet must, therefore, make full use of
what she is given. In these ways, Bishop is in direct opposi-
tion to surrealism, and the study of Bishop’s aesthetics needs
to reflect this fact by moving beyond the desire to broker a
rapprochement between the two, à la Suárez-Toste; beyond
the desire to cast Bishop as a revisionary inheritor of the sur-
realists, as do Travisano and Goldensohn; and beyond, even,
Stevenson’s idea that Bishop adopts surrealism in her early
poetry only to reject it later. The study of Bishop’s aesthetics
needs instead to focus on the ways that Bishop dislikes and
rejects surrealism from the start as a movement that mishan-
dles materials in which she herself is interested.
But to say that surrealism mishandles these materials raises
the question of what, exactly, Bishop considers the right way
to handle them, and the Darwin Letter goes on to answer this
question as well. Having rejected the surrealist position for
relying on an unnecessarily violent division between the con-
scious and unconscious minds, Bishop goes on to lay out her
own ideas about the relationship between the two, using

Charles Darwin as her model. That Darwin should occur to
her as an ally against surrealism is not surprising in light of a
1935 letter she wrote to Hallie Tompkins. In it, she mentions
having bought “the natural history Plates, by Max
Ernst” and says that her maid “read the introduction to them
by Arp and finally asked me to explain,” which she did by
saying that “Ernst was making fun of Darwin” (quoted in
Millier 89). Arp’s introduction, with its discussion of “the
cyclopean flying moustache without limbs” (Arp 55), is in-
deed confusing, but Bishop’s manner of explanation is re-
vealing. Seeing the title of Ernst’s plates, Histoire naturelle,
and mistaking the probable reference to Buffon’s Histoire na-
turelle, générale et particulière for one to Darwin, she likely
thought of Ernst as mocking Darwin’s project through frot-
tage. Arp’s introduction certainly leads off in such a manner,
seeming to mock the conventions of scientific literature with
its claim that “this introduction contains the pseudointro-
duction the original the variants of the original the pseudo-
original as well as the variants of the pseudooriginal” (55).
(The mention of “variants” may also have pointed her to-
wards Darwin.) She was, then, reading Ernst’s book as what
Zhou Xiaojing calls an “intertextual parody” of Darwin,
based in “subversive humor” (27).
So when she wrote to Stevenson in the 1960s, Darwin
and surrealism were, in Bishop’s mind, long-standing adver-
saries. In 1934, she was not so clearly on Darwin’s side; by
1964, however, she had come around. And so she invokes
him in her rejection of the surrealist ideas about the con-
scious and the unconscious, the rational and irrational: “I
can’t believe we are wholly irrational – and I do admire
Darwin!” (dl). Initially, the mention is only parenthetical,
an aside, a way for Bishop to bolster her case, but, as if
struck by the idea, she scratches out the parentheses and
Surrealism 53
continues to examine the ways that Darwin relates to her

topic. The letter is shown in figure 1.
Her argument here is very carefully nuanced. She begins by
drawing Darwin into the conflict between reason and surre-
alism, but, once she moves on to address him in his own
right, she quickly adjusts her argument. Instead of painting
him as a dry scientist, entirely rational, she uses him to take
back a set of terms and ideas from the surrealists by coupling
notions of the “unconscious” and the “automatic” with an
emphasis on “heroic observations.”
The concept of observation is both crucial to her argument
in this letter and anathema to the surrealist aesthetic. Com-
plaining of “the realist attitude” that has brought about an
“abundance of novels,” Breton writes that “everyone goes at
it with his own little ‘observations’ … And the descriptions!
The sheer pointlessness of them is incomparable” (Mani-
festes 16–17). But Bishop’s definition of observation claims a
greater depth for the term than Breton allows. In her
“speech” about artists who live in and out of the world, she
writes that she is often “thunderstruck by the helplessness,
ignorance, ghastly taste, lack of worldly knowledge, and lack
of observation, of writers who are much more talented than I
am … Lack of observation seems to me one of the cardinal
sins” (dl, the ellipsis is hers). She then redefines observation
as “a living in reality that works both ways” (dl), and it is
this sort of observation that allows one to be “good as well
as [a] good artist,” to both “care for the baby” and acquire
“wisdom and sympathy” (dl). Crucially, the two are not at
odds since it is with one’s “eyes fixed on facts and minute de-
tails” that one gets “a peripheral vision” of the beyond. To
observe the conscious world, for Bishop, is to turn one’s back
on the unconscious – but only so as to allow it to approach
one obliquely. It is in this sense that she can describe observa-
tion as “heroic,” as an important and difficult occupation,
and the importance that she thus places on the hero-observer

drives a further wedge between her and the surrealists.
Where Bishop insists on an activity performed by an agent,
the surrealists prefer to be “deaf receptacles” and “modest
recording devices” (Breton, Manifestes 39). Bishop’s heroic
observation is far from modest, and her emphasis on “sym-
pathy” and “empathy,” on the reader’s ability to “feel” the
“lonely young man,” insists on a place for the thinking, feel-
ing subject in the acquisition of “whatever it is … that seems
so important” (dl).
The distance here between Bishop and the surrealists is tre-
mendous. For the surrealist, emptying oneself of consciousness
summons the unknown; for Bishop, intensification of the con-
sciousness, “a perfectly useless concentration” (dl), allows the
unknown to sneak up on one. These two methods imply oppos-
ing paradoxes regarding the relationship between the conscious
Surrealism 55
and the unconscious spheres. For Bishop, being heroically ac-

tive in the conscious sphere creates a state of passive receptivity
in the unconscious sphere, allowing the unknown to emerge.
For the surrealist, on the other hand, being heroically passive in
the conscious sphere creates a state of activity in the uncon-
scious sphere, forcing the unknown to surface. The surrealist,
while denying agency, in fact asserts it, summoning the un-
known at will. Bishop, while asserting agency, in fact denies it,
waiting for the unknown to come to her. This opposition
is connected to Bishop’s rejection of surrealist attitudes in
“The Man-Moth,” “The Monument,” and “The Gentleman of
Shalott”: there she argues that one must make the most of what
the unconscious gives freely; here she argues that one cannot
force the unconscious to give what it does not want to. Both
imply a deference to and respect for the unconscious that the
surrealists, for all their valorizing of it, do not possess.
The Darwin Letter, beautiful as it is, contains a tightly fo-

cused attack on the surrealist position and a statement of po-
etics that constitutes an almost exact inversion of what
Breton promotes in his manifestoes. Bishop’s poetics are or-
ganized around a process of careful observation and scrutiny
of the real world, which leads to an epiphany given freely by
the unconscious. Like most of Bishop’s ideas, this is both
modest and severe, requiring both humility and hard work. It
is also tremendously hopeful, seeing in the minute work of
everyday life evidence of and potential for something magnif-
icent. And this takes her very far indeed from the dour, angry
world of André Breton. Her deeply unsurrealist optimism ex-
tends so far that even in the dirtiest, most mundane of places
she finds a beauty lying beneath the surface. Even in a
“dirty,” “oil-soaked, oil-permeated” gas-station, her scrutiny
turns to an “embroidered … doily” on the porch and the
“rows of cans” arranged
so that they softly say:

Esso—so—so—so
to high strung automobiles,
and her attention to these minute particulars somehow leads

to the warm truth that even here, even now, “Somebody
loves us all” (cp 127–8).
And so the Darwin Letter shows us how surrealism consti-
tutes, for Bishop, a joyless abuse of the potentially beautiful,
but such is only half of its message. The work of this chapter
has been to show that half, to show what Bishop rejects in the
Darwin Letter; in the next chapter, I shift my context some-
what and draw out the Letter’s more positive side. Before do-
ing so, however, I would like to point out briefly that Bishop’s
position regarding the conscious and unconscious mind is a
first example of the larger intellectual trend I mentioned in my
introduction. She does not deny the familiar binary division
Surrealism 57
between the conscious and unconscious; rather, she puts forth

an unusually subtle notion of their interrelationship. They are
both real, and they are distinct, but the route from one to the
other is more complicated than one (or the surrealists) might
think. This intellectual pattern will become familiar over the
course of this book, as will the counterintuitive role played in
it by scrutiny. Indeed, this same pattern and this same empha-
sis on scrutiny recur, in the next chapter, as I move from surre-
alist abuses to the Darwinian epiphanies that underlie the
intellectual structure of many of Bishop’s most famous poems.
3
Epiphany
Writing in his Autobiography about the joys of beetle-collecting

and, particularly, the pleasure of discovering a new species,
Charles Darwin claims that no “poet ever felt more delighted
at seeing his first poem published than [he] did at seeing, in
Stephens’ Illustrations of British Insects, the magic words, ‘cap-
tured by C. Darwin, Esq’” (21). Here, Darwin compares the
simplest of his accomplishments – the capture of a new beetle –
to the publication of a poem. As the Darwin Letter suggests,
this comparison warrants expansion far beyond such simple
matters. Though Bishop turns to Darwin originally as an ally
against surrealism, she goes on to make of him an aesthetic role
model, painting his “perfectly useless concentration” as what
“one seems to want in art, in experiencing it” and also the
“thing that is necessary for its creation” (dl). Implicitly,
Bishop redirects Stevenson from one model of mind to another,
suggesting that it is Darwin who shares her ideas about the lack
of a “split” between the conscious and unconscious mind, not
the surrealists. Up to now I have been reading this as a negative
move, as a rejection of surrealism; now I will read it as a posi-
tive one, an embrace of Darwin – and, more particularly, as a
treatise on the role of epiphany in both poetry and science.
In order to make sense of Bishop’s Darwinism, her com-
ments need to be examined in two related contexts: first, the
Epiphany 59
general appeal to science and the figure of the scientist in

high-modernist statements of poetics and, second, the meth-
ods and intellectual models of Victorian natural history as
Darwin actually practised it. Bishop’s immediate poetic pre-
cursors – Pound, Eliot, Moore, Williams – often use the sci-
entist as a figure for the poet, but Bishop’s use of Darwin is
different. Darwin is not the sort of scientist that Eliot or Pound
has in mind, nor the sort of scientist that we know today, and
to recover the intellectual methods underlying Darwin’s work
is to discover the structure underlying many of Bishop’s most
characteristic poems, particularly “In the Waiting Room” – a
poem that not only embodies Bishop’s Darwinian approach
but actually rewrites large portions of the Darwin Letter in po-
etic form.
Though Thomas Travisano has called Bishop a “postsurre-
alist” (eb 45), her use of a figure from the previous century as
her aesthetic champion suggests that she would prefer to be a
sort of presurrealist. There is a tone of dismay, a distaste for
modernity, in the Darwin Letter: she complains of the “ghastly
taste,” “ugliness,” and “bad manners” of other writers, and
claims that, of her own poems, most of the ones she “can still
abide were written before [she] met Robert Lowell” in 1947
(dl). There is something nostalgic about this attitude, a hear-
kening back to a more genteel age, as though the surrealists
were merely part of a larger problem with modern letters and
modern times. Her Darwin is, in this sense, opposed not only
to surrealism but also to modernity, and particularly to cer-
tain aspects of high modernism and its heirs. Her choice of
Darwin instead of a more contemporary scientific figure is
revealing in that it allows her to sidestep a number of con-
ventional twentieth-century ideas about science.
Insofar as modernism sought an aesthetics of clarity and pre-
cision, of stripped-down objectivity, the scientist made an at-
tractive emblem. In an interview with Donald Hall, Marianne
Moore argues that poet and scientist “work analogously”:
“Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one

of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each
must narrow the choice, must strive for precision” (Plimpton
86). To characterize the poet as one who is objective (“hard on
himself”), who eliminates clutter (“narrow[s] the choice”), and
who “strive[s] for precision” reveals the sort of modernist pre-
occupations that Pound betrays when he recommends “the
way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising
agent for a new soap” (le 6), and labels his ideogrammatic
method “the method of science” (abc 26). Most fa-
mously, T.S. Eliot unites tenor and vehicle when, in order to
show that only through “depersonalization” can art “be said
to approach the condition of science,” he likens the mind of the
poet to “a bit of finely filiated platinum” (spr 40). Eliot takes it
as given that art should approach the condition of science, and
his argument about the relationship between tradition and the
individual talent is implicitly based on familiar ideas about
how scientific work is done. In Pound’s words, “there are
simple procedures, and there are known discoveries, clearly
marked … [and] in each age one or two men of genius find
something and express it” (le 19). One builds on the work of
one’s predecessors, thus contributing, anonymously, to a larger
project in much the way a scientist is supposed to do.
But, as Charles Altieri points out, the modernists are not en-
tirely comfortable with some of the implications of the scientific
metaphor. No matter how “liberating science’s version of im-
personal dehumanization might prove,” the modernists always
revert to “some aspects of the romantic values they were os-
tensively denying, as in Eliot’s claim that only those who knew
what it meant to suffer from personality would appreciate
the impersonality he was calling for” (78). Hence, Williams,
in one of his more Romantic moods, can call “Shame on our
poets” for having “caught the prevalent fever” and being
“impressed / by the ‘laboratory’” (cp 2.263). Hence, too,
Pound’s recursion to “men of genius.” This reluctance to
Epiphany 61
commit fully to impersonality is not an obstacle for every-

one, however, and across the Channel, Breton picks up some
of Eliot’s terms – talent, platinum – in his own argument
about the extinction of personality, telling his reader that
one might as well speak “of this platinum ruler’s talent”
(Manifestes 39) as the artist’s. Whether or not Breton is con-
sciously invoking Eliot as an authority, the two of them fit
into a useful narrative of literary depersonalization: modern-
ism publicly endorses a scientific, depersonalized notion of
poetry-as-project, while secretly harbouring certain misgiv-
ings; feeling none of modernism’s doubts, surrealism picks
up on the scientific language and declares that its recherches
will eliminate personality in favour of the unconscious; and,
finally, some postmodern poets have celebrated the eradica-
tion of personality for its own sake. Christian Bök, for instance,
Canada’s postmodern enfant terrible, writes enthusiastically of
a book made up of random phrases generated by a computer
program, declaring it “not so much a book of surreal po-
ems” as “an obit for classic poets” that “confounds the
very idea of authorship, refuting the privileged uniqueness
of poetic genius” by proving that “the involvement of an
author in the production of literature has henceforth be-
come discretionary” (notice, too, his use of the term “sur-
real”). Where both modernists and surrealists believe in
setting the self aside in favour of something greater (the un-
conscious, precision, tradition), it is the setting aside itself
that so pleases Bök.
Bishop, though she belongs chronologically between Breton
and Bök, is closer to the modernists on this front and closer,
particularly, to what Altieri calls “the romantic values they
were ostensively denying” (77). She breaks away from this
progression of impersonality, as her choice of scientist-hero
makes clear. In her next letter to Stevenson, Bishop speaks of
finding a reference to Darwin in William Carlos Williams’s
“Asphodel, that greeny flower,” a reference that is “not in
[her] sense, at all” (23 March 1964), and it is crucial to distin-

guish Bishop’s Darwin from Williams’s. For Williams, as for
many, Darwin “opened our eyes” (cp 2:323) by destroying an-
cient dogmata, and it is Darwin the great clarifier that Williams
invokes. But Bishop is enthusiastic about Darwin in a more
personal way, calling him “such a hardworking young man,
and so good” (oa 257), “one of the people I like best in the
world” (oa 543), and “my favorite hero, almost” (oa 544).
The tone of these comments suggests a connection to Darwin
the man rather than Darwin the emblem of progress. And so,
where certain of her modernist predecessors include scientific
images in their statements of poetics in order to absorb some of
the aura of objectivity and precision that the scientist brings,
Bishop’s use of Darwin is different, both more specific and
more human.
Further, by choosing a scientist who practised a form of sci-
ence that has largely ceased to exist, Bishop leaves behind the
modernist interest in modern, experimentalist science, invok-
ing, instead, Victorian natural history as her model. Darwin
and his colleagues have little in common with the lab-coated
figures that Eliot’s imagery brings to mind, and one must leave
behind certain ideas about the disinterestedness and imperson-
ality of science and its emphasis on precision and specializa-
tion in order to understand what exactly Bishop is invoking
through Darwin. Victorian natural history does not agree well
with our contemporary ideas about science on any number of
levels: it prefers observation in the field to experimentation in
the laboratory; it does “not require any great accuracy in …
measurements” (Darwin, Auto 100); it is practised largely by
un- or half-trained enthusiasts like Darwin himself; and, most
importantly, natural history differs from more modern notions
of science in that it is organized around the principle of accu-
mulation rather than reduction.
This emphasis on accumulation is true on a number of
levels, from the physical work of collecting specimens to the
Epiphany 63
all-encompassing scope of natural history’s inquiry. Even in

his own time, Darwin’s type of science was falling out of
fashion, and on the “most thoroughly marked and under-
lined page” in Bishop’s copy of his Autobiography (Rognoni
246), Darwin’s son Francis points out that his father wrote
and worked in a “non-modern spirit and manner” and that
he was “a Naturalist in the old sense of the word, that is, a
man who works at many branches of science, not merely a
specialist in one” (Auto 106). This model of science was rap-
idly losing ground, and, by the middle of the nineteenth
century, “natural history had fragmented into separate scien-
tific disciplines and broken into subdisciplines” (Farber 33).
Darwin, rather than specializing, chose to publish on a wide
array of natural subjects, including coral reefs, moulds, bar-
nacles, worms, orchids, insectivorous plants, the expression
of emotion, and, of course, the notion of species. In this way,
his version of natural history descends from that of Buffon, a
contemporary of Diderot and d’Alembert, whose thirty-six-
volume Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–1804)
became “the encyclopaedia of the natural world” by present-
ing a “complete natural history of all living beings and min-
erals” (Farber 20, 14). Though they differ in certain critical
ways, Darwin shares Buffon’s conception of natural history
as, quite literally, the history of nature, the study of all physi-
cal things over all of time.
This model of science is obviously very different from the
more specialized one invoked by the modernists and their
heirs, and it implies a very different set of values and work
habits. The precision we now associate with science is based
on ideas of specialization and reduction, and, when the mod-
ernists use science as a model for poetry, they tend to invoke
such ideas. For Moore, the scientist and poet “must narrow
the choice” (Plimpton 86), and it is the impulse towards the
sleek that drives Pound to prefer “the way of the scientists rather
than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap” (le 6).
Moore and Pound are speaking here of different parts of the

creative process, but the impulse is similar. Moore focuses on
perception, on the work to be done before composition, and
compares it to the work of the scientist eliminating possible
hypotheses; Pound is focused on the act of writing itself, the
building up of words on the page, and he uses the idea of sci-
entific prose that eschews ornament and excess. Moore, in
other words, is trimming ideas before sitting down to write;
Pound is holding back words that are desperate to fill his page.
For both, science is precise in that it reduces: less is more.
Darwin works in the opposite direction, by accretion, as
is perhaps inevitable when one’s topic is all of the natural
world. As James Paradis argues in his essay on “Darwin and
Landscape,” the phenomena that natural history seeks to
explain are “hidden from the senses” because they take
place over “magnitudes of space and time that human phys-
iology [is] not equipped to apprehend” (93). As a result, it is
only through the slow accumulation of individual “mo-
ments of perception” that the natural historian can gain ac-
cess to the history of nature (94). No single reported fact is
of use, but through what Bishop calls the “almost uncon-
scious or automatic” process of observation (dl), the body
of data becomes substantial enough for the natural historian
to synthesize and extrapolate. In this sense, natural history is
a science not only of physical collection – the natural-history
museum of today has its origin in the curiosity cabinet of the
sixteenth century – but also of intellectual collection. And the
predisposition to these two sorts of collection are, according
to Darwin, the very things that made him a natural historian.
In his Autobiography he tells how, even as a young boy, his
“taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting,
was well developed” and how the “passion for collecting
which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist” was
“strong” in him (6). Collection plays two roles here: it is
both a particular activity and an underlying habit of mind; it
Epiphany 65
structures both the work the natural historian does and the
way the natural historian thinks.
And the natural historian thinks from collection to synthe-
sis, as the very first page of On the Origin of Species suggests.
Explaining the genesis of the book, Darwin claims that it oc-
curred to him “that something might perhaps be made out on
this question [of species] by patiently accumulating and re-
flecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any
bearing on it” (95). Where the concrete work of natural his-
tory involves a series of “heroic observations” (dl), the even-
tual intellectual work is a process of immense synthesis.
Darwin characterizes his own mind as “a kind of machine for
grinding general laws out of large collections of facts” (Auto
54), and it is crucial to his method that all of the facts – “all
sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing” (Origin
95) – be incorporated. Where experimentalist science begins
with a hypothesis and then moves on to collect relevant data,
natural history begins with the data, relevant or otherwise,
and only gradually comes to a hypothesis. Despite the self-
deprecating tone of Darwin’s machine image, this basic
method of accumulation and synthesis preserves a certain mys-
tery about it that more modern notions of science lack.
Moore’s gradual elimination of hypotheses is a sure and steady
process, with no moment of – for lack of a better word – inspi-
ration. Eliot, by likening the creative process to a chemical re-
action, implies that the creation of art is methodical, even
inevitable, so long as one has the appropriate materials. But in
Darwin’s method there is an unexpected moment given to the
scientist that Bishop characterizes as a sudden shift, a “sinking
or sliding giddily off into the unknown” (dl). As plodding
and mechanical as the process of collection may seem, it builds
towards a moment of vision when, bringing together the col-
lected observations, an internal, abstract world emerges.
As Paradis argues, there is something counterintuitively
Romantic about this process. Though natural history does
not privilege the individual moment of perception in quite

the way that Romanticism does, it does rely on a process of
imaginative synthesis. Darwin’s vision is not “the result of an
immediate act of perception in physical nature” – not an
imaginative reaction to the visual presence of the real world –
but, rather, an “aesthetic response to a mental landscape
founded upon generalization” (Paradis 87). The slow accu-
mulation of observations is like the piecing together of a
mental jigsaw puzzle, or, in an analogy of Paradis’s that is
guaranteed to catch the eye of a Bishop scholar, like the pro-
cess of cartography, which also translates individual mo-
ments of perception into an abstract picture of reality.
Beginning with individual observations, with measurements
taken, cartography moves outward to position “natural enti-
ties in relation to one another and not in relation to the ob-
server” (101). Similarly, natural history depends on the leap
from the concrete seen to the abstract imagined and is “no
less the product of the imagination” than the work of the
Romantic poet (94). Since the goal of natural history is to
move “beyond moments of perception to the continental
scope of land formations and species distribution, to the tem-
poral dimension of the prehistoric past” (94), the natural his-
torian needs to move between “a concrete landscape, full of
distinct, palpable organic forms, and an abstract physical
scheme,” to be “alternately at the center of the whole and at
its distant periphery” (101).
Paradis’s account of the intersection of “the aesthetic ideal-
ism of Romantic art” and the “traditions of the geological and
natural sciences” (85) helps to explain the attraction Bishop
felt for Darwin. The jump from a patient accumulation of de-
tail to an imaginative realization of something larger and more
abstract is both what she describes in her letter to Stevenson
and how a number of her poems work. “The Fish” is the
clearest example of this pattern, moving as it does from careful
and patient description to epiphany without ever quite making
Epiphany 67
explicit what exactly tips the balance, but other poems –

“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” “At
the Fishhouses,” “Questions of Travel,” “The Armadillo” –
betray the same internal structure. All of these poems, how-
ever, were written before the Darwin Letter, and while they
share a structure that the letter describes, they do not come out
of it. “In the Waiting Room” (cp 159–61), however, was fin-
ished no later than August of 1967, when Bishop sent a draft to
Robert Lowell (Millier 444), which dates its completion, if not
its composition, some time after her 1964 letter to Stevenson.
Indeed, the poem takes up an episode that Bishop had already
used in “The Country Mouse,” a prose piece written in 1961,
but it reworks that material to include ideas from, and verbal
echoes of, the Darwin Letter.
In “The Country Mouse,” the waiting-room episode
comes at the very end of a long series of memories from early
childhood, all centred around the experience of being taken
from rural Nova Scotia to Worcester, Massachusetts. The de-
tails of the episode are mostly the same as they are in the
poem, but there are a few key differences: the National Geo-
graphic plays a much smaller role – she looks only at the
cover – and there is no “oh! of pain” to trigger her epiphany
(cp 160). Instead, the feeling comes of itself, and suddenly:
“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 desola-
tion came over me” (cpr 32–3). This “awful sensation” is
“like coasting downhill … only much worse, and it quickly
smashed into a tree” (cpr 33), and the unqualified unpleas-
antness of it is another significant difference between the
story and the poem. “The Country Mouse” recounts a series
of unpleasant and unsettling events, and the waiting room in-
cident brings the unwelcome realization that more are to
come, that “you are going to be you forever” (cpr 33). “In
the Waiting Room,” on the other hand, comprises a discrete
experience and functions as an ontological epiphany rather

than an existential crisis, a visionary shift based on the one
Bishop ascribes to Darwin.
The speaker of the poem “carefully / studie[s]” the con-
tents of the National Geographic (cp 159), and the things
she sees in it – volcanoes, cannibals, “Babies with pointed
heads” (cp 159) – take the place of the accumulated events
of “The Country Mouse.” By replacing the many miseries of
an individual with the collected observations of natural his-
tory – National Geographic is devoted to a popularized form
of natural history – Bishop lays the foundation for a larger
leap. The stakes are raised, the poem is not autobiography
but epiphany, and her hero is no longer a mouse but a figure
based on Darwin. Like “the lonely young” Darwin (dl), the
solitary six-year-old begins by collecting “observations, al-
most unconscious or automatic” (dl), of “arctics and over-
coats, / lamps and magazines” (cp 159). A “forgetful
phrase” (dl), however, “an oh! of pain” (cp 160), sends her
“sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown” (dl), “fall-
ing off / the round, turning world” (cp 160), with the wait-
ing room “sliding / beneath a big black wave” (cp 161). As
Darwin slides with “his eyes fixed on facts and minute de-
tails” (dl), she falls with her “eyes glued to the cover / of the
National Geographic” (cp 160). And just as Darwin’s slip
reveals “the strangeness of his undertaking” (dl), the
speaker knows “that nothing stranger” than this epiphany
“had ever happened” or “could ever happen” (cp 160).
Beyond these resemblances, there are also similarities in in-
tellectual structure between “In the Waiting Room” and
Bishop’s understanding of Darwin. The poem dramatizes an
abrupt recognition of what one is to oneself – “you are an I”
– and an equally abrupt understanding of how one is thought
of by others – “you are an Elizabeth” – and in doing so it
conflates the first, second, and third person. But it moves
even further, into the third-person plural, declaring that “you
Epiphany 69
are one of them” (cp 160), and it is here that the abstraction
of the natural historian truly begins. The speaker glides from
her own point of view to that of those who know her name
and into a fully abstracted, classified view of herself as sim-
ply one of “them.” The effect is of a movie camera pulling
back from a close-up to a long shot and then further to a
view of all humanity in its teeming millions – she has fallen
off the world and can see it whole. In a few moments, the
speaker recognizes herself both subjectively and objectively;
she is, in Paradis’s terms, both “at the center of the whole
and at its distant periphery” (101). And, like Darwin, from
that distance what interests her is the question of species, the
“similarities” that “h[o]ld us all together / or ma[k]e us all
just one” (cp 161). She makes a few half-hearted suggestions
– “boots, hands, the family voice” (cp 161) – but leaves the
question essentially open. It is, after all, the “unknown” into
which she is sliding; Bishop’s interest is not in the Darwin
who solves the question of species, but the Darwin who first
imagines it, who catches “a peripheral vision of whatever it
is one can never really see full-face but that seems enor-
mously important” (dl).
The poem is both more condensed and more expansive
than the prose piece, taking only a single episode but marking
an epiphany of a much larger sort. Where “The Country
Mouse” describes the feeling as “coasting downhill” (cpr 33),
“In the Waiting Room” works on a larger scale, turning the
hill into the entire world. Like a natural historian, the speaker
builds towards a theory of everything from a set of minute ob-
servations, depicting that visionary moment that comes from a
“a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration” on the things
of the world (dl). And this, in the end, is what the Darwin
Letter is about: the relationship between the process of empiri-
cal observation and the gift of vision or epiphany. Crucial to
Bishop’s aesthetic is a unique combination of perseverance and
mystery: perseverance of observation, which leads mysteriously
to epiphany – not unsurprisingly, an echo of the relationship

between conscious and unconscious that also emerges from
the letter.
Bishop’s aesthetics of epiphany is modelled after Darwin’s
science of observation, and to see this is to understand the in-
tellectual structure of many of her poems. However, in an
odd way, her aesthetics also mimics nature itself, as it is pre-
sented in Darwin’s writings. Part of what has made Darwin
so significant is the way he extends the randomness of natu-
ral history into his theory of evolution, “successfully elimi-
nat[ing] teleology from the pool of common metaphysical
ideas” (Carroll 30). Overtly, Darwin derives his theory from
analogy to the practice of animal husbandry: the farmer se-
lects breeding stock; nature selects successful variants. But
this analogy implies purpose in nature as in a farmer, some-
thing notably lacking from Darwin’s final elaboration of evo-
lution. A more appropriate model for natural selection is the
random collection and eventual synthesis of the natural his-
torian, and so, in an odd way, another analogy for Bishop’s
poetics is evolution itself.
Darwin’s topic – the origin of species – is that moment
when, as a product of countless random variations over count-
less generations, a new species can be said to come into being.
A great deal of what Darwin is arguing against is the position
of natural theology, that all species were created at one time
and that species is a fact, not an idea. But Darwin’s work is
about the origin of species (in the abstract singular) as well as
the origin of species (in the concrete plural), and it suggests
that species, the idea, is essentially an enabling fiction, that
“[n]o one definition [of species] has as yet satisfied all natural-
ists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when
he speaks of a species” (122). Species is merely the point at
which enough random empirical fact (variation) has accumu-
lated to give birth to a new abstraction (species). Random
variation is as “perfectly useless” (dl) as the concentration of
Epiphany 71
the natural historian, and yet it still leads to the abstraction of

species just as the natural historian’s “moments of perception”
lead to “an abstract physical scheme” (Paradis 94, 101).
And this process continues up the chain of taxonomical be-
ing such that “the small differences distinguishing varieties of
the same species, steadily tend to increase till they come to
equal the greater differences between species of the same ge-
nus, or even of distinct genera” (Darwin, Origin 175). At the
end of his chapter on natural selection, Darwin likens the nat-
ural world to a tree, the individual twigs of which represent
variations, the larger twigs species, the branches genera, and
so on. The “great branches” that stand for the classes and or-
ders of the natural world “were themselves, once, when the
tree was small, budding twigs” (176). In drawing this analogy,
Darwin goes beyond denying the simultaneous creation of all
species; he calls into question the idea of classification as a
whole. Species, genus, family, order – all become little more
than arbitrary stops on a continuum that begins with random
variation of the smallest kind. In this way the origin of species
(or genus or family or order) is an oddly satisfying metaphor
for what Bishop is trying to say about the conscious and the
unconscious. Variation is to species as observation is to ab-
straction as conscious is to unconscious. There is no split;
rather, there is a continuous spectrum, and there is the mo-
ment when a build-up at one end of the spectrum brings about
a shift at the other end, when accumulated observations trig-
ger, in some mysterious way, a giddy epiphany. To read the
world through Bishop’s letter, the origin of species is in that
moment when nature, its eyes fixed on minute details, sinks or
slides giddily off into the unknown.
Somewhere between Darwin’s modest idea of the beetle-
collector as poet and the more expansive analogy I have just
drawn between the theory of evolution and Bishop’s ideas
about the conscious and the unconscious lies the fundamen-
tal intellectual affinity to which Bishop points in her letter to
Stevenson. Like Darwin, Bishop treasures a working interre-

lation of the conscious and the unconscious minds founded
on a division of intellectual labour. Their work is done, ac-
cording to Bishop, in sequence: the conscious mind begins
with a “perfectly useless concentration” on “facts and min-
ute details,” and the unconscious mind follows behind with
that “sudden relaxation,” the feeling of “sinking or sliding
giddily off into the unknown” (dl). At play in this relation-
ship is also a set of ideas about the relations and relative mer-
its of empirical and abstract mental processes, between the
type of knowledge our conscious sensory faculties accumu-
late and the abstractions our less tangible mental processes
make of them. In the first half of Bishop’s career, the ideas
that come out in the Darwin Letter are phrased more often, if
less confidently, in those terms, and my next chapter goes on
to read through two poems – “The Weed” and “At the Fish-
houses” – with that opposition in mind.
4
Water
When Bishop’s first collection of poetry was published in the

summer of 1946, she was not on hand to celebrate; instead,
she was touring Nova Scotia, visiting family and childhood
friends. Some of what she saw on that trip found its way
into her poetry: the bus ride back to Boston became “The
Moose,” and a few notes, comparing the “dark, icy, clear”
Atlantic to her “idea of knowledge” (quoted in Millier 181),
became the closing lines of “At the Fishhouses,” which, co-
incidentally, was first published when Bishop was back in
Nova Scotia during the summer of 1947. “At the Fish-
houses” describes the ocean as being “like what we imagine
knowledge to be” (cp 66), and by phrasing her idea as a simile
(“like”) of an approximation (“what we imagine”), Bishop
suggests an unusually elusive set of ideas about knowledge.
This odd pairing of water and knowledge, however, has a
precursor in “The Weed” (1937), which likens drops of wa-
ter to individual thoughts. As such, “The Weed” comprises a
first step towards the more fully nuanced position on know-
ing in “At the Fishhouses,” and we cannot fully understand
the later poem without isolating the terms and arguments of
the earlier.
Both poems take up the relationship between empirical and
abstract mental processes, but they do so very differently.
“The Weed” relies on an oppositional allegory, a narrative in

which empiricism struggles to overthrow the tyranny of ab-
straction; “At the Fishhouses,” adopting a number of terms
and ideas from “The Weed,” takes a less partisan approach
to the question in order to show the interdependence of these
two modes of thought. In a sense, then, these two poems re-
play what I have argued in the preceding two chapters. “The
Weed,” much like surrealism, recognizes an imbalance in the
relationship between two mental functions and sets out to re-
verse or recalibrate that imbalance at any cost. “At the Fish-
houses,” like Bishop’s account of Darwin, moves beyond this
agonistic framework towards a working integration of these
two faculties. Taken together, “The Weed” and “At the Fish-
houses” reveal a complicated set of ideas about knowing,
characterized by a profound sense of the difficulties and
hardships it entails. In “The Weed,” neither the empirical nor
the abstract is entirely easy, and the struggle between them
leaves the speaker battered and confused; in “At the Fish-
houses,” Bishop focuses on hardship, suffering, and dogged
perseverance, describing knowledge as something that, if
tasted, “would first taste bitter, / then briny, then surely burn
your tongue” (cp 66). To know, for Bishop, is to suffer, but
to emphasize suffering is not to turn away from its cause.
Quite the opposite: by transforming that hardship into a lyri-
cal epiphany at the conclusion of “At the Fishhouses,”
Bishop gives the strongest testimony for, and example of, the
process she advocates.
That epiphany belongs at the end of this chapter, where I
will be entering more abstract terrain. First, however, in true
Bishop style, I must begin more empirically, by deciphering the
ideas about knowledge presented in “The Weed” (cp 20–1).
The central event of the poem – the arrival of the Weed –
changes the way the speaker talks about thinking: near the be-
ginning of the poem, she describes the “final thought” of “the
cold heart,” and, near its end, she focuses instead on her “own
Water 75
thoughts.” At the most basic level, this is a motion from singu-

lar to plural (“thought” to “thoughts”) and from disinterested
to interested (“the cold heart”’s to “my own”), but this tells us
relatively little. Clearly, “The Weed” presents two distinct
forms of knowledge and a transition between them, but it re-
mains to be seen what exactly these two forms of knowledge
are and whether the transition from one to the other is, as
David Kalstone argues, a “grim release” that “takes the
speaker back … from a prized state of withdrawal” (16), or, as
Zhou Xioajing would have it, a “growth” that has a “positive,
dynamic, and productive effect” (35). While I will argue that
the initial “thought” is a stagnant abstraction, destroyed and
replaced by the onrush of empirical “thoughts,” and that, gen-
erally speaking, this is a change for the better, this is no simple
narrative of liberation, and even within the binary conflict of
“The Weed,” we can see the more equitable account that will
emerge in “At the Fishhouses.”
Like the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet, the first eight lines
of the poem provide a succinct description of the speaker’s
initial state of mental abstraction. The eighth line, which is
end-stopped and one foot shorter than all previous lines, fea-
tures the poem’s only true rhyme (“bower” – “hour”). As
such, it provides a natural boundary, on the other side of
which – beyond the volta, as it were – lies a reversal: the
Weed and all the changes it brings. Before that change, how-
ever, the poem depicts a state of extreme stasis:
I dreamed that dead, and meditating,

I lay upon a grave, or bed,
(at least, some cold and close-built bower).
In the cold heart, its final thought
stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,
stiff and idle as I was there;
and we remained unchanged together
for a year, a minute, an hour.
Generally, one cannot be both dead and meditating, and while

it is tempting to write this oddness off as the result of dream-
logic, the commas surrounding “and meditating” trigger a
slight pause, drawing the reader’s attention back to the contra-
diction. Further emphasizing this paradox, the speaker de-
scribes herself as lying on a “grave, or bed,” and the
uncertainty between “bed” and “grave” – locations appropri-
ate to meditation and death, respectively – together with the in-
ternal rhyme of “dead” and “bed,” suggests a fundamental
confusion between the two states. This confusion as to her state
of mind extends to her physical surroundings: after failing to
distinguish between “grave” and “bed,” she corrects herself
parenthetically, settling tentatively (“at least”) on “some cold
and close-built bower.” The comma after “at least” again slows
both reader and speaker down, giving a puzzled and puzzling
feel to the statement, and both the indefinite “some” and the
oddly archaic “bower” leave the reader with as indistinct a pic-
ture as possible – unusual in a poet as visually acute as Bishop.
Even the prepositions are confusing: she describes herself as ly-
ing “upon” these things, which is strange enough with “grave”
but becomes incomprehensible with “bower.” Finally, confused
as to her state of mind and her surroundings, she does not even
acknowledge her own body, the parts of which she refers to
with the definite article (“the cold heart”) as if they were dis-
tinct from her. The portrait painted here is of complete abstrac-
tion, of a being removed entirely from any contact with
physical existence, and without even a clear sense of her own
mental state.
What occupies the speaker’s attention, instead, is one “fi-
nal thought,” which stands “frozen, drawn immense and
clear.” The description of this thought is double-edged in
that its “finality” can be read either as a triumphant resolu-
tion to some quandary or as a mere stoppage of thought. The
use of “drawn” furthers this complexity since, in this con-
text, it could mean either “sketched” or “stretched.” Is this
Water 77
“final thought … drawn immense and clear” an immense

resolution that has been sketched out clearly in her mind? or
a normal thought artificially stretched to an enormous size?
The two are not mutually exclusive; rather, Bishop is suggest-
ing that even a successful intellectual resolution can bring
about a static finality, that no single thought should occupy
such a place in the mind. However grand the thought may
be, it has become “stiff and idle,” as has the speaker, suggest-
ing that even an intellectual triumph can become stultifying if
artificially preserved.
And Bishop emphasizes the eternal nature of this artificial
stasis metrically, as the speaker and the thought remain “un-
changed together / for a year, a minute, an hour.” As Robert
Dale Parker points out, the jumbled order of these time-units
stops the reader from glossing over them, focusing the atten-
tion on “what it means for time to remain unchanged for-
ever” (5), but this reordering also gives the line a different
metrical effect than would the expected order. In their nor-
mal order, the units run in steady anapests (if “hour” is
scanned bisyllabically) or in a steady rising rhythm (if it is
scanned monosyllabically) :
| fōr ā mí | nūte, ān hó | ūr, ā yéar. |

or
| fōr ā mí | nūte, ān hóur,| ā yéar. |
This hardly gives the feeling of an awful timeless eternity;

rather, coming after a great deal of double metre, the triple
metre trips on almost cheerfully, and the lack of any hard
consonant other than that one unstressed t leaves the reader
slurring smoothly through the line. The expected order of
time units produces rhythm that flows, that moves. Bishop’s
inversion destroys this rhythm:
| fōr ā yéar, | ā mínūte, | ān hóūr. |

(Because of the rhyme with “bower,” I am scanning “hour”

bisyllabically here.) By putting the hard t of “minute” in a
more prominent position, mixing anapest and amphibrach,
and ending on an unstressed syllable, Bishop gives the reader
a line that starts, and stops, and then ends with a whimper.
Like the inversion of ideas, and like the slightly excessive use
of commas earlier in the poem, this makes the reader stop
and think, but it also mimics time stumbling to a halt. Things
seem somehow over, and, as the first trimetric line in a poem
that has otherwise been in tetrameter, the eighth line crum-
bles almost literally into nothingness.
But the introduction of the Weed changes everything:
Suddenly there was a motion,

as startling, there, to every sense
as an explosion.
The pace picks up here in a number of ways. The trochaic first

foot provides a metrical surge, and considering the abundance
of commas in the first section, the lack of one after “Sud-
denly” signals a new tempo, as does the internal rhyme of
“motion” and “explosion.” The fact that the motion is partic-
ularly startling “there” helps to emphasize the contrast be-
tween the established stasis and the newfound activity. In his
review of North & South, Robert Lowell identifies this oppo-
sition between stasis and motion as the “single symbolic pat-
tern” that characterizes “nine-tenths” of the collection (76).
But in Lowell’s account, the principle of motion is “weary but
persisting, almost always failing and on the point of disinte-
grating” (76–7). Lowell specifically mentions the Weed as an
example, and yet its weariness is short-lived. Though at first it
“creep[s]” and “nod[s],” leaves quickly begin to “sho[o]t
out,” “twisting” and “waving,” while the “stem gr[ows]
thick.” After the eternal sameness of the opening lines, the
Weed’s rapid growth – “It grew an inch … next, one leaf …
then / two leaves” – invokes a restless outpouring of energy.
Water 79
With this energy comes a diversification of thought, im-

plied in the Weed’s initial growth:
one leaf shot out of its side

a twisting, waving flag, and then
two leaves moved like a semaphore.
A flag is, of course, a means of communication, but a means

that is extremely limited: a flag means only one thing and rep-
resents only one thought. From here, however, the Weed moves
to semaphore, a means of communicating many thoughts
through the use of many flags. And not only does the motion
from single flag to multiple flags mimic the speaker’s eventual
progression from a “final thought” to her “own thoughts,”
but the leaves that shoot out of the Weed’s “side” anticipate
the streams that will run “off from the sides” of the speaker.
The corollary between the two implies a natural liveliness in
the speaker’s evolution; like the Weed, she is growing, becom-
ing a more complicated and mature creature. In place of the
deathly singularity of the first lines, there is a state of plural, ex-
uberant life; instead of changeless meditation, there is evolution
and growth.
The climax of this growth occurs when the Weed splits the
speaker’s heart open and releases “a flood of water,” of which
A few drops fell upon my face

and in my eyes, so I could see
(or, in that black place, thought I saw)
that each drop contained a light,
a small, illuminated scene;
the Weed-deflected stream was made
itself of racing images.
This is the first overt mention of any act of seeing; although,

obviously, the speaker has been perceiving things all along,
she never quite says how, and even points out that everything
takes place “in the dark.” By ending the line after “I could
see” and then adding a delaying parenthetical remark, Bishop
gives the reader a brief moment in which the verb looks in-
transitive and the expression like that of one given sight by
healing waters: “A few drops fell upon my face / and in my
eyes, so I could see.” The interruption of the Weed brings the
speaker, then, to reclaim the use of her senses, eliminating the
sensory confusion that characterized the poem’s beginning.
At this point, Bishop has established an almost complete
reversal of the opening situation. She contrasts motion and
stasis, life and death, perception and sensory deprivation,
embodiment and disembodiment, change and changeless-
ness. And all of this change highlights the many differences
between the “cold heart[’s]” “final thought” and the water-
drop thoughts: they are many where it is one; they contain
“light” where it exists “in the dark”; they are “half-clear”
where it is entirely “clear”; they “rush” and “rac[e]” where
it “stood”; they are “small” where it is “immense.” Per-
haps the most important difference, however, is that these
water-drops are only partially “thoughts.” Each drop con-
tains “a light,” a “scene,” or an “image,” and the speaker
identifies them only tentatively – in parentheses and with a
question mark – as her “own thoughts.” This sort of think-
ing, mimetic rather than creative, is closer to what we might
call observation than it is to meditation since the human
mind is not shown generating thought but reflecting and
absorbing it:
(As if a river should carry all

the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters, and not floating
on momentary surfaces.)
The sort of thinking and knowledge that Bishop endorses

here is essentially empirical, an involvement in and a record
Water 81
of the events and things of the world, a process that finds its
actual embodiment in Darwin’s “heroic observations” (dl).
And yet Bishop’s play on the English language’s tendency to
conflate light, sight, and thought suggests something more than
simple recording. The scenes are both “illuminated” and “re-
flected”: the speaker, who has observed these scenes passing be-
fore her eyes, has reflected on them, illuminating them. Unlike
the “final thought,” created within a darkened mind, these are
scenes that occur, originally, outside the mind and then, through
the double process of reflection (mimesis) and reflection (con-
sideration) become both illuminated (made clear) and illumi-
nated (enhanced) in memory. Much like Bishop’s other models
of intellection, this one begins in the empirical, and then only
afterwards follows it up with a certain level of abstraction.
Running alongside Bishop’s argument about the relative
merits of empiricism and abstraction, however, is a persistent
interest in motion and stasis, and the way in which an in-
volvement in the world implies an involvement in time’s for-
ward march. A notebook entry from the same period further
connects these issues with water imagery:
The window this evening was covered with hundreds of

long, shining drops of rain, laid on the glass which was
covered with steam on the inside. I tried to look out, but
could not. Instead I realized I could look into the drops,
like so many crystal balls. Each bore traces of a relative or
friend: several weeping faces slid away from mine; water
plants and fish floated within other drops; watery jewels,
leaves and insects magnified, and strangest of all, horrible
enough to make me step quickly away, was one large long
drop containing a lonely, magnificent human eye, wrapped
in its own tear. (Quoted in Kalstone 14)
In many ways this foreshadows “The Weed” – or, indeed, the

“The Man-Moth,” which also ends with a dramatic tear –
but while the similarities are relatively obvious, the differ-

ences are more interesting: where “The Weed” moves consis-
tently from stasis to motion, this notebook fragment has a
more complicated pattern. The speaker begins by describing
the images contained in the raindrops as “traces of a relative
or friend,” and the colon that follows this statement suggests
that a list of relatives and friends will follow. What follows
is, instead, the account of “weeping faces.” To look into
“crystal balls,” as the drops are described, and see one’s
friends and relatives “weeping” is understandably upsetting,
carrying, as it does, implications of hardships to come. And
so the speaker, finding people sad, retreats into easier images:
first the relatively neutral “water plants and fish” and then
the more overtly positive “watery jewels.” In so doing, she
retreats not only from pain but also from motion, from the
narrative drama of the weeping faces to the still image of
“watery jewels.” Even the verbs that describe the contents of
the various drops illustrate this flight from motion: the faces
actively “slid[e],” the plants and fish more stilly “float[],”
and the jewels lack a verb altogether, being merely described
appositionally as “magnified.” In order to escape the upset-
ting presence of human grief, the speaker withdraws into a
static world.
Up to this point, the notebook fragment is like “The
Weed” in reverse, but, as if in response to this retreat, the
“lonely, magnificent human eye, wrapped in its own tear”
appears, spelling out the costs of such an avoidance. The eye
is the speaker’s own, either literally, in that it is reflected in
the water or the window (it is “evening” outside), or symbol-
ically, in that it comes at the end of a retreat from the world.
As such its “lonel[iness]” and its “tear” become a critique of
the speaker’s own reluctance to engage: to be wrapped,
“lonely,” in one’s “own tear” is to separate oneself from the
world at a great cost. The shock of this realization removes
the speaker from her complacency, causing her to break the
Water 83
stillness of the scene and “step quickly away,” reintroducing

motion to the text.
I will return to this emphasis on motion and involvement
with time. Indeed, Bishop’s sometimes stringent ideas about
the dangers of stepping outside of time’s flow (particularly in
terms of narrative) form the basis of this book’s final section.
For the time being, however, I wish only to show how Bishop
acknowledges the appeal of withdrawal, the attraction of a
static meditation on some pleasant thought, rather than an
ongoing engagement with the world. “The Weed” is less
careful to show the appeal of the abstract, and so the slightly
uncomfortable note on which the poem ends – with the
Weed’s threateningly archaic “I grow … but to divide your
heart again” – comes as a bit of a surprise. Who, after all,
would go back to the poem’s initial situation? Read against
the notebook fragment, however, the Weed begins to look
more like a corrective figure than a liberator, and the source
of that final reprimand is more clear. David Kalstone may go
too far when he describes the initial state of “The Weed” as
“prized” (16), but numbness does hold a certain appeal, as
the notebook entry suggests. (This notion, too, will reappear,
in a different context, in the next chapter.)
This aspect of correction also plays well into Bishop’s admis-
sion that “The Weed” “is modelled somewhat” after George
Herbert’s “Love Unknown” (Monteiro 23) since Herbert’s
poem of religious purification helps to frame Bishop’s poem
of mental cleansing. In Herbert’s poem (125–7), the speaker’s
heart is severely ill-treated, “dipt and dy’d, / And washt, and
wrung,” by God, “Who fain would have it new, tender,
quick.” Near the end of the poem, the speaker tries to sleep,
only to find that someone has “stuff’d [his] bed with
thoughts, / I would say thorns,” which serve, as the poem’s
conclusion puts it, to “quicken, what was grown too dull.”
This link between bed, thoughts, plants, and quickening car-
ries through into Bishop’s poem, providing both the basic
scenario and the framework for the intellectual transition she

depicts. Herbert’s context, however, is religious, and the trib-
ulations his speaker endures are steps along the road to salva-
tion. Bishop’s poem, which lacks, as Bonnie Costello points
out, “Herbert’s antagonistic God” to provide “a context of
righteous purpose” (59), substitutes knowledge for salvation.
Mobile knowledge takes the place of lively holiness, and the
Weed itself stands in for the “servant” who puts Herbert’s
speaker’s heart through its changes.
But there is a limit to how far one can take this, to how far
one can apotheosize the role of motion, of quickening, in
Bishop’s ideas about knowledge. While the mind should re-
flect multiple scenes rather than a single thought, “The
Weed” insists that these scenes remain discrete. The Weed re-
leases a stream, but it is a stream made up of drops; thought
flows, but it flows in individual units. I emphasize this out of
a desire to refine Bonnie Costello’s influential argument that
Bishop resists the “quest for mastery over nature’s plurality
and flux” (3). “Plurality” and “flux” are different things,
and in this context, it is necessary to distinguish between the
two. Both are, for Costello, opposed to “a static, hierarchical
view of the world” (5), what she calls, in her discussion of
“The Weed,” the “space of mental finality, of ‘stiff and idle’
thoughts” (57). This much is fair, but to Costello, Bishop
“continually yields to [the] unmastered material” of life (4),
where she is, instead, mastering it in her own way. The mind
as stream “shut[s] in its waters” what passes across its “mo-
mentary surfaces”; it captures and stores material in much
the way that Bishop claims poetic material should be “eaten
out with acid, pulled down from underneath, made to per-
form and always kept in order, in its place” (quoted in Costello
4). When Costello discusses “flux” she invokes an ever-shifting
nature before which Bishop admits defeat, but nature, as
presented in “The Weed,” is “made to perform” by the
thinking subject. In this way “plurality” makes more sense
Water 85
than “flux”: the world moves, granted, but that does not pre-
vent us from capturing its motion in units we can grasp, sepa-
rate, and control, units that we can know. So while Costello is
absolutely right to emphasize motion, she is wrong to paint
Bishop as its victim. Bishop has very concrete notions of just
how one can make use of the moving world.
And yet “The Weed” posits more control over the world
than it does over the self, and so to paint Bishop as entirely
masterful is not quite accurate. This poem has a confusion
and a discomfort that speak of an uneasy relationship to
knowledge. The catalytic Weed is simultaneously part of the
speaker, growing as it does from her heart, and separate from
her, addressing her, in the final line, in the second person. In-
deed, the “final thought” and the Weed, though opponents,
have a great deal in common. Both come from the heart, and
both plant themselves possessively in it: before the Weed’s ar-
rival the final thought “st[ands]” in the “cold heart,” and at
the end of the poem the Weed “st[ands] in the severed
heart.” Bishop prefers a severed heart to a cold one, but she
is not willing to pretend that this severing is either pleasant
or within her control: her speaker is reduced to the role of
spectator as her mental faculties compete for dominance.
Giving the victory to the Weed and privileging its mobile,
more empirical model of mind without ever claiming control
over it, Bishop constructs an unusual model of thought in
which we can master the world by knowing it without being
able to control how we do so.
Such a model, while it works well with Bishop’s general
preference for the empirical, does not express her ongoing in-
terest in the work of knowing. The strange separation be-
tween thinker and thought, between the speaker and the
Weed, presents Bishop with a new kind of stasis: firmly dom-
inated by the Weed, the speaker can do nothing but lie still
and reflect. The allegorical framework within which she
works in this poem leads her to a problematic ending: just as
Herbert’s speaker is left entirely dependent on God’s grace,

so is Bishop’s made a slave to the Weed. But to be subject to a
Weed is far from being subject to God, and where God’s
grace is a comfortable resting place for Herbert, Bishop can-
not know by faith alone. And so, in order to reclaim the act
of knowing, to master her own mental processes, Bishop re-
works parts of “The Weed” in “At the Fishhouses,” again
taking up the question of what kind or kinds of knowledge
are most valuable, most useful, most characteristic of the hu-
man mind, and again using water as a central image.

Not only does “At the Fishhouses” (cp 64–6) explicitly liken
water to “what we imagine knowledge to be,” but it also re-
prises a number of terms from “The Weed,” taking up at its
conclusion much that appeared in the opening of the earlier
poem. Here are the first lines of its final stanza, which de-
scribes the sea:
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal.
The cold and, later, the “ic[iness]” echo the “cold” bower and
the “frozen” thought of “The Weed”’s “cold heart”; the depth
and clarity reprise “The Weed”’s “final thought,” “drawn im-
mense and clear,” (the terms “drawn” and “clear” also occur,
close together, in the last few lines of “At the Fishhouses”);
and the “element bearable to no mortal” suggests the odd semi-
death of “The Weed.” Beyond these basic similarities, the over-
all contrast of light and dark is even more extensive and care-
fully controlled here than in the earlier poem. The first stanza
begins on “a cold evening,” with “the gloaming” making
things “almost invisible” and “dark,” then progresses through
descriptions of the “opaque” silver sea to the “translucen[t]”
silver of the objects on land, and from there to the “iridescent”
Water 87
fish scales and flies – repeating the word twice – and the
“bright sprinkle of grass.” Isolating these adjectives shows
how the speaker’s eye moves up a scale of luminescence in the
poem’s first stanza: “dark,” “opaque,” “translucent,” “irides-
cent,” “bright.” However, she makes an abrupt shift on reach-
ing the ramp that leads into the water. Here the “silver / tree
trunks” give way to the “gray stones,” and grey replaces silver
as the dominant colour in the poem, grey being a duller version
of silver. The stanza that ends the poem is so insistent in its
darkness (the word “dark” occurs four times) that even fire is
said to burn “with a dark gray flame.” Where “The Weed”
moves from darkness to illumination, “At the Fishhouses”
moves from dark to light and then back again.
Indeed, there is a crucial difference in the way that these
two poems manipulate light and dark. Whereas in “The
Weed” the cold, dark, immense deathliness describes a state
of being and knowing to which water and motion are explic-
itly opposed, here all of those things are characteristics of
water. But this is not simply a reversal of water’s valence
since water retains the power of movement; if anything it is
more fluid in “At the Fishhouses” than in “The Weed,” be-
ing both “flowing, and flown,” both moving and getting
away. So while there are extensive similarities between the
initial meditative state of the earlier poem and the water of
the later poem, they do not share the stasis that characterizes
the opening section of “The Weed.”
This reorganization of terms makes it difficult to determine
exactly what sorts of knowledge “At the Fishhouses” describes
or prefers, and critical opinion is dramatically divided on the
topic. Some critics construe the poem as valuing abstract
knowledge over empirical, reading the sea as “a medium of
pure knowing wholly distinct from the compromised, con-
structed world above” (Gilbert 144) or “a representation of ab-
solute knowledge, of knowledge out of time” opposed to “the
half-truths and ‘apparent’ perceptions of ordinary existence”
(Spires 21). In Seamus Heaney’s elegant phrasing “it is a differ-

ent, estranging and fearful element that ultimately fascinates
[the speaker]: the world of meditated meaning, of a knowledge-
need which sets human beings apart from seals and herrings”
(305). These critics see Bishop preferring here just the sort of
knowledge that she rejects in “The Weed,” and even though
none of them mentions the earlier poem, the references to time-
lessness and “meditated meaning” suggest similarities. Such a
position seems to contradict Bishop’s usual emphasis on obser-
vation, and Heaney, for his part, does paint the poem as some-
thing of an anomaly for her, describing it as the “spectacle of a
well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big
leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness, actually tak-
ing the leap” (304). Heaney, however, is unique in addressing
the conflict between this interpretation of the poem and the
ways in which Bishop is generally read.
Poets, of course, write many poems, and, as Bishop herself
insisted, “the poet’s concern is not consistency” (Schwartz
and Estess 281); however, in this case, the discrepancy points
to a real problem. The poem does shift gears in that last
stanza: after two false starts, each beginning “Cold dark
deep and absolutely clear,” the last stanza changes register,
using an immense amount of repetition (“over and over,”
“the same sea, the same,” “above the stones, / icily free above
the stones,” “your wrist would ache immediately, / your
bones would begin to ache,” “your hand would burn,”
“burns with a dark gray flame,” “surely burn your tongue”),
building up conditional clauses (“If you should dip,” “If you
tasted it”), and ending with a level of figuration that seems to
remove the poem from any sort of mundane clarity (“as if
the water were a transmutation of fire,” “It is like what we
imagine knowledge to be”). In a sense, then, the poem does
get bigger and more lyrical in the last stanza, but to infer
from this change in register that the poem now concerns “ab-
solute” or “pure” knowledge, “meditated meaning,” and the
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“knowledge-need that sets human beings apart from seals and

herrings” is not quite accurate. In fact, the sea-knowledge is
described with empirical, sensory terminology, particularly
that of taste and touch, the most basic of the senses: it tastes
“bitter, / then briny,” and makes “your wrist” and “bones”
“ache” and “your hand” and “tongue” “burn” (this last
nicely combines both taste and touch). The adjectives used to
describe it are concrete and mostly monosyllabic: cold, dark,
deep, clear. Far from other-worldly, this knowledge comes
from “the cold hard mouth / of the world.” So while the last
stanza is less concrete than the first, it is a mistake to read it as
entirely Platonic.
However, there is something ambitious about the portrait
of knowledge in the second half of this poem. This knowl-
edge is ours “forever,” and the permanence of that “forever”
leads into the finality of “flowing, and flown.” So while this
is not absolute, abstract knowledge, it is not simply tempo-
rary, empirical knowledge. And yet there are those who
would read it that way: where many critics read the first half
of the poem as empirical and the second half as abstract,
Bonnie Costello reverses this process and reads the first half
as “mythic” (113) and the second half as “anti-Romantic,
antimetaphysical” (116). But Costello bases her argument
about the first half of the poem on a number of highly ques-
tionable readings. She describes the old man as “prophetic,
even God-like” (111) and “symbolic of Fate” (112), and,
while one might have accepted him as a symbol of fate (and,
perhaps, thereby God-like) if Costello had tied his netting to
the Greek Fates – though even this requires a bit of blurring
since the Fates do not weave nets but spin, measure, and cut
thread – she bases her assertion instead on his accepting a
“Lucky Strike,” reading a great deal into the word “Lucky”
and glossing over the fact that he gets the cigarette from the
poem’s speaker (111, 112). Similarly, she asserts that the an-
cient capstan “suggests a crucifix,” an assertion that most
readers, not really knowing what a capstan looks like, might

unwisely accept (111). (A capstan is a primitive sort of
winch, essentially a rotating drum with long poles attached
such that several people can turn it – something like an old
fashioned mill.) She even characterizes Bishop’s description
of the sea as “opaque” as an inversion of “mimetic norms in
preparation for the visionary thrust of the poem” (111), but
the sea is opaque, especially in the evening.
Costello’s reading is flawed in the particulars, but she is right
to point out that the first stanza goes beyond what Heaney
calls the “fastidious notations” of a “securely positioned ob-
server” (302, 304). The sometimes confusing syntax, which
seems to describe the old man as “almost invisible”; odd
phrasings like “apparent translucence”; the repetition of “iri-
descent” and the anaphora that goes with it; even the sugges-
tive silveriness of the scene – all of these things prevent the tone
of the first stanza from settling into the pure empiricism of a
“securely positioned” speaker. So while there is nothing
overtly mythical about the content of the first stanza, there is
something tonally complex about it.
So on one side, there is a set of critics who paint the last
stanza as metaphysical and see it as a repudiation of the
more empirical first stanza; on the other side, Costello takes
the first stanza as metaphysical and sees the second as an em-
pirical repudiation of it. Neither of these interpretations does
full justice to the complexity of the poem at least partially be-
cause they both depend on opposing its two halves: land
against sea, one type of knowledge against another. And
while the poem does divide tidily in two, with the first stanza
concerning the land and the last stanza concerning the sea,
the division is not so absolute: the sea appears in the land-
stanza (“the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly”), just
as the land appears in the sea-stanza (“behind us, / the digni-
fied tall firs begin”). More importantly, there is also the cen-
tral, transitional stanza, which has been unduly neglected in
Water 91
critical assessments of the poem. In order to achieve a more

balanced reading, we need to pay more attention to that
middle stanza and to read the poem in terms of the interac-
tion and interpenetration of land and sea. Further, we need to
bring the specific scenario of that interaction back into play:
the poem is about the land and the sea, but it is also about
how those on land – fishermen – take to and from the sea.
Just as these two models of mind are more interactive than
has generally been seen, the overall direction of the poem is
far from simple. On one level, the poem moves smoothly
from land to sea, and this has tempted critics to see what
Bishop calls “total immersion” as the underlying intellectual
motion of the poem. Even though Heaney and Costello gen-
erally disagree, they both describe the end of the poem with
the same image: Heaney has Bishop “taking the leap” (304),
and Costello points to “a visionary leap” (109). They have
very different ideas about what Bishop is leaping into, but
the one-way motion of the poem is assumed. The poem’s un-
derlying scenario, however, is fishing, a process by which
things are taken out of the sea, and, while the central stanza
comes between land and sea, in that order, and seems, there-
fore, to point seaward, the ramp is described as the place
“where they haul up the boats.” The central stanza is thor-
oughly bi-directional:
Down at the water’s edge, at the place

where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet. (my emphasis)
This is a world in which one moves back and forth between

land and sea, between one form of knowledge and another, a
world in which there is an industry based on doing just that.
The idea of the fishing industry is crucial to an understand-

ing of the poem and the claims it makes about our relation-
ship to knowledge. Costello reads the poem in the same way
she reads “The Weed,” as a turn “away from transcendent
idealism toward the acceptance of change as absolute” (109)
and a depiction of “the futility of human attempts to master
flux” (111). Her argument is based on the notion that the
water-knowledge in the last stanza is a version of that un-
masterable flux. But the terrifying “element bearable to no
mortal” is, in this context, an element that mortals have
stripped of its treasures: the old man has captured and
“scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered
fish.” Even the physical setting reinforces this: the “long
ramp / descending into the water” with “tree trunks” laid
across it is foreshadowed in the first stanza by the “cleated
gangplanks” that “slant up / to storerooms” in the epony-
mous fishhouses, the cleats, like the tree trunks, providing
support for the treacherous climb. From the sea, by industry,
up ramp and gangplank, fish are moved to the storerooms;
from the “element bearable to no mortal,” which is “like
what we imagine knowledge to be,” something is consciously
retrieved and stored. The poem is not only about the
speaker’s approach to the sea and its particular form of
knowledge; it is also about how we take up and use that
knowledge for our own purposes.
In “The Weed” the active principle, though part of the
speaker, is not under her control, and the pain it causes, though
necessary, is not chosen. Here the activity is the result of con-
scious effort, but it still brings with it a great deal of pain and
exhaustion. In the first stanza, which is more concretely about
fishing, the physical tools of the trade are depicted as old and
worn: the old man’s shuttle is “worn and polished,” and his
“black old knife” is “almost worn away”; the buildings are
“old” and “moss[y],” and the capstan is “ancient” and
“cracked” with “bleached handles” and “melancholy stains”
Water 93
where it has “rusted”; even the population is in “decline.” In

the final stanza, in which the speaker’s description of the sea
takes over, the emphasis shifts from the exhaustion of industry
to the pain of exposure. The repetitions – “your wrist would
ache,” “your bones would begin to ache and your hand would
burn,” “burns with a dark gray flame,” “surely burn your
tongue” (my emphasis) – make certain that the reader appreci-
ates the hardships endured by those who work the sea in its
more figurative sense. To draw knowledge “from the cold hard
mouth / of the world” is a wearying thing, but necessary, as the
mention of “rocky breasts” implies, painting knowledge, like
fish, as a form of sustenance.
But this is not quite precise enough: if the water is like
knowledge, then the fish must be something else, something
that exists in knowledge and is removed from it by industry.
Given that the ramp by which one crosses from land to sea is
laid “horizontally” with tree trunks at intervals of “four or
five feet,” it is likely that Bishop means to suggest a parallel
between fishing and poetry. The image of the old man remov-
ing the “principal beauty” from the fish suggests that they rep-
resent either poems themselves or the observations that make
them up. (Bishop has another poem in which the speaker goes
fishing and catches a poem). And so “At the Fishhouses” ap-
plies the ideas about our relationship to knowledge begun in
“The Weed” to the art of poetry or, to be less rigid, to any
number of related activities that involve collecting observa-
tions. In both poems, we master knowledge, portion it off, and
take from it what we need. But where “The Weed” makes the
process both involuntary and random, it is here a conscious
technology, with specific methods and aims.
And so, leaving behind the idea that the two halves of the
poem are opposites that cannot interact, and keeping the fish-
ing scenario and its implications firmly in mind, we can re-
examine the types of knowledge that Bishop is talking about.
The knowledge described in the second half of the poem does
come from the “cold hard mouth / of the world” and is empir-
ical in that sense, but it is more involved than the sort of
knowledge depicted in “The Weed.” It is not a matter of
“thoughts” that reflect and illuminate what passes before
one’s eyes; rather, it is “knowledge” that must be actively
“drawn” and “derived” from the raw data of life. In this way
it makes sense that some of the terms that characterize the ini-
tial state in “The Weed” recur in “At the Fishhouses” since
Bishop is bringing the abstraction she rejected in “The Weed”
back into play. But this slight abstraction does not lead to ab-
solute knowledge or “truth” since, as Bishop points out, “our
knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.” We know, that
is, only what is now happening (“flowing”) and has already
passed away (“flown”). We know in time, not “out of” it
(Spires 21); our knowledge is not absolute or pure; and we do
not, as Heaney suggests, become aware of “the cold sea-light
of [our] own wyrd” (305).
To say that this knowledge has to be derived from the
world requires that it is, in some sense, there in the world
whether it is derived or not, which has a number of implica-
tions for the poem. It explains the slightly mythical touch of
the first stanza: knowledge lies latent in the empirical world
of the senses, and it shows through the most mundane of ob-
servations. Similarly, it is only through the empirical world
that one has access to the more abstracted knowledge in the
final stanza. In this sense, the loving detail with which Bishop
describes the tools of the fishing industry has a double mean-
ing: description, sensory observation, and empirical thought
are the tools of her own industry, the means by which she is
able to get what she gets from knowledge. Far from two op-
posing models of thought, the two halves of the poem repre-
sent two modes that are intricately linked, the first leading
into the second and the second lying latent in the first.
The presence of knowledge in the world, whether we col-
lect it or not, also redefines the role of the thinking subject in
Water 95
its production. In “The Weed,” abstract thought was located

in the speaker’s oddly distantiated “cold heart”; here it is
even further from her, located within a large and alien entity
“bearable to no mortal.” This additional step denies the
thinking subject even an implicit role in the creation of
knowledge, and the verbs that describe its production –
“drawn” and “derived” – are noticeably passive and without
agent. The thinker merely enters into knowledge in order to
retrieve a manageable portion, a fish, which she then stores
in her fishhouse, which, in this reading, becomes her mind in
a general sense – a house as symbol of mind or soul is not un-
usual – or her poetry in a more specific sense. We may collect
knowledge, but we do not produce it, and, in this sense, the
poem rewrites Bishop’s rejection of the surrealist relationship
to the unconscious: just as one must wait to “catch a periph-
eral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face
but that seems enormously important” (dl), so must the
fisher-poet go out into knowledge and collect whatever she
can rather than produce it herself.
This inactivity in the production of knowledge is reinforced
earlier in the poem. As the speaker prepares, figuratively, to en-
ter the sea, she has two moments of hesitation and withdrawal
– the digressions on the seal and the firs. In each instance, the
tone drops from high portent to casual humour as the speaker
makes a pun: the seal is “a believer in total immersion,” so she
sings him “Baptist hymns”; the trees on shore are “tall firs,” so
she makes them “Christmas trees … waiting for Christmas.”
Clever as they are, these two digressions stand tonally between
the speaker and the sea, and they represent a form of behaviour
that is, in this context, an obstacle to real knowing. Both are in-
stances of the speaker imposing abstraction on the world in a
display of her own mental acuity; rather than drawing knowl-
edge from the world, she is imposing meaning on it. The seal,
of course, is not a Baptist; the trees are not Christmas trees
(at least not yet). The fact that both digressions draw upon
religious terminology may present a gentle reprimand to certain

religious habits of mind and, perhaps, a gentle goodbye to
Herbert and the allegorical mode she took from him, but the
critique would be as valid were her terms philosophical or ar-
tistic – this is a critique of ego, not of religion. So while
Bishop is making room for abstraction within her definition
of knowledge, she is not making room for any sort of self-
aggrandizement. One acquires Bishop’s sort of knowledge
through industry and suffering, not by being clever. Again, as at
the end of “The Weed,” Bishop is left in an odd position, want-
ing something more than the merely empirical but unable, in all
honesty, to take credit for its production. She has come some
distance towards intellectual empowerment since “The Weed,”
but she is careful not to take this too far: she will admit that
knowing involves work on the part of the knower but not that
the knower is its source. Trapped somewhere between or be-
yond both the abstract and the empirical, she adopts the pa-
tience and industry of the fisherman as her method.
In “The Weed,” Bishop begins to spell out her ideas about
knowledge, about what it is and what it should be, about how
we acquire and use it. The strange (dare I say surreal?), dream-
like, allegorical mode of the poem gives her a structure within
which to work, and, combining the explicit logic of allegory
and the vaguer logic of the dream, she conceives a space in
which to draw strong distinctions and to set up oppositions.
But “The Weed” leaves the empirical and the abstract locked
in a perpetual battle without showing any clear means of reso-
lution, and Bishop is left with well defined terms but no pro-
gram, no way forward. The more realistic narrative mode of
“At the Fishhouses,” however, provides just such a program.
Taking up the terms defined in the earlier poem, Bishop leaves
behind its strict oppositional logic to create a more tangled ar-
gument, complete with a tentative model of knowledge and a
method for interacting with it. “At the Fishhouses” shows
knowledge to be an extract of existence, a thing made from
Water 97
fact, from the world, which, while more serious, more porten-
tous than fact, is not entirely different from it in kind – a sort
of concentrate. Who or what does the work of concentrating
is not clear, but it is clearly not us. This knowledge is danger-
ous, frightening, and alien but finally manageable at a certain
cost: one can go out into it and return with materials as neces-
sary to the mind as food is to the body. But far from some he-
roic quest, some epic adventure, this entering into knowledge
is really a form of careful scrutiny, a looking slowly and hon-
estly about, painstakingly examining one’s surroundings,
searching everywhere and always for the iridescence with
which everything is, for the right eye, invested.
5
War
Acknowledging Bishop’s complicated deference to the world

around her is the first step towards qualifying my initial, too-
masterful model of her poetics. From the strange way in
which she both honours and devours the Fish, through the
complex interplay of empirical and abstract knowledge in
“At the Fishhouses,” Bishop is engaged repeatedly in the par-
ticular intellectual manoeuvre laid out in the Darwin Letter.
The preceding three chapters show how this manoeuvre
plays out in Bishop’s model of mind, looking particularly at
the relationship between conscious and unconscious, obser-
vation and epiphany, empirical and abstract. In each context,
Bishop maintains that, while there are clear differences, there
is “no split”; her point is that opposites interact, that it is
only by going through the more concrete, descriptive side of
the equation – the conscious mind, observation, empirical
knowledge – that one gets to the other: the “peripheral vision
of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that
seems enormously important” (dl). This pattern is what
makes Bishop a descriptive poet in a far richer sense than is
usually intended by that term – it is what makes her a poet
invested in scrutiny as an intellectual endeavour as well as
description as a literary practice. However, the time has come
to move beyond the questions of intellection that occupy the
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preceding few chapters and to extend in different directions

the basic pattern I have established.
The preceding chapters focus on the relationship between
the mind and the world in quite a large sense: the mind is
sometimes that of a poet, though not necessarily in the act of
writing poetry, but it is more often merely “the mind” in gen-
eral; the world with which it interacts is, similarly, “the
world” in the simplest sense of the physical universe. In this
chapter, the world in question is a narrower, more difficult
thing: the often horrifying reality of human society and its
doings. And rather than interact with the mind in an abstract
sense, this world interacts with poetry in a concrete manner.
The conflict at hand here is the familiar opposition between
politics and aesthetics. However, as in the previous chapters,
any familiar notion of these two forces as antagonists does
not survive careful scrutiny; instead, much as the empirical is
Bishop’s avenue to the abstract, aesthetics are her avenue to
the socio-political world. The context in which I read Bishop
in this chapter, however, is not as politically concrete as has
become common; rather, I read her in terms of a more over-
arching notion of morality, of the desire to do or be good in a
general sense that leaves behind particular historical events
and political ideologies. Much recent criticism reads Bishop
in terms more politically specific than her poetics and, in-
deed, her politics allow. Not surprisingly, such discussion can
leave her looking rather feeble and half-committed. My goal
here is to shift the discussion into a realm in which Bishop
fits much more comfortably and in which her poetry can be
read as a far more significant accomplishment.
Though some of Bishop’s poems, such as “Roosters,” “Bra-
zil, January 1, 1502,” or “The Burglar of Babylon,” invite po-
litical interpretation, the general lack of overt political content
in Bishop’s poetry would seem to bode ill for any attempt to
paint her as someone seriously engaged with the political
world. And yet many critics have argued, following Adrienne
Rich, that Bishop tries “critically and consciously” to “ex-

plore marginality, power and powerlessness” in her poetry
(135). But even after some twenty years of criticism along
these lines, Kim Fortuny, whose recent study of Bishop’s po-
etry pursues a “reciprocal reading of artistic form and social
function,” admits that no “single twentieth-century poet
makes this project so difficult to sustain” (3). Fortuny allows
herself the luxury of choosing her texts from throughout
Bishop’s career, but narrowing the focus to Bishop’s early
years makes a political reading of her poetry even harder. By
her own admission, though she “considered herself a social-
ist” in the 1930s and 1940s, Bishop “disliked ‘social con-
scious’ writing” and was less “interested in social problems
and politics” then than she was towards the end of her career
(Monteiro 22). And yet even those early years have been po-
liticized by recent criticism. James Longenbach reads
Bishop’s juvenilia for evidence that “from the beginning of
her career, Bishop was ‘more interested in social problems’
than, in retrospect, she would allow” (37); Betsy Erkkila ar-
gues that, even though “Bishop never wrote the topical po-
etry we associate with the social-consciousness writing of the
’30s, her work registers the ‘revolutionary’ effects of the time
as a crisis of the subject, of knowledge, of signification, and
of the possibility of meaning itself” (286); and James Gould
Axelrod, following in the path of Camille Roman’s Elizabeth
Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View, maintains that even
“at the height of her apolitical phase” Bishop “did indeed ex-
plore political issues in her poetry” (848).
Each of these studies is forced to argue against the grain,
to move beyond what Bishop herself “would allow,” to ad-
mit that Bishop “never wrote” “topical poetry,” or to look
for politics at the “height of her apolitical phase.” None of
these things is problematic in and of itself, but taken as a
whole this field of inquiry seems to involve a great many ob-
stacles. Such obstacles, however, may simply be a product of
War 101
using contemporary notions of political engagement to dis-

cuss the poetry of another era. Politics, as we now use the
term, is not the context in which Bishop’s contemporaries
read her poetry; rather, for those faced with the reality of a
second World War, questions of right and left lost ground to
larger questions of right and wrong, and it is in this more
general realm that I address Bishop’s work. This moral read-
ing of Bishop’s poetry is based on Randall Jarrell’s review of
her first book, and my intention, in what follows, is to use
Jarrell as a means of retrieving a more chronologically ap-
propriate set of ideas about how poetry could or should in-
teract with the world around it. Such a manoeuvre is,
admittedly, a peculiar sort of historicism. It is not New His-
toricism, in that it does not seek to expose the rhetorical
strategies of historical documents by reading them as literary
texts. Nor is it what we might call Old Historicism, in that it
does not seek to expose references to specific historical
events in literary texts by reading them as historical docu-
ments (quite the opposite, as will become clear). Rather, the
historicism of this chapter is a simple one. Recognizing that
our current critical strategies seem inadequate to this particu-
lar aspect of Bishop’s early work, I look to the critical strate-
gies of one of her most acute contemporaries for more
appropriate terms and parameters.
Though North & South received positive notices from Louise
Bogan, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, and
M.L. Rosenthal, among others, no comment on her poetry has
had the staying power of Jarrell’s enthusiastic endorsement in
Partisan Review (reprinted in Poetry and the Age), which
Bishop later claimed to “hold on to in dark stretches” (oa
284). The article is interesting in and of itself, and I will dis-
cuss it here at some length, but it has also come to occupy a
strange position in the world of Bishop scholarship, largely
through the persistence of one particular phrase – a phrase
that also persists in Jarrell’s work, turning up again in a later
essay on Kipling (Kipling 338). Jarrell writes of Bishop that

“all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it” (499).
Although it is quoted in the first few paragraphs of any num-
ber of books and articles about Bishop, this statement is some-
what cryptic if taken on its own – as it invariably is – and
critics have long reinterpreted it in ways that are rhetorically
useful to them. For some, it characterizes Bishop’s “pursuit of
the exact and the descriptive” (Goldensohn 118), pointing to
the “extraordinary description” that “allow[s Bishop’s] read-
ers to see what she sees” (Estess 705), or “her ability to recon-
struct a sense of place” (Meyer 246); for others, it moves
beyond description and into the realm of psychology, com-
menting on Bishop’s habit of “turning description to the task
of mapping an inner life” (Costello 3); more recently, and less
generously, it has been seen to reflect an insufficiently post-
modern epistemology, implying “an ability to record objec-
tively immediate experience, as if words could transparently
describe the world” (McCabe, eb xii). In almost every in-
stance, however, Jarrell is posited as a first step beyond which
the critic must move, an early explorer whose work, while
valuable, is naïve or out of date.
While some critics have shown a more sensitive understand-
ing of Jarrell’s argument (Harrison 12), even spending some
time looking at the portion of the review that is explicitly
about Bishop (Longenbach 58–9), not one has made a con-
certed effort to look at the review as a whole in order to de-
velop a full account of what exactly Jarrell is saying in it and
in that famous phrase. An attempt to do so shows him arguing
for much more than simple empiricism. In this perceptive re-
view, Jarrell demonstrates a complex understanding of both
Bishop’s poetry and the predicament of postwar poetry more
generally, and, in so doing, he reconciles the moral demands of
the postwar world and the aesthetic demands of art. What he
appreciates in Bishop’s poetry is both her mastery of tone and
detail and the modest moral stance implicit in that mastery.
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Jarrell points to the careful balance that Bishop maintains be-

tween form and fear, the way that her close attention to aes-
thetic matters implies a silent acknowledgment of the
complicated issues that her poetry seems at times to ignore.
For Jarrell, Bishop’s is a poetry that admits its own limitations
and, in so doing, accomplishes something unique.

“The Poet and His Public” ran in the Fall 1946 issue of Parti-
san Review, and, in it, Jarrell examines North & South as part
of an “accidental three-months’ collection” (500), which also
includes books by Josephine Miles, Adam Drinan, Robert
Graves, Denis Devlin, and William Carlos Williams. Jarrell is
most enthusiastic about Williams, Graves, and Bishop and
commends all three for writing poems that “are a lonely tri-
umph of integrity, knowledge, and affection” (500). Bishop, in
particular, receives pride of place at the very end of the review,
and Jarrell describes her poetry as “so good that it takes a geo-
logical event like Paterson to overshadow” it (498). (He is re-
ferring to Book I; “The Poet and His Public” was written
before the rest of Paterson so disappointed him.)
The grounds on which Jarrell judges these poets successful
are essentially those of public appeal. As his title suggests,
Jarrell bemoans the fact that “here and now most people
can’t and don’t read poetry” and that all “the public do[es]
for poets” is “mutter accusingly that it ‘can’t understand
them’” (500). Even though “poetry, like virtue, is its own re-
ward” (500), this reward is not enough, and the situation is
presented as one in need of remedy. Hovering behind Jarrell’s
review is an acute sense of both the evils of the world and the
new rules by which poetry must engage it. He is writing, af-
ter all, in the fall of 1946, and the shadows of the Second
World War and the Holocaust loom large. Not surprisingly,
then, the relationship between the public and the poet is con-
ceived of in terms of the relationship between the poet and
what he calls “the world” – a nebulous term encompassing

the difficulties of the modern predicament in a general way.
To negotiate the proper relationship between “the world and
poetry” (488), to understand “people and the world” (489),
to reflect “just how complicated the world is” (493), to “find
a language so close to the world that the world can be repre-
sented and understood in it” (494), to find, that is, the right
poetic tone and approach to the complicated and tragic situ-
ation of the postwar generation is the key to the rapproche-
ment between the poet and the public: to make people read
poetry, poets must arrive at a sympathetic way of writing
about the things that affect those people.
And so, throughout the review, Jarrell privileges poetry that
seeks to satisfy this public need and change this sorry state of
affairs. Williams is praised for allowing “the underlying green
of the facts” to cancel out “the red in which we had found our
partial, temporary, aesthetic victory” (497). He holds up Drinan
as someone who “loves and understands people and the
world, instead of language and rhetoric and allusions” (489)
while attacking Devlin for “making so many overt or covert
allusions” to “his own historical or geographical or cultural
information” and for being both “rhetorical” and “extraordi-
narily conscious of surfaces” (492). There is, as there often is
with Jarrell, an almost snobbish disdain for those who do not
read poetry – “the stupidest shepherd or potboy of any other
age liked and understood poetry better than the average col-
lege graduate today” (500) – but there is an equal disdain for
poets who do not read anything else, who refuse to write for
an audience of more than one. Jarrell is resolutely opposed to
poetry that relies on the perversely personal, the overly aes-
thetic or rhetorical, the sort of poetry that, unwilling to engage
with the public or the “world,” retreats into a self-affirming
realm of formalistic involution.
How, then, does Bishop satisfy him? She herself was con-
cerned about the “fact that none of these poems [in North &
War 105
South] deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war
poetry is being published,” thinking that it might “leave [her]
open to reproach” (oa 125). She even suggested to her pub-
lisher that “a note to the effect that most of the poems had
been written, or begun at least, before 1941, could be inserted
at the beginning” of the volume to explain it (oa 125). Even
aside from the question of content, Bishop’s first collection
could easily be accused of the involution that Jarrell derides.
While there are some instantly appealing poems (“The Map,”
“The Fish”), there are several that could be accused of trading
in “rhetoric and allusions” (“Roosters,” “The Gentleman of
Shalott”) and “partial, temporary, aesthetic victor[ies]” (“Flor-
ida,” “Little Exercise”) or of being too dense and tangled to
appeal to any but the most dedicated reader (“Paris, 7 a.m.,”
“The Imaginary Iceberg”). The Bishop of North & South
seems, that is, both unlikely to reach out to Jarrell’s “average
college graduate today” and open to reproach on charges of
selfish aestheticism.
But Bishop receives no censure on this front; instead, Jarrell
focuses his ire on Josephine Miles. The very first words of the
review declare that, in Miles’s poetry, “some overspecialized
sensitivity and ability come to a cautionary end – mostly be-
cause Miss Miles asks surprisingly little of herself, and seems
to feel that the world and poetry ask even less” (488). Jarrell
rather caustically points out the appropriateness of her title –
Local Measures – for a book of poems that are not “the
worked-out, required, sometimes lengthy expression of a sub-
ject that is trying to realize itself through Miss Miles, but only
one more product of the Miles method for turning out Miles
poems” (488). In its most complete and cutting expression,
Jarrell’s criticism takes on an unpleasantly gendered tone:
Miles’s poems are like “the diary some impressionable but un-
impassioned monomaniac had year by year been engraving on
the side of a knitting needle” (488–9), a series of “individual-
ized, cultivated limited affairs” (489).
As difficult as North & South may be, it is certainly not all of

a piece in this sense, and Jarrell actually makes of Bishop a sort
of anti-Miles. The two women form a structural framework for
the review, which begins with Miles and ends with Bishop, and
he begins his section on Bishop with praise of her tone and tech-
nique that contrasts directly with his attacks on Miles: where
Miles is “relishingly idiosyncratic,” “carefully awkward and
mannered,” and full of “little voluntary tricks of technique”
(488–9), Bishop is “pleasant and sympathetic,” “grave, calm,
and tender,” and “calmly beautiful, deeply sympathetic” (498).
The social language he uses here – “sympathetic” and “pleas-
ant” as opposed to “awkward” and “mannered” – suggests
that the real difference between the two is something like the
difference between “having manners” and “being mannered.”
Good manners involve a respect for the reader that translates
into a careful attempt to get everything just so, an attention to
the minutiae of grace and courtesy; being mannered involves no
such respect and manifests itself in a wilful determination to
stick to one’s own unreasonably minute system of behaviour.
Both inhere in the details, but one is a form of accommodation
and the other a form of rigidity. Miles’s attention to detail
makes her a “monomaniac … engraving on the side of a
knitting-needle,” a spinsterish recluse, rejecting “the world and
poetry”; Bishop’s attention to “every detail of metre or organi-
zation or workmanship,” on the other hand, implies the “re-
straint, calm, and proportion” (499) of civilized living.
Jarrell’s discussion, or, to be fair, my characterization of
Jarrell’s discussion, is reliant on what Victoria Harrison calls
“the clichés about what is good in women’s poetry” (12), but
it still has something to say about the notion of aestheticism.
Jarrell is not opposed to aestheticism per se, nor is he willing
to relinquish the notion of difficulty or complexity. As he
puts it elsewhere, if “we were in the habit of reading poets
their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the
habit, their clarity does not help” (P&A 4). Rather, Jarrell is
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concerned that complexity and rhetoric be deployed in order

to express something worthwhile and not simply for their
own sake. His point is that a reader may have to work hard
to read Bishop’s poems but only because, unlike Miles,
Bishop has worked hard to write them.
But Jarrell is not only opposed to poetry that turns in on it-
self, he also objects to poetry that turns too persistently to the
horrors of the public sphere. While such poetry seeks to ex-
pose and denounce, it implicitly raises the poet above any re-
sponsibility for the evils of the world, becoming, as Jarrell puts
it, a form of “gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who
stays legally innocuous by means of it” (498–9). Further, the fo-
cus on evil blinds the poet to anything more pleasant so that he
or she would rather “walk down children like Mr. Hyde than
weep over them like Swinburne” (498). James Longenbach ar-
gues convincingly that Jarrell has in mind “the idealization of
violence he found in Warren, Tate, [and] Lowell” (58) and
that, “for Jarrell, this fascination with evil allowed Warren to
avoid responsibility for the world’s condition” (52). Just as he
criticizes the aesthetic poet for moving inwards, Jarrell criti-
cizes the moralizing poet for moving upwards, for taking up a
position above both the world and the public.
And Jarrell holds Bishop up as an antidote to the violent
school of Hyde as well as to Miles’s school of perverse aesthet-
icism. What Jarrell finds so attractive in Bishop is her under-
standing of the fact that “the wickedness and confusion of the
age can explain and extenuate other people’s wickedness and
confusion, but not, for you, your own” (500). For Jarrell,
Bishop finds a way to write poetry that speaks to the world
without writing about the world, and she does it through the
“restraint, calm, and proportion” “implicit in every detail of
metre or organization or workmanship” (498). The same
good manners that separate her from Miles distinguish her
from her more despairing contemporaries: “instead of crying,
with justice, ‘This is a world in which you can’t get along,’
Miss Bishop’s poems show that it is barely but perfectly possi-

ble – has been, that is, for her” (498). For Jarrell, Bishop not
only leads by example but, crucially, by aesthetic example.
Jarrell here defines a poetics in which poetry at its most poetic
is not a flight from the world but a means of bettering it. After
refusing to relinquish the aesthetic to Miles, he also takes mo-
rality back from the moralizers, insisting instead on the moral-
ity of aesthetic action. This particular manoeuvre is what
separates Jarrell from most contemporary critics. For Jarrell,
to do something well in this world is a moral action in its own
right. To neither flee from nor lash out against the world, to
maintain “restraint, calm, and proportion” in “every detail of
metre or organization or workmanship,” is to do good. Along
with Bishop, he insists that “[t]here is no split” and that one
can be both “good as well as [a] good artist” (dl). Or, as
Bishop writes whimsically of Marianne Moore, he promotes
“manners as morals” (cpr 156).
It is in this context that we find that famous line: “Her work
is unusually personal and honest in its wit, perception, and
sensitivity – and in its restrictions too; all her poems have writ-
ten underneath, I have seen it” (499). Jarrell’s mention of
“perception, and sensitivity” pays tribute to Bishop’s powers
of description, but the syntax of the sentence puts the empha-
sis elsewhere. By setting off the notion of “restrictions” with a
dash, Jarrell puts special emphasis on it, and this in turn re-
duces the last clause of the sentence – the famous one – to an
elaboration of that very notion. Read in context, that famous
line is not about epistemology or psychology, or any of the
things that critics have suggested; rather, it is about the role of
limitations in the act of description, about how leaving things
out of a poem can be morally necessary.
In order to clarify Jarrell’s point fully here, we need still
address the question of what, exactly, “it” is – the thing a
poem describes or the world outside it. If we take “it” to
mean the subject of each particular poem, then, knowing
War 109
that the world is beyond her power, Bishop speaks only of

things she can capture and control through seeing and de-
scribing them. Most critics have read the phrase in these
terms – description – but without any sense of how, within
this paradigm, description says as much, albeit silently, about
context as it does about the thing described. The reader sees
Bishop’s “restraint, calm, and proportion,” and realizes that
it is a means of not “crying out” about something else.
If, however, “it” is read as the world and its horrors, then
the phrase written “underneath” becomes a mute acknowl-
edgment of it, an indication that she may be writing about
this but she has also seen that. Too honest to retreat fully
into the aesthetic realm, Bishop creates an aesthetic object
that indirectly testifies to her knowledge of what she is not
writing about in a sort of a footnote (to take Jarrell’s “under-
neath” literally). These two options add up, essentially, to
the same thing. Jarrell’s famous sentence testifies both to the
moral qualities of Bishop’s careful craft – to the potential pri-
vate morality of a careful aesthetic – and to the power she
gains from knowingly and openly turning from the horrible
world in her poetry. It testifies to both the goodness of writ-
ing well in the face of the world’s horrors and also the impor-
tance of not writing directly about them. It shows how she is
neither pretending, like Miles, that the world does not exist,
nor wallowing, like Warren and company, in its horrors.
It is this particular poetical personality that makes her
“morally so satisfactory” and so “attractively and unassum-
ingly good” (499), and, for Jarrell, it is this particular good-
ness in the poet that will bridge the gap between the poet and
the public, the gap that is the overarching concern of his re-
view. Jarrell insists that the public be offered poets that are
both good and appealing – hence his emphasis on “sympa-
thy” (493, twice on 498), “attractiveness” (489, 499), and
“affection” (489, 500, where it is the very last word of the
review). And it is Bishop, more than anyone, that he holds up
as an example of both goodness and appeal since she, more

than anyone, understands that “morality, for the individual,
is usually a small, personal, statistical, but heartbreaking
or heartwarming affair of omissions and commissions the
greatest of which will seem infinitesimal, ludicrously beneath
notice” (500).
Hence, “The Fish.” Coming to some understanding of the
fish and then letting it go is, for Jarrell, a stronger, more
moral action than writing a hard-hitting poem about the
atrocities of the world; it is what Marianne Moore calls, in
another context, a “private defiance of the significantly de-
testable” (391). Jarrell ends his section on Bishop with a
powerful reading of the poem, arguing that Bishop is so
“morally satisfactory” because she understands that it is
“sometimes easy and natural, to ‘do well’” and that when
“you see the snapped lines trailing, ‘a five-haired beard of
wisdom,’ from the great fish’s aching jaw, it is then that vic-
tory fills ‘the little rented boat,’ that the oil on the bilgewater
by the rusty engine is ‘rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!’ – that
you let the fish go” (499–500). In this tribute, Jarrell presents
that small moral action as greater and more poetic than a
larger attack on the world’s injustice. In doing so, however,
he applies only half of his own formula; he focuses on the
“it” that is within the poem, the fish itself that Bishop’s
speaker really sees for the first time. There is more to this
poem, however, and to bring out its engagement with the
other “it,” the world outside, is to erect a more complete
model of Bishop’s particular poetics that can then be applied
more generally.
In the Darwin Letter, Bishop mentions that her friend
Pauline Hemingway gave North & South to her ex-husband,
Ernest, who liked it and said of “The Fish,” “I wish I knew as
much about it as she does” (dl). Bishop claimed that this
compliment meant more to her “than any praise in the quar-
terlies” since “underneath” she and Hemingway were “really
War 111
a lot alike” (dl). She goes on to qualify this, however, by saying

that she likes “only his short stories and the first two novels –
something went tragically wrong with him after that – but
he had the right idea about lots of things” (dl). The early
Hemingway is not unlike the Bishop of Jarrell’s review, focusing
on the smaller things in an attempt to maintain composure in
the face of larger, more horrible realities. The clearest example
of this affinity is “Big Two-Hearted River,” which Hemingway
describes as a story “about coming back from the war” without
any “mention of the war in it” (Moveable 76), and which reads
as a textbook example of how a “perfectly useless concentra-
tion” (dl) can make it “barely but perfectly possible” (Jarrell,
“Poet” 499) to get along in the world.
As the narrator of Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School puts it,
“Big Two-Hearted River” is instantly appealing in terms of
“physical detail” since Hemingway relates Nick Adams’s ac-
tions in “precise, almost fussy descriptions that most writers
would’ve left out” (96). But while such “rough solemnities”
are attractive in themselves, a closer reading shows that
“Nick observes them so carefully – religiously is not too
strong a word – because they keep him from falling apart”
(96). It is a simple extension to read “The Fish” in a similar
manner, casting the speaker’s “almost fussy descriptions” of
the fish as a reflection of Nick’s exacting care for the pro-
cesses of camping and fishing. Further, both Bishop and
Hemingway emphasize Jarrell’s “restrictions” by choosing to
end their narratives on a high note: Bishop’s speaker releases
her fish as soon as “victory fill[s] up / the little rented boat”
(cp 43); Nick decides to stop with the two trout he catches in
the river and to forgo the “tragic adventure” of fishing in the
swamp (Hemingway, In Our 155). Both story and poem
point to the possibility of doing something right, of achiev-
ing, through care and detail, some small victory in a world
that can seem so overwhelming, but they also point to the
importance of not overstepping one’s bounds, of sticking to
what one can do in this world. (Bishop, too, saw the resem-
blance, though in a less generous light: she describes the
poem to Marianne Moore as “very bad and, if not like
Robert Frost, perhaps like Ernest Hemingway” [oa 87].)
The difference between Bishop and Hemingway in this re-
gard is that the reader knows that Nick’s concentration comes
in reaction to his experiences in the First World War – the war
is never mentioned, but it does not need to be. With Bishop, it
is never so clear what exactly it is that necessitates such care.
The reader knows only that Bishop’s speaker seems oddly pa-
ralysed by the fact of having caught a fish – an eventuality she
must have expected when she went out fishing – and strangely
spooked by the “the frightening gills, / fresh and crisp with
blood, / that can cut so badly” (cp 42). There are a number of
possible explanations: the poem was written during the Sec-
ond World War, which adds a certain threat to Bishop’s char-
acterization of the fish’s lip as “weaponlike” and the hooks
and lines in his jaw as “medals with their ribbons” (43). Ig-
noring this angle, the speaker’s attempt to look “into [the
fish’s] eyes” (42) may signal a more personal, psychological
context, “summoning up,” as David Kalstone argues, “a crea-
ture from the speaker’s own inner depths” (87). Alternately, as
Bonnie Costello suggests, the “pervasive but ambiguous sex-
ual quality” of the fish, who “hangs like a giant phallus,” may
clash with the speaker’s conventionally feminine “domestic
world of wallpaper and roses,” signalling a set of anxieties re-
lated to gender (64). The poem may be set among anxieties re-
lated to war, to an inner darkness, or to the gender roles
society assigns, but it may also be set among all of these and
more. As Lionel Kelly points out, though not in reference to
this poem, there may be several sources of anxiety, but,
“whether its sources are personal, social, political or global,”
there is always the “element of mortal panic and fear underly-
ing all works of art” that Bishop describes in her memoir of
Marianne Moore (Kelly 1, the quotation is from cpr 144). In
War 113
the end, it may not be necessary to decide what, in particular,

Bishop is not talking about in this instance, which “it” she has
seen. What matters is that the speaker is scared and uneasy
and that she works carefully past her anxiety towards a small
moral epiphany.
Kelly argues that, for Bishop, “the function of the work of
art is to mediate that sense of panic through the formal de-
vices which structure the work” (1), but his argument is too
modest: he restricts himself to form in its most rigid sense
and anxiety in its most explicit sense, focusing on poems that
are clearly about loss written in particularly strict forms – “Ses-
tina” and “One Art.” In these two poems, as Molly Peacock
puts it, form “becomes the arms of comfort in which to ex-
press the enormity of emotion” making “impossible emo-
tions possible” (71). But Jarrell is looking at, and allows us
to look at, the opposite situation, at poems wherein emotion,
or panic, is kept out. The more frank examination of loss
and emotion in “Sestina” or “One Art” belongs to a differ-
ent mode and a different era – the more intimate work found
in Bishop’s third and fourth volumes. Jarrell’s review, how-
ever, allows one to bring the question of form and anxiety to
bear on poems that are not so explicitly about the “art of los-
ing” and not written in such strict forms (cp 178).
“The Fish” satisfies Jarrell’s criteria perfectly: it testifies to
having seen the fish itself, to having seen something horrible
besides, and to the relationship between those two sights; it
maintains a rigorous detail of description and tone and form
while displaying a certain quiet desperation; and it builds
through these things towards a small but significant moral act.
Yet it is hardly surprising that “The Fish” satisfies Jarrell’s cri-
teria since Jarrell’s criteria are derived from “The Fish.” How-
ever, the ideas that come out of the review can also provide an
excellent context in which to look at a few smaller, quieter po-
ems from North & South: “Cirque d’Hiver,” “The Unbe-
liever,” and “Quai d’Orléans.” Like “The Fish” these poems
derive their power from keeping anxiety “underneath,” but

unlike “The Fish” none of them ends with an externalized
moral action, which renders their final negotiation of the aes-
thetic and moral worlds more difficult to assess. But the force
of Jarrell’s ideas lies precisely in the way that they allow the
reader to think in moral terms about poems that do not en-
gage explicitly with moral actions.
Each of these poems balances Jarrell’s care for every “de-
tail of metre or organization or workmanship” against an
oblique “element of mortal panic and fear.” The first two,
“Cirque d’Hiver” and “The Unbeliever,” do so in a relatively
explicit manner, presenting allegories of the conflict between
fear and form, between the world and the aesthetic. Together,
they form a cautionary pair: “Cirque d’Hiver” warns against
allowing the world to take over one’s poetry, “The Unbe-
liever,” against allowing one’s fear of the world to dominate.
“Quai d’Orléans,” on the other hand, is an example of the
successful balance in which Jarrell is interested. It allows its
own particular panic to colour it but never to intrude. It
keeps “it” underneath but allows the strain of doing so to
show, becoming, as Jarrell puts it, “a small, personal …
heartbreaking or heartwarming affair” (500).
“Cirque d’Hiver” (cp 31) reads as an allegory of the divi-
sion between art and the world: the “mechanical toy” that
the poem describes is made up of two contrasting parts,
horse and dancer, each of which represents one half of this
familiar binary. The dancer, who “stands upon her toes,”
represents the rigidly aesthetic. That she is en pointe not only
identifies her as a ballerina, summoning up the aura of purity
and rigid aestheticism associated with the classical ballet, but
also places her, physically, in a position that seeks to tran-
scend natural human form in the quest for visual perfection.
Her “tinsel bodice” furthers this trend since a bodice, like a
pointe shoe, helps to sculpt the body into a more aestheti-
cally pleasing shape. This fact is echoed in the repetition of
War 115
the word “artificial” in the two “spray[s] of artificial roses,”

one of which she “poses” above her head. With “her pink
toes dangl[ing]” the dancer “turns and turns” in midair,
spinning on her own axis and literalizing the notion of de-
tached aesthetic involution. The horse, on the other hand,
has “real white hair” and is described in less superficial
terms. He has a “formal, melancholy soul,” he “feels” the
dancer’s toes above him, and he is “more intelligent by far,”
capable of acting and speaking at the poem’s end in tandem
with the poem’s speaker. The poem also focuses on his eyes
in its first and last stanzas, where they are, respectively,
“glossy black” and “like a star”; this attention to the clichéd
window to the soul speaks to a level of personification that
the dancer lacks. Unlike the aestheticized dancer, the horse is
presented as a thinking, rational creature, capable of engag-
ing with the world beyond himself, as he does by approach-
ing the speaker and bringing about the final tableau in which
the dancer, appropriately, “has turned her back” while the
horse “looks at” the speaker.
The poem’s rhyme scheme dictates that the second and fifth
lines of each stanza end with the same word, but in the fourth
stanza, as the speaker comes face to face with the horse, her
intrusive “me” disrupts this pattern. Taken together with the
toy’s gradual running down, the various stages of which ren-
der the metre jerky, this line forms a climax:
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,

canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.
Up to this point, the speaker has merely watched the toy func-
tion, watched as the aesthetic and the real interacted, but now
she finds herself dragged into the poem itself. The horse mim-
ics the motions of a suitor asking for a dance: he approaches,
bows, comes closer still and stands, looking expectantly. The
rhyme scheme is interrupted as the aesthetic world “turn[s its]

back” on her, and this withdrawal leaves the speaker and the
horse “[f]acing each other rather desperately,” unsure of what,
exactly, to do.
The poem ends there, with the disconcerting intensity of
the horse’s gaze – “his eye is like a star” – and the oddly am-
biguous “Well, we have come this far.” The hypnotic effect
of the horse’s eye seems to destroy the speaker’s sense of her-
self as a discrete being. She and the horse “fac[e]” each other
and “stare” in tandem; they even speak with one voice.
Taken over by the horse, by the concerns of the world, the
speaker loses something of what makes her an individual, of
the “me” that disrupts the rhyme scheme of the poem. Read
in this light, “Cirque d’Hiver” portrays the real world as
mesmeric and terrifying, waiting to take over the poet’s
voice. But the real world seems able to exert this power only
when the toy has run itself down and the dancer has turned
away. Were the horse to continue to canter and bow, the
dancer to spin, this danger would not have arisen, the toy
would remain merely “fit for a king of several centuries
back,” a quaint outdated “mechanical toy,” “flit[ting]”
“across the floor.” What Jarrell sees in Bishop is a consistent
awareness of the danger that “Cirque d’Hiver” examines, a
conscientious effort to keep the “big tin key” of “metre or
organization or workmanship” wound up at all times. By al-
lowing her concentration to slip momentarily, by allowing
the horse to catch her eye and propose whatever it is that he
proposes, she acknowledges that from which she is escaping.
In order to bring out this effect, it helps to look at a poem
that works in the opposite way: W.H. Auden’s “September 1,
1939” (245–7). The two poems were published within a few
months of each other, but Auden’s poem, written explicitly in
reaction to the outbreak of war, derides the anonymous “Faces
along the bar,” who insist that “The lights must never go out,
/ The music must always play.” This insistence is parallel to
War 117
Bishop’s own emphasis on maintaining an aesthetic coherence,

but to keep such things up in the face of adversity is not, for
Auden, a moral action so much as a surrender to the very “con-
ventions” that “conspire” to propagate “the lie of Authority.”
The poet’s voice, on the other hand, is meant to “undo the
folded lie,” and while Auden is at best tentative about his
own ability to do so, he never doubts that it is the thing
to do. Though elsewhere he claims that “poetry makes noth-
ing happen” (242), and though he would later repudiate
“September 1” for its “incurable dishonesty” (quoted in Fuller
292), here we see part of Auden’s Romantic inheritance, his
sense that poetry should do, or at least try to do, something in
the world rather than in spite of it.
As such, the motion of these two poems is essentially op-
posite: where Bishop starts calmly and ends face to face with
the world, Auden admits to uncertainty and fear in the first
lines of the poem, only to sweep them away with the power
of his rhetoric. He may be “composed like them / Of Eros
and of dust,” but the rhetoric of the poem – even the rhetoric
of that simile – implies a clear division between “them” (“the
deaf,” “the dumb”) and himself. Jarrell points to this very
aspect of Auden, his penchant for the “We-They opposition”
(Third 117), which renders his morality “abstract, sentimen-
tal, and safe” (Third 154). Part of what Jarrell likes in Bishop
is the lack of any such opposition or safety: “Cirque
d’Hiver” is about her own need to keep those lights on and
to keep that music playing, and it is by allowing them to run
down that she gives the reader a glimpse of the desperation
behind them, of the “element of mortal panic and fear under-
lying all works of art.” Jarrell’s argument, that the elegance
of her music is itself an admirable moral action, only really
makes sense in light of the knowledge that it is only music
and that it could stop abruptly at any time. Auden is simply
too elegant; his music comes to him too easily, and the
reader, caught up in the grand sweep of his rhetoric, is lifted
into a world whose own music never does stop, where the
fear and loathing depicted in the poem can never penetrate.
But if “Cirque d’Hiver” acknowledges the need for an aes-
thetic refuge from the world, “The Unbeliever” (cp 22) – an-
other poem of five short, formally intricate stanzas – points
to the danger of taking this too far. Whereas in “Cirque
d’Hiver” the crisis comes from confronting the world, from al-
lowing the toy to wind down while the horse is facing the
speaker, the Unbeliever’s problem is that he so resolutely
avoids the world, both physically and sensually, retreating like
the dancer into a world of aesthetic removal. “The Unbe-
liever,” like “Cirque d’Hiver,” focuses on eyes in the first and
last stanzas, but the Unbeliever’s eyes, unlike the horse’s, are
“fast closed” in the first stanza, and “closed tight” in the last,
such that what little the Unbeliever does he does “Asleep” or
“blindly,” isolated from the world. His position “on the top of
a mast” not only further isolates him from the society of any-
one but gulls and clouds but also presents a visual echo of the
dancer similarly astride a tall vertical structure. And, like her,
his elevation is characterized as a flight into the aesthetic.
Bishop’s emphasis on gilding suggests both beauty and artifice,
and her suggestion that, to reach his mast-top, he might have
“climbed inside / a gilded bird” echoes Yeats’s Byzantine birds
of “golden handiwork” who “scorn aloud” the real world of
“mire or blood” (248). The Unbeliever thus seems to realize
Yeats’s own dream of climbing inside such a bird, “Once out
of nature,” in order to spend eternity singing to “lords and la-
dies of Byzantium” (194).
The parallels between “Cirque d’Hiver” and “The Unbe-
liever” extend to formal matters as well. In “Cirque
d’Hiver,” Bishop breaks the pattern of identical rhyme in or-
der to signal the end of the aesthetic’s influence, the point at
which the dancer has turned away and the speaker is con-
fronted with the horse; here, she introduces identical rhyme
at the moment where the Unbeliever’s aesthetic position is
War 119
given voice. In all but the last stanza, only the fourth and
fifth lines rhyme; in the last stanza, however, in the mono-
logue that represents the Unbeliever’s dream, the third line
also rhymes identically with the fourth:
“I must not fall.

The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.”
The repetition of the word, the extra line in the stanza (there
are six), and the short, blunt clauses enact the paranoia that
fuels the Unbeliever, the blind terror of reality that sends him
up the mast of aestheticism in the first place.
Whereas “Cirque d’Hiver” focuses on the dangers of the
world, “The Unbeliever” is about the dangers of aestheti-
cism, which the poem’s epigraph suggests is a form of hyster-
ical escapism, of wilful isolation and oblivion. The quotation
is taken immediately from Bunyan but ultimately from Prov-
erbs 23:34, where it constitutes a caution against the perils of
drunkenness: “Look not thou upon the wine when it is red
… Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the
sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast. They have
stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have
beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it
yet again” (Proverbs 23:31, 34–5). Bunyan cites this proverb
twice in The Pilgrim’s Progress, both times in a metaphorical
sense, implying oblivion but not literal drunkenness, and
both times in phrasings slightly different from the one Bishop
uses: “You are like them that sleep on the top of a Mast”
(32), “and he slept as one upon the Mast of a Ship” (250).
Bishop’s version, however, is from The Life and Death of
Mr. Badman, in which it appears, unmetaphorically, as part
of a lengthy analysis of the sin of drunkenness. It character-
izes what Bunyan describes as the worst of drunkenness’s
several evils – that it “so stupefies and besotts the soul, that a
man that is far gone in Drunkenness, is hardly ever recovered

to God. Tell me, when did you see an old drunkard con-
verted? No, no, such an one will sleep till he dies, though he
sleeps on the top of a Mast” (46).
The parallel between aestheticism and alcoholic oblivion is
far from flattering to the aesthete, implying as it does that the
Unbeliever’s withdrawal consists in a permanent shutting
down of the self. But keeping the Biblical passage in mind,
the parallel is not entirely unsympathetic. Unlike Bunyan’s
use of it, the original proverb includes an account of the ben-
efits of oblivion, a sense of why a drinker drinks: “They have
stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have
beaten me, and I felt it not.” Solomon does not advocate al-
cohol, but he allows that the drunkard, on waking, might
well “seek it yet again” as a means of mitigating the difficul-
ties of the world. Reading Bunyan from a drunkard’s point
of view – a point of view with which Bishop might well sym-
pathize – the same cycle can be seen: the drunkard, roused by
someone seeking to save his soul, is likely to turn from any
terrifying threats of damnation to more drink. And moving
from Bunyan back to Bishop, in the powerfully constructed
last lines of “The Unbeliever,” Bishop takes the reader inside
the Unbeliever’s mind, laying bare the very real fear that
drives his own endless cycle. The Unbeliever is partially right:
the sea is “hard as diamonds,” especially if one falls from a
great height, and it is entirely able to destroy him. But re-
moving himself to the top of the mast only exacerbates these
problems by rendering a fall both more likely and more seri-
ous, which, in turn, drives him further up the mast. Just as
the drunkard is beaten and reaches for more drink to ease the
pain, the aesthetic Unbeliever sees glimpses of the “spangled
sea” in “his dream” and curls into an ever tighter gilded ball.
Both “The Unbeliever” and “Cirque d’Hiver” end in a
sort of paralysis, the former of fear, the latter of submission.
Either the sea scares one into hiding or the horse overwhelms
War 121
one’s self control. Seen through the lens of Jarrell’s review,

they reveal the twin problems to which Jarrell posits Bishop
as the solution. Both, however, present a notion of oblivion
that Jarrell does not address – “Cirque d’Hiver” through a
hostile takeover by the world and “The Unbeliever” through
an endless cycle of retreat into the intoxication of the aes-
thetic. Bishop thinks in terms of self-preservation rather than
the role of poetry in the public sphere, and she also takes the
time to picture herself at either extreme of the aesthetic/
moral spectrum before settling on the middle ground. This
middle ground, Jarrell’s perfect balance, is achieved in such
poems as “The Fish,” where the horrors of the world are
kept just outside the poem’s boundaries, and also in “Quai
D’Orléans” (cp 28), where a profound melancholy pervades
a poem that never explains its sad tone. For those with access
to biographical detail, there is no mystery: in France, in
1937, Bishop, Louise Crane, and Margaret Miller were in-
volved in a car accident, which left Miller without the use of
her right arm. The poem was written in an “apartment on
the Ile St. Louis near the Quai D’Orléans” (Millier 125),
where the three lived for a time when Miller was first re-
leased from the hospital. For this particular poem, then,
there is a clear and identifiable “it” that Bishop has seen, but
she keeps it just outside the poem – above, rather than under-
neath it, if the dedication counts – and enacts sadness in the
poem exclusively in small, elusive ways that do not require
any knowledge of the accident on the part of the reader.
By splitting her long, flexible lines into unequal parts, usu-
ally four feet and two feet, Bishop not only mimics the large
and small leaves of the poem’s scene but also softens the
poem’s formal frame, burying its otherwise regular rhyme
scheme and keeping the rhythm from gaining too much mo-
mentum. This quiet motion is echoed throughout the poem by
the use of soft, gentle terms: “easily,” “gray,” “duller,” “float-
ing,” “softly,” “drifting,” “modestly,” “dissolving,” “still.”
And all of this softness is applied in its gentling way to a scene

of some grandeur and violence, in which the individual ripples
of a “mighty wake,” pictured as a “giant oak-leaf,” “extin-
guish themselves” as “falling stars come to their ends.” With
its hidden puns on “wake” and “leaving,” and its open dis-
cussion of extinction, dissolution, and ends, the poem reveals
an ongoing concern with mutability and death, but each
large or violent term is paired with a smaller, gentler one: the
“mighty wake” is “easily” towed; the “giant oak-leaf” is
made of “gray lights / on duller gray”; the “giant leaves” are
made up of “ripples”; the “falling-stars” end “softly”; and
the “throngs” of real leaves “disappear modestly.” The
poem enacts a struggle between a morbid vision and a more
soothing one; its speaker is fighting with herself over the in-
terpretation of the scene before her, seeing death everywhere
but trying, desperately, to keep herself calm in its face.
“Quai d’Orléans” is a poem in which the speaker de-
scribes a scene, but it is the scene, really, that captures the
speaker. In the final lines, the agency of memory rests not in
her but in it:
“If what we see could forget us half as easily,”

I want to tell you,
“as it does itself – but for life we’ll not be rid
of the leaves’ fossils.”
These lines are not exactly clear, but Bishop’s point is that the
scene, the poem, preserves the speaker’s state of mind. In its
physical aspect the scene is impermanent. The ripples extin-
guish themselves and the leaves float away. “What we see”
forgets itself since the world’s relationship with itself is neu-
tral and transitory. However, inasmuch as the world interacts
with the speaker, insofar as it is “what we see,” it preserves
the confused emotions with which it is seen: it becomes a re-
cord of which she will never be rid. The quai itself, its waters,
War 123
the wake behind a boat, the poem about them all become
fossilized, permanent, and permanently tainted. The aesthetic
process by which the speaker calms herself ends up preserv-
ing slight traces of the very depression she seeks to evade. By
using poetry to keep the world at bay, she allows the world
to infect the poetry; by pushing it away, she makes it perma-
nent. The point of those final lines is to emphasize how
very much the speaker’s sadness has pervaded the scene, how
very much “it,” though “written underneath,” colours ev-
erything. Earlier, I described Jarrell’s famous line as relegat-
ing the world to a space outside the poem, but perhaps it
makes more sense, in this context at least, to read the word
“underneath” in another sense. Rather than read it two-
dimensionally as indicating a space below, we might read it
in three dimensions, in a painterly sense, to indicate an un-
dercoat beneath even the painting’s background. In both
“Cirque d’Hiver” and “The Unbeliever” the world is pushed
down, literally, to the last stanza of each poem. Here, in-
stead, it is pushed behind the poem, only to show through
every phrase in highlights and muted tones.
And it is in highlights and muted tones that the world gen-
erally appears in Bishop’s early poetry, and the power of
Jarrell’s review is that it gives us a way of thinking about that
fact, of acknowledging the ways in which she is “morally so
satisfactory” without ever speaking of moral issues. Jarrell’s
account of Bishop is powerful in that it allows us to redis-
cover the conditions under which Bishop laboured, the direc-
tions in which she felt pulled, and the conflicting claims laid
on her; it shows us, that is, how it felt to publish a volume of
poetry in 1946. But, most importantly, Jarrell shows us how
description can bear a moral dimension and how Bishop’s in-
tense scrutiny of the physical world is not necessarily a blind
escape from the more pressing facts of historical reality but,
rather, a particular, and particularly successful, way of ad-
dressing them. Bishop’s method is not a popular one, and it
sets her apart from the bulk of her contemporaries, but

Jarrell’s review lets us reach her where she is. Just as Bishop
points back to the “lonely young” Darwin, “his eyes fixed
on facts and minute details” (dl), so does Jarrell point to the
“lonely triumph of integrity” (500) that Bishop’s poems,
with their testament to having “seen it,” comprise.
6
Narrative
As I hope to have made clear, this book is not only about de-
scription in the usual sense (or senses) but also about the role
of scrutiny in a much larger intellectual pattern that dominates
Bishop’s work. Chapters 2 through 4 lay this pattern out as it
pertains to knowledge and the mind, showing how Bishop al-
ways emphasizes the study of smaller, more concrete things at
least partially because she believes that study to be the only av-
enue to the larger, more abstract ones. The preceding chapter
shifts gears somewhat, tracing this same pattern as it applies to
the opposition between aesthetic and moral action. Again,
Bishop’s method is to focus resolutely on the aesthetic as the
only legitimate way to reach the moral. In keeping with the
larger pattern, she does not consider morality and aesthetics to
be indistinguishable, nor does she seek to elevate aesthetics at
the expense of morality; rather, she considers any direct entry
into the moral sphere to be either facile or impossible. Like the
model of mind put forth in “At the Fishhouses,” the morality
revealed by Jarrell’s review is one that relies on hard work and
hardship, on a scrupulosity and balance nearly impossible to
maintain, on the intellectual and poetic virtues that result from
a lifelong devotion to the idea of scrutiny and description.
To say this is to draw attention to a similarity not only in
Bishop’s art and thought but also in what I have written
about her so far. There is also, however, an important differ-

ence – or, rather, an important progression – inherent here. In
my first chapter, I put forward a Bishop firmly in control of
both the objects within her poems and the readers of those
poems. I acknowledge a certain respect for the Fish and the
Man-Moth, but it is a respect among equals (if that). My
chapters on Bishop’s model of mind require a more moderate
position: however firmly Bishop controls the objects within
her poems, the world outside her poems is something over
which she has considerably less control. As “At the Fish-
houses” makes clear, she can extract something from the
world around her, but not easily. This last chapter compli-
cates things even further by bringing forth the role of the so-
cial world, suggesting that her habit of focusing so carefully
within the poems is not only a product of aesthetic prefer-
ence but also a reaction to pressures outside the aesthetic
sphere. To put this another way, if “At the Fishhouses” high-
lights the difficulty of Bishop’s poetics of description, then
Jarrell’s review shows how it is a product of necessity as
much as choice.
And so while there is a basic intellectual pattern that runs
throughout Bishop’s thinking, the sources of that pattern are
various and complicated. It is worth pausing to sum things
up in this manner not only because we have come to the mid-
point of this study but also because I am about to shift direc-
tions somewhat. In one sense, I will return to my first chapter
by beginning with a concrete question of writing not unlike
my distinction between types of imagery: the relationship be-
tween narrative and time. In another sense, I will repeat the
motion of chapters 2 through 4: just as those chapters begin
with the careful reading of a neglected piece of prose and
move from there to a much more expansive vision of
Bishop’s poetics, so do the next three chapters begin with a
careful reading of one of Bishop’s undergraduate essays and
move from there to an examination of how narrative and
Narrative 127
scrutiny interact in her poetics more generally. As always, that

characteristically Bishopesque approach to binaries, that fa-
miliar intellectual pattern, will crop up again and again, albeit
in different and more complicated ways. So much is familiar.
New, however, is an emerging emphasis on maturation. Up to
this point, I have been painting an eternal, Platonic Bishop
whose poetics remain unchanged throughout her career. The
portrait of Bishop that emerges in these next chapters is one of
gradual accommodation to reality, of a youthful rigour relax-
ing into mature nonchalance. As is, perhaps, appropriate for a
set of chapters explicitly concerned with the idea of time, one
of the wrinkles that these next chapters add to my argument is
a consciousness of biographical time, of Bishop’s development
as a thinker.
In 1930, Bishop entered Vassar College with, as Brett C.
Millier puts it, “a simmering literary ambition” but “no clear
path to its fulfillment” (41). “Time’s Andromedas,” an essay
she wrote in her senior year, and which was published in the
Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies, illustrates that am-
bition rather nicely. Sadly, it also shows the lack of a clear
path that Millier identifies. The essay presents a complicated
set of ideas about temporality and narrative and a portrait of
the sort of fiction that Bishop would like to write or see writ-
ten, but it gives only a confused sense of how such fiction
could possibly come to be. It is a difficult essay on a difficult
topic, and it is also rather difficult to discuss. On the one
hand, it is an undergraduate essay, and it is sometimes unfo-
cused, ungenerous, and blind to internal contradictions; on
the other hand, it is the product of an impressive mind, and it
shows all the brilliant use of imagery, the confident yet con-
versational tone, and the combination of intellectual insight
and lyrical power that characterizes Bishop’s adult work.
What Bishop proposes is neither plain nor really possible,
but her attempt is so characteristically her own that it is hard
to dismiss it as juvenilia. More to the point, though she
would never succeed in writing (or defining, really) the sort

of fiction that would satisfy her rigorous ideas about time,
the concepts implicit in the paper prove useful in describing
certain characteristics of her mature poetics.
“Time’s Andromedas” is actually one of two linked es-
says Bishop wrote during her senior year (1933–34) for
Rose Peebles’s class in “Contemporary Prose Fiction,” the
other being “Dimensions for a Novel.” Bishop was Peebles’s
“star pupil” (Millier 43), which explains the appearance of
both essays in the Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies.
“Time’s Andromedas” is the more conventionally analytical
of the two, setting up a topic of investigation and then look-
ing carefully at two exemplary texts. It begins with the obser-
vation that time feels different within a novel than it does in
life, suggests that this disparity is problematic, and then
looks at two particular methods of overcoming it, embodied
by Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and Gertrude Stein’s
The Making of Americans. “Dimensions for a Novel” is
more abstract and, as the title indicates, consists of a set of
ideas about and characteristics of a not-yet-written novel.
The later essay quotes from the first at one point, and the
two share a number of concerns, but I will not address “Di-
mensions for a Novel” except in passing. “Time’s Androme-
das” is difficult enough, but “Dimensions for a Novel” is
thoroughly frustrating in the impracticality of its ambition.
Since “Time’s Andromedas” examines the role of time in
fiction, I will draw on Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative in
order to argue that what Bishop really wants is the elimination
of narrative from the novel. Such a goal is ambitious to the
point of impossibility, but Bishop’s essay begins much more
modestly, with the premise that time is involved in a novel in
three ways: “First, it must be employed actually, hour by hour,
in the writing process. Second, it must pass a suppositious length
of days, hours, or years within the novel. And third, it must be
used up, actually again, while the book is being read” (103).
Narrative 129
Leaving aside the first of these, which does not recur in the es-
say, Bishop seems to be moving towards the familiar narrato-
logical distinction between “narrated time” and “time of
narrating.” (The terms are originally Genette’s, but I am using
Ricoeur’s definitions.) Narrated time, which is measured in
“years, days, and hours” (2:79), is the amount of time the
events of a novel are supposed to have occupied within that
novel’s world – Bishop’s “suppositious” time. Time of narrat-
ing, which is measured in “pages and lines” (2:78), is the
amount of space devoted to describing or relating those
events, which, in turn, is translated by the individual reader
into real time, while, as Bishop puts it, “the book is being
read.” So far, then, Bishop is a narratologist avant la lettre.
But, moving on from these basic definitions, Bishop ex-
plains that there is “perhaps a fourth” dimension of time in the
novel in that “each book has a tempo of its own” (103). She
makes a brief attempt to figure out how “literal reading time”
(time of narrating) and “suppositious time-passage” (narrated
time) might be related to the “general time-atmosphere of
the book” but gives up her “fourth conclusion” as only
“half-expressed” and declares the “sum of all these ideas”
“a complete mystery” (103–4). According to Ricoeur, how-
ever, it is precisely the ratio of narrated time to time of nar-
rating that gives a novel its particular feeling of time. By
manipulating this ratio, the novelist can draw out and em-
phasize certain events while passing quickly over others. Sim-
ilarly, by rearranging the order of events or by controlling the
frequency of their appearance through repetition, the novel-
ist can manipulate time for a variety of purposes. This is,
again, to be found in Genette: he posits the manipulation of
duration, order, and frequency as a tool for the novelist’s use.
But Ricoeur goes slightly further, suggesting that the overall
pattern of manipulation gives each novel’s imagined world
what Bishop calls a time-sense and what he calls “a fictive
experience of time” (2:77). Rather than a tool used to create
isolated effects or to emphasize particular parts of a novel,

Ricoeur, like Bishop, sees a total temporal experience partic-
ular to each novel.
Since the novelist creates his or her time-sense through ma-
nipulation, the key to time-sense is control, and, when discuss-
ing Realist fiction’s use of time, Bishop uses a set of images that
reflects this. The Realist author is a “band-master” (110),
someone who always seems to be saying “Now we must be
careful” (108), a train “conductor” (107), or one of “those
fussy people who must get to the train hours ahead of time”
(112). In the Realist novel, “conversation, description, thought,
all are led by [the author] to the same tune and are in his mind
from the very beginning” (110). The simple fact of control sep-
arates the novel’s time-sense from that of reality, making it, in
Ricoeur’s terms, a “fictive experience of time” (my emphasis).
But where Ricoeur merely posits this as a neutral fact of fiction-
ality, Bishop finds it objectionable. To her mind, since book
time is different from real time, it is condemned to be an oddity,
felt while reading but foreign and strange as soon as the book is
set down. She introduces this notion with an elaborate descrip-
tion of a group of migrating birds:
Within the invisible boundaries of the flying birds every-

thing became theirs … [and w]hen I had looked away I
was conscious for a minute of their time, pulsing against
and contradicting my own; then it lost its reality and be-
came a fixed feeling, a little section of the past which had
changed and become timeless for me because of its escape
from my own time pattern. Now I believe that is a fair rep-
resentation of what happens when one reads any novel of
the nineteenth or early twentieth century sort … I accept,
while reading, the time-system of the book; and then when
the book is read, this system, slipped into a state of actual
timelessness, becomes a condition, something realized
whenever the book is thought of. (104–5)
Narrative 131
The Realist novel, like the birds, creates a sort of alternate

universe, which, being so organized and controlled, looks
strange and foreign when compared to the real, disorganized,
uncontrolled world in which the reader lives. Ironically, it is
by “carefully ‘positing’ their time-district,” and by “getting
us back mentally into a time-pattern of their own making,”
that Realist authors condemn their own work to ephemeral-
ity (108). A well-written Realist novel can “include us for the
reading,” but it “will later become to us only a minute’s at-
mosphere” (108). Realist fiction functions by creating a fully
articulated world, complete with its own sense of time, but
this world is necessarily a world distinct from the world.
Implicit in Bishop’s rejection of fiction’s very fictionality is a
set of ideas about what fiction should and should not do that
is characteristically Bishopesque but also characteristically
modernist. By pointing out the discrepancy between the time-
sense of the Realist novel and the time-sense of reality, Bishop,
consciously or not, follows in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps.
Woolf argues in “Modern Fiction” that, even as the “tyrant”
of Realism “is obeyed” and “the novel is done to a turn,” one
feels “a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages
fill themselves in the customary way,” as to whether or not life
is really “like this” and whether novels must also, therefore,
“be like this” (149). Woolf concludes that “life, it seems, is
very far from being ‘like this’” (149) and that Realism is not
an accurate portrait of reality so much as a set of fictional con-
ventions that have little if anything to do with how reality is
actually perceived.
Woolf is not concerned with time in particular, but her argu-
ment that modernist fiction, as strange as it might seem to a
reader trained by Realist conventions, is actually an attempt to
bring fiction closer to reality finds an echo in Bishop’s argu-
ment that “a great deal of our modern ‘experimental’ writing”
attempts “to either prolong this first contradictory time-
pattern into the after recollection of the novel, or to make it no
longer contradictory but acquiescent with our own time-

pattern as we read” (105). As the essay unfolds, it becomes
clear that, in order to “prolong this first contradictory time-
pattern into the after recollection of the novel,” it is necessary
to make it a less contradictory time-pattern: the more book
time feels like real time, the easier it is to reconcile the two. For
Bishop, the two authors who best illustrate “these two methods
of adding time to the novel, of preserving it in counterpoint or
in unison with our own” (106), are Dorothy Richardson, who
strives for a time-sense as similar to real time as possible, and
Gertrude Stein, who tries to make her novel’s time-sense identi-
cal to the reader’s while in the process of reading.
Stein fares rather ill, and though she is treated second in
the essay, I will deal with her first and quickly. To Bishop’s
mind, writing is “a linear art,” “a form of motion,” that
“gets by us even as we read, and must be dealt with in retro-
spect. So that the time in all compositions must necessarily be
past” (115). Stein, however, wants to “get present time into
her writing, somehow to make us feel that the thing is hap-
pening, as we read it, simultaneously” (115). Unfortunately,
Bishop finds that though “Miss Stein believes in this theory,
her characters certainly do not prove it” (116), and that she
succeeds only in a few “curious tricks which perhaps further
the sense of present time” that is, nonetheless, “defeated in
the book as a whole” (117). And that is that. Bishop does
not spend as much energy on Stein as on Richardson, and the
main thrust of her section on Stein is simply that, whatever
Stein is trying to do, it is not working.
She finds Richardson’s Pilgrimage more promising. Where
Stein tries to equate the time-sense of her novel to the actual
time-sense of the reader while reading, Richardson attempts,
instead, to create a fictional time-sense that is as close to real
time as possible. Stein tries and fails to infiltrate the actual
present; Richardson is content to echo it with a time-sense
“consistently parallel with our own yet in a more vivace
Narrative 133
tempo” (113). The ways in which Richardson accomplishes

this effect occupy a good portion of Bishop’s essay, but for the
most part, they are the standard tools of the stream-of-
consciousness narrative, and Bishop explicitly calls the novel’s
“time-sense, that of the stream of consciousness” (107). The
novel does not begin with exposition, so that the past appears
to the reader as a “series of vague days outside the left-hand
cover” (106); there are no authorial glimpses of the future, or
“getting into carriages and fussing about … while the author,
conductor-wise, shouts the next destination in our ears” (107);
no authorial indication of time or place, or what Bishop calls
the “Contractors and Builders Method” of “clearing ground,
measuring and digging for the basement” (108); and, perhaps
most crucially, no privileging at the time of what are only later
revealed to be important events: “the acquiring of a new
blouse gives [the novel’s protagonist] much more thought and
trouble than the meeting of the man who is later to become
her lover” (113). All in all, Pilgrimage is presented in such a
manner that it most clearly reflects “a life happening to some-
one and being written down” (113).
Although this sounds relatively familiar, there are a few
important differences between Bishop’s characterization of
Pilgrimage and more familiar high-modernist stream-of-
consciousness writing. Mrs Dalloway, for example, though it
takes place over the course of one day and presents most of
the ordinary things that occur during that day, still recounts
a normal novel’s share of story, and, in doing so, it returns to
certain Realist conventions. Insofar as the novel narrates the
events of that particular day, it does reflect “a life happening
to someone and being written down”; however, insofar as
the novel, through flashback and reflection, narrates the lives
of Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith, and others, it falls back
into a Realist time-sense, using exposition, indicating time
and place, and privileging certain key events by returning to
them repeatedly. In this way, in terms of time, Woolf hides
Realism beneath reality, presenting a realistic narrative that

contains a Realist novel in the form of flashbacks.
Woolf’s use of flashbacks is antithetical to Bishop’s design
in that it reduces the present to a medium through which to
gain access to the past. In this regard, Proust is the ultimate
villain: “so much thought backwards from a sitting posture,
no matter what wonders it brought to light, must be a sin
against the particular beauties of the passing minute” (110).
Richardson’s particular virtue, on the other hand, is that her
protagonist’s “thoughts are struck off, spark-like, from the
present” (111). Bishop is dodging a bit here since Richardson
does indeed use flashbacks, which Bishop attempts to justify
by redefining them as “loops”: “not digression but actual
story, brought in off the beat, so to speak, in a form of syn-
copation” (112). This is hardly convincing, but Bishop is
exaggerating Richardson’s method in order to make her
point. Even though Richardson does not line up time of
narrating and narrated time perfectly, she is moving in the
direction that Bishop indicates, attempting to insinuate her
protagonist “simply and slightly into our own time, with-
out disturbing it” so that we “become aware of a rhythm
perpetually going on, like our own, [and] in many ways as mo-
notonous as our own” (109). Compared to Mrs Dalloway,
which jumps around to condense several lives into a single
day, Richardson’s book may seem dull, but that is “the se-
cret of the whole thing” (113).
Taking what she says of Richardson to its logical end,
Bishop is working towards a sort of continuous journal in-
time. Not surprisingly, then, “Seven-Days Monolouge” [sic], a
short story she published within months of “Time’s Androme-
das,” is written in diary form and shows little interest in rec-
onciling itself to the demands of the short-story genre. But the
essays go further even than this short story: a diarist sits down
at the end of a day to select and arrange its events, but in
Bishop’s characterization, Richardson does not even enjoy this
Narrative 135
limited version of authorial privilege, being sworn to a careful

notation of thoughts and sensations as they are triggered by
events, without any omniscient or retrospective selection or
manipulation of order, duration, or frequency. In “Pilgrim-
ages, we don’t know what’s coming next” and “what is more,
Miss Richardson has no clear idea, either” (110).
The implications of this statement are extensive since, as
Ricoeur points out, it is the knowledge of what is coming
next that makes an author an author: a story is “governed as
a whole by its way of ending” and so inverts the “so-called
‘natural’ order of time” that flows simply “from the past to-
ward the future” (1:67–8). The power of retrospection al-
lows the author to identify causes before their effects arise, to
draw “a configuration out of a simple succession” (1:65),
which is the sine qua non of narrative: “[t]o make up a plot
is already to make the intelligible spring from the accidental,
the universal from the singular, the necessary or the probable
from the episodic” (1:41). If “Miss Richardson has no clear
idea” of how her novel ends (110), then she is not really, or
not simply, writing a narrative, and her novel shares more
with real time than narrative time. By aligning the time of
narrating strictly to the narrated time, by refusing to modify
duration, order, or frequency, Richardson eliminates that
part of the author’s function that consists in narrating. She is
still creating the world in which her protagonist moves, and
in this sense she is still writing fiction, but she is doing so in
such a way as to eliminate the appearance of narrative. This
effect is inevitably an illusion – presumably Richardson has a
somewhat clearer idea of what comes next than does her
reader – but she has done as much as possible to pretend oth-
erwise. In this way, Richardson has an impressive claim to
our attention. Not only was the term “stream of conscious-
ness” first used in a literary context to describe her novel
(Allan 4), but, as Bishop’s undergraduate essay makes clear,
she gives the term an unusually pure and literal embodiment.
Bishop’s ideas about eliminating authorial control over time

from a novel’s composition are fairly radical, but, undaunted,
she goes on in the last lines of the essay to “wonder if any one
has ever thought of writing a novel” that, instead of lining up
narrated time and time of narrating on a strictly objective level,
would attempt to portray the “experience-time … in which re-
alities reach us, quite different from the hour after hour, day af-
ter day kind” (119). She illustrates her point with the image of
“boys div[ing] after pennies” that sink “at unequal rates,” so
that “the diving boys sometimes pick them up halfway down,
or even get there before the coins do” (120). Such, she suggests,
is our experience of time, and there is no reason that the days
presented in a fictional world should “retreat systematically –
Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday” and not “any other
way” (120). “Why not,” she asks, “Wednesday, Friday, Tues-
day, if they seem that way to me?” (120). At one point in the
essay she characterizes the events in Richardson’s novels as
snow-flakes that descend “slowly” and “purposefully” (113),
but here she prefers pennies drifting at their own pace. Real
time, which marches by evenly and in its proper order, is re-
jected in favour of something truer to Bishop’s sense of how
time feels to the subjective consciousness.
Bishop’s proposal is to construct a novel that is strictly
bound to this sort of subjective ordering of experience, much
as her version of Richardson’s novel is strictly bound to an
objective ordering of experience. Her novelist would, pre-
sumably, have to invent an objective fictional world, com-
plete with the order, duration, and frequency of its events,
and then record a subjective experience of that world, with
its own order, duration, and frequency of events – no easy
task. Though this idea may sound like a reintroduction of au-
thorial control, like flashbacks in disguise, it is actually a
more complicated notion than that: these pennies are not re-
membered experiences but, rather, the experiences them-
selves being registered, albeit out of order, for the first time.
Narrative 137
By employing such a method, Bishop’s imaginary novel

would remain far truer than Mrs Dalloway to Woolf’s goal
of recording “the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the or-
der in which they fall” and tracing “the pattern, however dis-
connected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or
incident scores upon the consciousness” (150). And so, by
moving beyond even Richardson, Bishop’s imaginary novelist
extends Woolf’s ideas to their logical, if unwieldy, conclusion.
Instead of Richardson’s thoughts, “struck off, spark-like, from
the present,” she substitutes pennies that fall upon the mind in
their own order – like Woolf’s “atoms.”
Hard as it is to imagine such a novel, the added wrinkles
introduced in “Dimensions for a Novel” (which I will not get
into here) push her agenda firmly into the realm of the un-
readable. And an unreadable novel puts Bishop in a bind: if
her goal is a radical verisimilitude, then a novel that alienates
the reader through its incomprehensibility is a failure, which
is why Bishop, as close as she comes, never goes over into the
nouveau roman. As Stephen Heath writes, the nouveau ro-
man is based on the notion that reality “needs to be under-
stood not as an absolute and immutable given but as a
production within which representation will depend on (and,
dialectically, contribute to) what the French Marxist theoreti-
cian Louis Althusser has described as ‘practical ideology’”
(20). The novel, for Robbe-Grillet and others, does not ap-
proach to an objective reality; instead, it is a tool with which
“Reality” is enforced and, therefore, “an area of man’s cap-
tivity” (22). As such, the nouveau roman can reject readabil-
ity since “‘the readable’” is merely “the area in which
[humanity] is held captive” (22). But such rhetoric, like the
rhetoric of the surrealists, is not Bishop’s, and the fact that
her devotion to the accurate depiction of reality leads her to
a similar method is a problem for her.
In “Dimensions for a Novel,” she worries that the very no-
tion of prescribing a fictional method is as “ridiculous as it
would be to make measurements for a suit of clothes and

then grow the body to fit them” (95). But it is not the fact of
prescription that is ridiculous – she would hardly be the first
to issue a manifesto – it is the extreme ambition of the pre-
scription she gives. The suit of clothes for which she wants to
grow a body is shaped in such a manner that no body, or, at
least, no body she is ideologically ready to produce, will fit it.
Not surprisingly, no such novel was forthcoming, and even
Bishop’s short stories, with the exception of “In the Village,”
are relatively conservative in their relationship to time. But
even “In the Village” fails to live up to Bishop’s program: it
is unusual in its shifts of tense and person but normal enough
in its willingness to manipulate time – of the mother, for in-
stance, it is proleptically noted that “[l]ater it was she who
gave the scream” (cpr 251).
But even though these essays on time in the novel do not de-
scribe Bishop’s fiction, they may still provide some interesting
ideas that can be carried through to a discussion of her poetry.
To flesh out the ways in which Bishop’s undergraduate essay
predicts her later writing is the work of the next two chapters,
in which I parlay this initial set of notions into discussions of,
respectively, travel writing and the mental processes of descrip-
tion. Before I do, however, I want to look more immediately at
the question of narrative in Bishop’s poetry in order to demon-
strate how her initially hostile attitude towards it fades over
the course of time. This examination is necessary for the im-
mediate goals of this set of chapters, but it also contributes
something important to the overall trajectory of this study:
evolution. Bishop’s ideas about narrative are another version
of her persistent approach to intellectual binaries. Just as she is
committed to objective, empirical thinking as the only route to
more abstract notions, so is she committed, in “Time’s An-
dromedas,” to realistic time as the only route to fictional
truth. But Bishop’s attitude towards time is one that gradually
relaxes, and that gradual relaxation is an important new
Narrative 139
development for me. The Bishop I have presented so far is rig-

idly committed to her empirical world, but the Bishop that
ends this study is a more flexible thinker. And so these next
few pages set an important precedent for my final chapters.
In the most obvious sense, somewhere around Questions of
Travel, Bishop begins to write narrative poems, and narrative
plays an increasingly important role for her, leading up to the
major accomplishments of “In the Waiting Room” and “The
Moose.” But in a more subtle manner, she moves gradually
from an implicit distrust of the very idea of narrativity to a
much more comfortable relationship to the powers of retro-
spective narration. The trajectory that emerges is a familiar one
of confused youthful ambition fading into mature nonchalance.
After proposing the radical position of “Time’s Andromedas,”
she experiments briefly with an equivalent poetics but eventu-
ally begins to doubt the distinctions that once seemed so clear
and so morally imperative. This doubt brings on questioning
and uncertainty, then a careful, mid-career re-examination of
the whole issue, and eventually a whole new attitude. In what
remains of this chapter, I want to look briefly at the beginning
and the end of this process – the experimentation, the doubt,
and then the comfortable resolution. The middle, the careful re-
examination, occupies the next chapter entirely.
Written sometime in late 1935 or early 1936, “Paris, 7 a.m.”
(cp 26–7) is the closest Bishop ever really comes to realizing
the ideas about narrative in “Time’s Andromedas.” Time, in
the poem’s opening lines, is an ignorant and random thing
without even momentary coherence:
I make a trip to each clock in the apartment:

some hands point histrionically one way
and some point others, from the ignorant faces.
More to the point, however, time moves here in the slow,

Richardsonian manner that Bishop advocates:
Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge

so much that days are journeys round the suburbs.
A composite clock, with a hand pointing to each hour, re-

veals a star-like pattern that reminds Bishop of Paris’s urban
planning and the étoiles in which its streets converge. But
these hours do not converge; they diverge. And so a journey
around the outer perimeter of the clock, the journey that
time makes each day, becomes an immensely extended pil-
grimage around the circumference of Paris. Time, in this
poem, is distended, but not merely, as Bonnie Costello sug-
gests, to “symbolize[] the ennui” of “pointlessly repetitive”
days (179); rather, the slow passage of time allows the
speaker a valuable acuteness of observation:
The short, half-tone scale of winter weathers

is a spread pigeon’s wing.
Winter lives under a pigeon’s wing, a dead wing with damp
feathers.
An array of minute variations, the shades of grey that make

up the “half-tone scale of winter weathers,” is to be found
even within the “dead wing with damp feathers.” Even the
seemingly dull and mundane reveals observations “struck
off, spark-like, from the present.” Narrative would hurry us
past things that deserve description, a Bishopesque observa-
tion if ever there was one.
Conversely, as the poem moves towards “introspection,”
“recollection,” and, tellingly, “retrospection,” Bishop develops
the image of an eternal snow-fort “built in flashier winters,”
“withstanding spring” and growing to “four, five, stories
high.” Stepping outside of time’s forward march, the poem
looks to the possibility of erecting some edifice, some structure
that preserves human artifice, some accomplishment whose
“walls” and “shape” “could not dissolve and die.” Bishop is
Narrative 141
not only bringing up the notion of some human endeavour that

operates against real time but also positing it as an antidote to
change. This acknowledgment of mutability and the defensive
implications of the fort introduce a whole new level of dis-
course into Bishop’s thinking, a recognition that the forward
march of time, to which she has been so devoted, brings with it
change and death. But Bishop has little faith in the defensive ca-
pabilities of her fort, as the next stanza informs us:
Where is the ammunition, the piled-up balls

with the star-splintered hearts of ice?
This sky is no carrier-warrior-pigeon
escaping endless intersecting circles.
Bishop undercuts this option by pointing to its lack of de-

fence – “ammunition” – against time and suggesting that the
winter sky is no “warrior” with the power to resist the “end-
less intersecting circles” of the first stanza’s clock hands.
(Note the pun on “intersection.”) Rather, the sky, and, by
implication, the model of time on which the poem will settle,
is “a dead one,” whose “dead wing with damp feathers” be-
longs to Bishop’s endlessly circling Richardsonian clock.
But the tone of this poem is oddly mournful, and the persis-
tent pairing of Richardsonian time with negative images and
adjectives – “histrionic[],” “ignorant,” “dead,” “damp,” “end-
less” – suggests certain misgivings. The final lines even hint at
its possible defeat, implying that it may have been “captured”
or be “about to tumble in snow.” The reintroduction of the mil-
itary language, together with the snow imagery, suggests that
Richardson’s time may not be triumphant after all and that
Bishop’s grand snowball fight might not have been the simple
rout that slow time expected. Regardless, the poem certainly in-
troduces the negative aspects of time that marches forward, the
suggestion of death and mutability to which so much poetry
holds itself up as an antidote. “Paris, 7 a.m.” engages with the
issues introduced in “Time’s Andromedas,” but it comes to a

much more equivocal decision, if it comes to a decision at all.
“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”
(cp 57–9) takes this equivocation to its logical extreme, mov-
ing into a realm of unsettled desperation and yearning. The ba-
sic structure of the poem points to the conflict between real life
and narrated life: the illustrated book (whether it is a Bible or
an illustrated book of wonders is a matter of some critical dis-
agreement), with its pictures of “serious, engravable” scenes
featuring capitalized attractions – “the Tomb, the Pit, the Sep-
ulcher” – shames the speaker’s own recollected travels with its
claims to significance. “Thus,” she complains, “should have
been our travels.” Lacking the power of retrospection to draw
“a configuration out of a simple succession” (Ricoeur 1:65),
her travels seem almost random, and she complains that they
are “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’” (They are – the sec-
ond stanza is full of sentences beginning with “And”: “And at
St. Peters,” “And at Volubilis,” “And in the brothels of Mar-
rakech.”) Discouraged, the speaker turns once more to “the
book,” “the heavy book,” asking why “couldn’t we have seen
/ this old Nativity” and slipping into a beautifully evocative ek-
phrastic description. The power of narrative representation tri-
umphs over the actual immersion in real life and real time.
Or so it seems. But the book is not unproblematic. As
Thomas Travisano points out, there is a strong sense of the
“limitations of the pictorial technique and artistic achieve-
ment of these engravings” (eb 116):
The branches of the date-palms look like files.

The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry,
is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits
are vast and obvious.
But beyond such faults in the artist’s skill, there is a problem

with the very fact of artistic representation. The speaker’s
Narrative 143
criticisms are organized around the extent to which the ren-

dering is “obvious” or “like a diagram,” the extent to which
it is clearly planned. In the end, the illustrations “all resolve
themselves” as the “eye drops, weighted, through the lines /
the burin made.” Examined closely, the images stand re-
vealed as images, products of a needle scratching tiny lines
into wax. From a distance, the images look solid enough,
but, as the eye moves in, the lines that comprise them “move
apart,” and the pictures are revealed in their “watery pris-
matic white-and-blue”: just as a prism divides solid light into
separately coloured beams, so does careful scrutiny resolve the
seemingly solid images into lines of watery blue ink and
the white spaces that separate them. The closer one looks at
the book, the less significance it seems to have; from com-
plete images representing important things, it dissolves into
individually meaningless lines.
In a strange reversal of this process, the catalogue of travels
that follows is presented as if it were a list of individually
meaningless scenes, “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and,’” and
yet it contains a version of the same Christian story that the
speaker finds in the book: “St. John” appears, as does the An-
nunciation in the form of an “Englishwoman … informing us /
that the Duchess was going to have a baby”; we see “St. Peter”
and Mary Magdalene in the form of “little pockmarked pros-
titutes”; the resurrection is suggested in the near conjunction
of a “dead man” and some “Easter lilies”; and the nativity it-
self shows up in the form of a “marble trough” (a manger is a
feed trough, from the French mangeoire) in which a “poor
prophet paynim” “once lay.” A more careful reading of the
stanza as a whole reveals that the meaning of “our travels,”
like the meaning of the “lines / the burin made,” is greater
than the sum of its parts.
Similarly, a more careful reading of the poem as a whole
shows Bishop pointing out how everything is “only con-
nected by ‘and’ and ‘and’” if one looks closely enough: the
“lines / the burin made,” “our travels,” even the predomi-

nantly paratactic Bible, from which we get the story of the
nativity so movingly described in the last lines. Anything
can be endowed with meaning if read from a sufficient dis-
tance, just as anything can be reduced to a meaningless
jumble if perspective is lacking. In the end, “Over 2,000 Il-
lustrations and a Complete Concordance” becomes a testa-
ment to the universal power of retrospection that elides the
very distinction between real life and narrated life, the dis-
tinction on which everything in “Time’s Andromedas” is
based. Ricoeur points out that there is, for us, no true ac-
cess to real time since “time becomes human time to the ex-
tent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative”
(1:3), and, in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete
Concordance,” Bishop seems to have come around to this
opinion. She even uses her power of description, in those
last lines, to make the reader see “this old Nativity” despite
not having “seen” it herself.
The next step along this path, a careful re-examination of
some of the fundamental concerns at play here, is the subject
of the next chapter, but for now I want to leap over that par-
ticular stage and into the final phase of Bishop’s changing at-
titude towards narrative. Far from the angry young woman
denouncing Realism as a betrayal of reality, the Bishop of
“Santarém” (cp 185–7) engages explicitly and cheerfully in
retrospective narration – and retrospective narration of a
particularly casual sort. The first lines are:
Of course I may be remembering it all wrong

after, after how many years?
The poem is openly the product of a reimagining, and the

speaker makes little if any attempt to separate original knowl-
edge from knowledge acquired since or during the visit. Al-
though the traveller in “Santarém” is apparently visiting the
Narrative 145
town for the first time, the speaker is remarkably well in-
formed about the town’s history, both distant – the influx of
Southerners after the civil war – and recent – lightning striking
the Cathedral a “week or so before” her visit. She is also com-
fortable enough with the language to construct a bilingual
echo on the fact that the Portuguese word for painted tiles,
azulejos, contains the word for blue, azul:
buildings one story high, stucco, blue or yellow,

and one house faced with azulejos, buttercup yellow.
However new Santarém might have been to her all those

years ago, it is familiar to her now, and the poem makes no
attempt to recapture that initial naïveté.
No longer anxious to keep reality and narrative separate,
Bishop allows past and present to “resolve[ ]” and “dissolve[ ].”
As a result, the details of Santarém take on a sort of luminosity
that may or may not have been there in reality. The “blue and
yellow” of those buildings, for example, become almost magi-
cally ubiquitous. The “yellow” spreads to the “buttercup yel-
low” tiles, to the “dark-gold river sand,” and from there to
“golden sand” and “golden sand” (the phrase ends two con-
secutive lines); the “blue” expands from the “stucco” to the
“azulejos,” to the “teams of zebus […] gentle, proud, / and
blue,” to the “blue eyes” of the Southerners’ descendents, and,
finally, to the “blue pharmacy” where the speaker first sees the
wasps’ nest. However magically beautiful a place Santarém
might have been, “Santarém” is much more so.
In “Time’s Andromedas,” Bishop complained of Proust
that “so much thought backwards from a sitting posture, no
matter what wonders it brought to light, must be a sin
against the particular beauties of the passing minute” (110),
and so she preferred Richardson, whose “thoughts are struck
off, spark-like, from the present” (111). But in “Santarém,”
it is permanence that interests her – hence the importance
given to the “empty wasps’ nest” that ends the poem. Not
unlike the snow fort in “Paris, 7 a.m.,” it is “small, exqui-
site, clean matte white, / and hard as stucco.” It also echoes
those “stucco” “buildings one story high,” whose colours
have been taking over the poem, and contrasts with the “bel-
vedere / about to fall into the river” and the “Cathedral”
whose “tower” shows “a widening zigzag crack all the way
down” where it had been “struck by lightning.” The wasps’
nest is a building that lasts where others do not. Like her pri-
vate, half-imaginary version of Santarém, it stays with her,
and, in the process, like Santarém, it assumes a private signif-
icance – to “Mr. Swan” after all, it is just “that ugly thing.”
The key-note of Santarém, for the speaker, is the desire “to
go no farther,” “to stay.” And the wasps’ nest becomes a
home in Santarém that she can, paradoxically, take with her.
This is undoubtedly “a sin against the particular beauties
of the passing minute,” but Bishop’s goals and priorities have
changed over the course of her career. The battles she sought
to join as a young woman no longer seem so crucial in her
late sixties. As an undergraduate, she argued for a new form
of fiction, bound tightly to a realistic feeling of temporal
presentness, but by the end of her career such presentness no
longer seems desirable or even possible. In my next chapter, I
suggest that Questions of Travel can be divided between the
travel poems of the “Brazil” section and the more autobio-
graphical poems of “Elsewhere” and that this division can
also be read as a turning point in Bishop’s career. From
“Elsewhere” onwards, Bishop grows increasingly comfort-
able with the malleability of the past and insists less and less
on the strictures of the present. She begins, with the “Else-
where” poems, to show a greater openness to and interest in
the possibilities of retrospective narration, to the poet’s
power to shape reality to her own ends. By the time of “San-
tarém,” such reshaping has become so much the norm that
she begins the poem with a shrug of the shoulders, admitting
Narrative 147
quite cheerfully that she may be “remembering it all wrong.”

In her youth, Bishop thought such an attitude weak and
backward, but, reading through these various poems written
at various points in her career, we can see her losing that ini-
tial rigidity. From the young revolutionary who could dismiss
Proust in such an offhand manner, Bishop matures into the poet
whose elegant insouciance fills the poems of Geography III, the
poet who cheerfully presents
art “copying from life” and life itself,

life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which? (cp 177)
7
Travel
Located somewhere between the youthful ambition of

“Time’s Andromedas” and the mature relaxation of “San-
tarém,” the three poems that begin Questions of Travel
present a turning point and a resolution of sorts. Explicitly,
these poems are about travel, not time or narrative, but, as
my choice of poems in the previous chapter suggests,
travel, time, and narrative are not entirely unrelated: “Over
2,000 Illustrations” and “Santarém” are openly about
travel, and “Paris, 7 a.m.,” is set – and was written – in a
foreign city. Granted, Bishop wrote many poems that en-
gage either directly or indirectly with travel, and any ran-
dom sample of three poems could well come out like this
one, but there is more than coincidence at play here. In the
preceding chapter, I argued that the young Bishop sees in
Richardson an author with “no clear idea” of how her
novel ends (110), who tries to leave behind the very thing
that separates narrative and reality. Narrative is narrative
because it “draws a configuration” out of the “simple suc-
cession” that is reality (Ricoeur 1:65); such a configuration
needs, as Aristotle suggests, “a beginning, a middle, and an
end” so as to present “a single action, whole and complete
in itself” (57–8). Travel writing, however, occupies an in-
teresting middle ground between narrative and reality, and,
Travel 149
as such, it provides a particularly attractive model for

Bishop in her quest for a form of writing suspended be-
tween these opposing poles.
Tzvetan Todorov defines the “first important feature of”
travel writing as a tension between “travel” and “narrative”
(293). The genre is made up of both “objective description”
and “personal narration,” and so it occupies a middle ground
between “science” and “autobiography,” resulting from “the
fusion of the two” (293). Todorov’s definition helps to explain
why a writer interested in creating a form of literature that
clings closely to the temporal and intellectual experience of re-
ality – a literature of description – would be attracted to travel
and travel writing. It also provides a useful framework within
which to think about Bishop’s third collection. Questions of
Travel is divided neatly between travel writing (“Brazil”) and
autobiography (“Elsewhere,” which included “In the Village”
in its original printing). As David Kalstone points out, while
there might be “connections” between “the orphaned child in
Nova Scotia and the adult observer in Brazil,” the “Brazilian
poems themselves resist narrative explanations and links be-
tween present and past” (214). Rather, these travel poems “re-
cord an awakening to a world almost as if Bishop had no
previous history; they are ‘life studies’ in a new transparent
key, the bright C major of discovery in the present tense” (214).
Kalstone’s biographical method and his desire to see Questions
of Travel as influenced by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies lead
him to read the Brazilian poems as a new form of autobiogra-
phy (“‘life studies’ in a new transparent key”) rather than an
existing genre that shares a border with autobiography. If,
however, we can rid the term “life studies” of its confessional
baggage, returning to its original painterly meaning, we get a
perceptive description of the method Bishop applies in “Bra-
zil”: a form of perception suspended evenly between autobiog-
raphy and science, partaking fully of neither, a study of life as it
is discovered moment to moment in the present tense.
But to describe travel writing in terms of “the bright C major

of discovery” is to romanticize it, to assume that travel in-
volves, and that travel writing transmits, an immediate appre-
hension of reality. However, as Paul Fussell points out, there
are different types of travellers: “the explorer” who “seeks the
undiscovered”; the “traveler” proper, who seeks “that which
has been discovered by the mind working in history”; and the
“tourist,” who is interested only in “that which has been dis-
covered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts
of mass publicity” (Abroad 39). Fussell’s distinction between
exploring the unknown and touring the expected implies differ-
ent degrees of immersion in reality and different relations to the
narrative urge: while the explorer might be “awakening to a
world … in the present tense,” the tourist prefigures experi-
ence, emplotting it in advance. Tourism, then, falls into place
alongside Realist fiction as an activity that is necessarily bound
to foreknowledge, that attempts to bring time under control, to
plan the future with an eye to eventual retrospection. Explora-
tion, in turn, becomes the equivalent of Bishop’s impossible
novel: a pure immersion in the present tense.
In Bishop’s art, as in life, the purity of exploration is not a
practical option. Just as her impossible novel never comes to
be, the age of exploration, if it ever really existed, is long
past, and the scope of inquiry is reduced to the conflict be-
tween tourist and traveller. In Todorov’s terms, science is
eliminated, and the relevant border is the one between travel
writing and autobiography. Bishop’s exploration of this bor-
der, of this conflict, is most evident in the first three poems of
Questions of Travel, which are, as Kalstone suggests, “poems
of method” (214). Insofar as they take up and examine a se-
ries of questions and ideas about travel and, by extension,
travel writing, the central issue around which they turn is the
conflict between the intellectual habits of the tourist and the
traveller. But this conflict, in turn, reflects the larger concerns
about the relationship between time and writing that informs
Travel 151
her work in any number of ways. And beyond even those

concerns lies the familiar intellectual model of intense scru-
tiny leading to a given epiphany that colours all of Bishop’s
work. In this chapter, then, I speak in terms of tourist and
traveller, but, in so doing, I speak also to my larger ongoing
examination of time and narrative, empirical and abstract,
scrutiny and epiphany.
To speak in terms of tourist and traveller, however, is to
use Fussell’s terms, and Fussell’s terms imply Fussell’s values.
Yet Fussell is fully invested in what Casey Blanton calls “the
idea of travel as a symbolic act, heavy with promises of new
life, progress, and the thrill of escape” (18), and it is this idea
that makes possible both his elevation of the genuine travel-
ler over the artificial tourist and his elegiac notion that
“travel is hardly possible anymore” (Abroad 37). More re-
cently, however, as the very idea of the “genuine” has begun
to look questionable, scholars such as Jonathon Culler have
argued that such an exalted notion of travel is merely a fic-
tion dear to the tourist’s heart: the “desire to distinguish be-
tween tourists and real travelers is a part of tourism … other
travelers are always tourists” (156–7). For Culler, since the
traveller looks forward to experiencing the unexpected, the
very notion of the unexpected is undone, and travel is every
bit as subject to the prefiguring logic of signification as any-
thing else: a voyage of discovery is a narrative the traveller
hopes to live out. For Fussell, there are no more travellers be-
cause the tourist industry has driven them to extinction; for
Culler there never were travellers because all travellers are re-
ally tourists.
“Arrival at Santos,” “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” and “Ques-
tions of Travel” negotiate between these two opposing mod-
els. Bishop refuses to dismiss either the tourist as a degraded
traveller or the traveller as a touristic fiction. There is, in
Bishop’s world, such a thing as the genuinely unexpected, but
she realizes that there is a paradox inherent in setting out to
find it. Writing decades before either Culler or Fussell, Bishop

is able to treat both traveller and tourist with dubious equa-
nimity in such a way that the first three poems of Questions of
Travel foreshadow both Fussell’s Romanticism and Culler’s
debunking of it. These poems present a set of reflections on the
interrelationship of tourist and traveller, working slowly to-
wards a satisfying truce between opposing impulses and com-
ing to a resting point that enables Bishop to write the more
relaxed narrative poetry of her later years.
The vacillations in tone and attitude that characterize these
three poems occupy the rest of this chapter, but a preliminary
sketch looks something like this: In “Arrival at Santos,”
Bishop begins by opposing tourist and traveller within the
speaker herself. Finding Brazil disappointing at first and then
briefly and unexpectedly fascinating, the speaker embodies
each of these conflicting attitudes in turn. The tourist, how-
ever, reasserts herself at the poem’s end and carries through
to “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” “Brazil” uses colonialism as a
metaphor for the mental habits of the tourist, and the poem
represents tourism’s nadir. “Questions of Travel” enacts a
tentative resolution to the speaker’s dilemma by moving from
confusion, through self-doubt, to a tentative but lyrical justi-
fication of both travel and tourism. By setting it out in this
manner, I do not mean to imply that all three poems are to be
read as the words of one speaker at several distinct chrono-
logical points. Although such a reading is certainly inviting
and plausible enough, I am more comfortable reading them
as illustrations set forth in support of an argument. Rather
than read the poems as the words of “Elizabeth Bishop” in
Brazil, I prefer to read them as poems written by Elizabeth
Bishop about her travels in Brazil.
The first of these poems, “Arrival at Santos” (cp 89–90), is
deceptively dense, shifting rapidly and radically among a vari-
ety of tones and attitudes as it examines the speaker’s reaction
to the disappointing experience offered by her first glimpse of
Travel 153
Brazil. In order to make sense of the poem, it is crucial to map

out both the straightforward pronominal shifts – from “you”
to “I” to “we” – and the more convoluted and subtle shifts in
tone and treatment. The poem is made up of three main sec-
tions, each of which uses a different set of pronouns in order
to depict a different moment of reaction and a different aspect
of the speaker’s feelings about what she is or is not experienc-
ing. The first section examines the initial disappointment of
the expectant tourist arriving in a less than astonishing land
and dissects this attitude with gentle, self-critical humour. The
second section focuses on a moment of genuine surprise as the
speaker realizes that Brazil is an autonomous nation as well as
a travel destination. The third and most complicated section
sees the speaker and her “fellow passenger,” Miss Breen, reas-
serting their original touristic expectations despite the disap-
pointing and somewhat threatening reality of Santos.
The first of the poem’s three sections – from the beginning
to “Finish your breakfast” – addresses the very first moment
of arrival and the initial inspection of the approaching coast-
line. The sight is clearly disappointing, but the speaker’s tone
is gently teasing as it attempts to put the disappointment into
perspective. The first line – “Here is a coast; here is a har-
bor” – sets a tone of eager, almost child-like excitement. The
nursery-rhyme rhythm echoes that of the children’s game of
“here is a church; here is a steeple,” and the short, simple
declarations of fact suggest a state of mind that is not entirely
composed and mature. The speaker, starved after her “mea-
ger diet of horizon,” is desperate for something – anything –
to look at, which makes the “sad and harsh” view of the
“impractically shaped” and “self-pitying” mountains all the
more disappointing.
But by casting this disappointment as a product of childish
over-excitement, Bishop maintains a relatively light tone. The
parenthetical “–who knows?–” that precedes her personifi-
cation of the mountains as “self-pitying” suggests that the
speaker sees the humour in the situation and uses the person-
ification as a way of making light of it. She is disappointed,
but it is a disappointment born of her own unreasonable ex-
pectation, for which she gently upbraids herself:
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?
The use of the second person shows a degree of self-reflection

and self-criticism that will be lacking later in the poem. She
recognizes in herself the “immodest demands” of what she
calls the “tourist” and gently pushes them away through self-
apostrophe. She separates out the childish tourist in herself,
who would try to read a new land through a familiar rhyme,
and implies, through the gentle mocking tone of this opening
passage, a knowing, almost parental indulgence of this per-
sona. She ends this parent/child dynamic, as she ends this sec-
tion, with the curt command, “finish your breakfast.” The
tone of reprimand suggests that such antics are tolerable, but
only briefly, and that the time for them is now through, that
the tourist persona is now to be set aside. This line also picks
up on the “meager diet” imagery of the first stanza, recasting
it as a visual fast that the speaker is breaking. In this way the
entire episode of initial excitement, disappointment, and self-
criticism is relegated to an early morning episode to be swept
aside, the cranky fussing of a hungry child.
As the second section of the poem begins, the speaker, suit-
ably chastened, sets her touristic expectations aside and be-
gins to use the first person singular. The explicit trigger for
the change seems to be the approaching tender, the descrip-
tion of which – “a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange
Travel 155
and brilliant rag” – is considerably more lyrical in tone than

what has come before, more in keeping with what one might
expect of a poem about arriving in the strange land of Brazil.
The repetition and the graceful rhythm put an unusual em-
phasis on this one line, and the choice of adjectives –
“strange,” “ancient,” and “brilliant,” as opposed to “sad,”
“feeble,” or “uncertain” – verges on the discourse of the
sublime. But, oddly, this heightened tone is triggered by pro-
saic content: as it turns out, “this country” intends to “an-
swer” her differently than she had expected – with the
functional tender rather than with magnificent landscapes.
The sight of the flag triggers in her a set of new thoughts
about this more mundane side of Brazil, and she admits to
never having “thought of there being a flag.” After this sur-
prising realization, she goes on to “presume” that there are
also “coins” and “paper money,” punning, perhaps, on the
word “tender.” As she begins to consider the simple things –
a flag, currency – that make Brazil a country in its own right,
she moves tonally into a straightforward mode of unself-
conscious asides. The sentences become shorter and simpler,
approximating a series of internal realizations, and the poem
assumes an air of transparency, of direct, real-time insight
into the speaker’s consciousness.
So, to this point, the poem charts the speaker’s initial reac-
tions to Brazil, and as it does so, it sets up a development, a
transition from the speaker’s tourist side to her traveller side,
which also entails a motion from an initial disappointment
with the landscape through a growing interest in Brazil’s
daily life, from childishness to maturity, from self-critique to
unself-consciousness, from the second person to the first.
Through all of this, and especially through her use of pro-
nouns, she presents a relatively clear, Fussellian preference, a
sense that the traveller is her real self and that tourism is
merely a weakness that she succumbs to on occasion, or, tak-
ing the child imagery into account, a sense that tourism is a
stage in the development of the traveller. The first two sec-

tions of the poem have a real sense of progress, of internal
growth and growing engagement, and the reader might ex-
pect that, with the touristic false start now over, the speaker
might settle into a more familiarly Bishopesque examination
of whatever Brazil has to offer.
Instead, the speaker shifts pronouns again and begins to
slip back into old habits. From this point on, the poem oper-
ates in the first person plural, the “we” composed of “myself
and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,” and with Miss
Breen’s introduction, the touristic attitude is reintroduced
into the poem. Miss Breen is presented entirely as a product
of her home environment. The reader is told what she did for
a living, and where she lives “when she is at home,” but
never why she is abroad or where she might be going – un-
like, for example, Mr Swan, Bishop’s “fellow-passenger” in
“Santarém,” who “want[s] to see the Amazon before he
die[s]” (cp 187). Miss Breen, of “Glens Fall // s, New York,”
is a small piece of America that the speaker carries with her,
like her “bourbon and cigarettes.” But more than that, she
introduces a sense of control and safety that accords more
with tourism than with travel. The speaker’s emphasis on
Miss Breen’s comforting Americanness, her size (“six feet
tall”), and her profession (“police lieutenant”) suggests a
certain fear, a retreat in the face of a new and intimidating re-
ality. As such, Miss Breen is described in terms that oppose
her directly to their new surroundings. Her expression is
“kind,” unlike that of the “self-pitying … sad and harsh”
mountains. Like the palms of the first stanza, she is tall (“six
feet”), but in the forceful manner of a “retired police lieuten-
ant” rather than their gawky “uncertain” way. And while
her eyes are blue like the warehouses, they are a “bright”
rather than a “feeble … blue.” Miss Breen embodies the atti-
tudes and ideas that the speaker brings with her, and so the
speaker’s attempt to present her as better and stronger than
Travel 157
Brazil marks a desperate return to the touristic attitude of the

poem’s first section.
And so it is not surprising that Miss Breen finds herself un-
der attack from the boy with the boat hook. Just as the
speaker was shocked to find a flag and currency, Miss Breen
is assaulted by the very mundane economic business of load-
ing coffee beans onto freighters. As the assault begins, the
speaker slips into an unusually prim tone, using “boy” as a
form of address and an old-fashioned verb form with “do” –
“Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!” This
propriety extends into the next stanza, where the speaker dis-
tracts the reader from Miss Breen as her skirt is lifted up by
the boat hook. The hook catches her skirt – “There!” – and
the speaker quickly launches into a description of her. By the
time the description is finished, the skirt has been freed –
“There” – and they “are settled.” The resolution takes place
off-stage, and the effect is almost one of sleight-of-hand, es-
pecially with the neat trick that Bishop pulls by delaying the
“s” at the end of “Glens Fall // s.”
The attack forces the speaker to choose sides, as it were,
and by protecting Miss Breen from prying eyes in this way,
the speaker chooses tourism. Though there is, if only
briefly, a moment of comfortable reflection, the novelty of
Brazil proves too terrifying, and the boat hook incident so-
lidifies the battle lines, bringing out a newly indignant tone
in the speaker, together with an obvious satisfaction in be-
ing “settled” that does not agree with the openness that
travel requires. Miss Breen, by her very presence, has the ef-
fect of drawing the speaker out of herself, of taking her
away from the open reflections that characterized the more
travel-like second section of the poem. It may be too much
to say that the addition of Miss Breen turns the solitary
traveller into a tour group, but her presence transforms the
“I” into “we,” and this “we,” in turn, becomes an “us” un-
der attack by “them.”
Indeed, throughout the last three stanzas, there is no separa-

tion between the speaker and her travelling companion; there is
no “me,” no “Miss Breen,” but only “we” and “us.” As the
tourists close ranks against Brazil, the tone shifts towards a
world-weary litany of stereotypically touristic complaints: “the
heat,” the “inferior[ity]” of local products (in this case, the
glue), the fact that the local officials may not “speak English,”
and the risk of their taking away “our bourbon and ciga-
rettes.” From the heights of this new attitude, Santos is both
dismissed and forgiven for its poor showing since ports “are
necessities, like postage stamps, or soap, // but they seldom
seem to care what impression they make.” In an unusually in-
distinct simile, Bishop suggests that places
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.
The unimpressiveness of Santos dissolves into a simile whose

precise referent becomes obscure: what is it that wastes away
like soap and slips like stamps? is it Santos itself? ports more
generally? the impression that Santos leaves? the colours it at-
tempts? As the speaker’s eye loses interest in Santos, her preci-
sion slips. Though she began by counting the “twenty-six
freighters” being loaded with “green coffee beans,” she de-
scends, here, to a generalized, if evocative, wave of dismissal as
she and her companion “leave Santos at once,” “driving to the
interior,” which will, presumably “care what impression” it
makes. From that brief moment of true, almost Darwinian, ob-
servation, the speaker has descended to a careless abstraction
that reveals nothing about what she describes.
In one way, the poem has come full circle, and the tourist
with her “immodest demands” comes out once again. Santos
stands in for all of Brazil’s disappointing reality, which becomes
Travel 159
an unpleasant chore one must suffer through in order to expe-

rience whatever attractions it might contain. But even as the
nursery-rhyme tones of the first line reappear in the ternary feet
and internal rhyme of “the letters we wrote on the boat,” the
attitude they imply has changed. The innocence of the opening
line is lost somewhere in the poem’s development, and the
hard, defensive arrogance of the speaker’s attitude comes from
a very real sense of fear and isolation. Her letters, after all, with
their slippery stamps, may not be delivered, and the interior, for
all its potential touristic interest, is further still from home. The
tone may try to approximate the nursery rhythms of the first
line, but too much has occurred to make that truly possible.
Over the course of the poem, the implications of tourism
change from ignorance to arrogance, from a cheerful hopeful-
ness to an embattled defensiveness. The poem no longer pres-
ents a gentle self-mockery of the touristic outlook but, rather, a
(perhaps understandably) frightened embrace of it.
“Brazil, January 1, 1502” (cp 91–2) picks up on this
change. I spend some time discussing this poem in my next
chapter and so will not dwell on it here at any length, except
to look at how it interacts with “Arrival at Santos.” That
Bishop intended the two poems to be read together is clear
from the dating of “Arrival.” As it first appeared in The New
Yorker and A Cold Spring, it was not dated at all. However,
when Bishop chose to reprint it at the beginning of Questions
of Travel, and in the Complete Poems, she dated it “January,
1952,” even though she arrived at Santos in November of
1951 (Millier 240). The attractively round 450-year gap be-
tween the two arrivals and the echoing repetitions of the word
January – “January, 1952,” “January 1,” “Januaries” – sug-
gest a possible connection between the “we” who are “driving
to the interior” at the end of “Arrival at Santos” and the “us”
whose eyes “Nature greets” in “Brazil, January 1.” As such, it
is tempting to read “Brazil, January 1,” with its initial focus
on dense foliage, as a description of “the interior” of Brazil.
But “Brazil, January 1” is also a coastal poem: its eponymous

date is that on which the Portuguese first made land at Guana-
bara Bay. And so it does not make sense to read “Brazil, Janu-
ary 1” as coming after “Arrival” in such a literal sense. Rather,
both poems present “our” arrival; they merely present different
versions of it. “Brazil, January 1” is about the interior but not
the interior of Brazil; it is about what Bonnie Costello calls, in
her reading of “Arrival,” “the elusive interior of [the speaker
and Miss Breen’s] minds” (142).
Where “Arrival at Santos” is an honest account of disap-
pointment, “Brazil, January 1” is an imagined account of sat-
isfaction. As I argue in my next chapter, it is less a poem about
Brazil than a poem about “Brazil,” cut from the whole cloth
of the speaker’s imagination. As such, it can be read as a por-
trait of the psychological process with which “Arrival at San-
tos” ends. “Arrival” works its way towards ignoring the fact
of Santos itself, dismissing it as a “port,” a “necessit[y],” and
locating the real “Brazil” elsewhere; “Brazil, January 1” is a
poem that never even considers the real Brazil, choosing in-
stead to see only what it wants to see. Read together in this
way, the two poems present a rather forceful indictment of the
mental habits that tourism endorses, going so far as to liken
them to imperial conquest. This may sound somewhat exces-
sive, but the link between travel and empire is one that ap-
pears often enough in the scholarship that surrounds travel
writing, and critics have spent a great deal of time examining
the “relationships of culture and power found in the settings,
encounters, and representations of travel texts” and suggesting
that travel writing offers “particular insights into the opera-
tion of colonial discourses” (Hulme and Youngs 8). Bishop,
however, is not enacting or dissecting colonial discourse but,
rather, suggesting that some of the tourist’s intellectual habits
are similar to those of empire, using empire as a metaphor for
tourism. This distinction is in many ways crucial, and it would
be a stretch to suggest that Bishop considers the traveller or
Travel 161
the travel writer to be inherently complicit in oppression. Em-

pire is an illustration, a way of showing the tourist exagger-
ated ad absurdum.
These two poems work together to expose a set of intellec-
tual patterns in which Bishop’s speaker is implicated, but
Bishop does not allow herself the luxury of condescension:
the tone of “Arrival at Santos” is indulgent, and the speaker
is presented as an intelligent and interesting individual, de-
spite certain unattractive characteristics. I point this out be-
cause there is a critical tendency to read Bishop as entirely
critical of, and therefore free from the taint of, colonialism.
Cynthia Messenger, for instance, suggests that, after creating
“what is almost a kinship with the conquerors” at the begin-
ning of “Brazil, January 1,” Bishop severs “any ties with
them through the surrealism of the closing images” and “ex-
presses her disgust with the raging conquerors and by impli-
cation with the imperial mentality” (107). To say that Bishop
“expresses her disgust” is not strictly true, and in fact the
speaker stays close to the Christians’ point of view through-
out the poem, as the characterization of “those maddening
little women” suggests. Similar problems mar both Bonnie
Costello and Thomas Travisano’s otherwise perceptive read-
ings of “Arrival at Santos”: Costello argues that the ending
“rises above its parodic speaker” (eb 141), and Travisano
suggests that the poem’s “most incisive irony is directed … at
the traveler” (137). Although the desire to read these poems
as open indictments of tourism and colonialism is under-
standable, it is unnecessary, and, more importantly, it misses
the point. There is no need to argue that Bishop is, in reality,
critical of the colonial Portuguese since the poem functions
precisely through its failure to condemn them: by refusing to
allow her speaker to criticize Miss Breen or the Portuguese,
and by giving that speaker a reasonably sympathetic voice,
Bishop shows a level of nuance that moves beyond Fussell’s
schema. The point of these poems is not to condemn the
tourist (or colonist) but to work towards a full and accurate

understanding of how tourist and traveller relate.
In “Questions of Travel” (cp 93–4), Bishop brings tourist
and traveller together again, reminding us that they are
merely different aspects of the same consciousness and argu-
ing for the first time that each has its proper place. The poem
begins with a frank acknowledgment of the strangeness of
Brazil’s otherworldly landscape. The line between earth and
sky is blurred as the “clouds on the mountaintops” “spill
over the sides in soft slow-motion” and turn into “water-
falls.” The line between sky and sea is equally blurred: the
mountaintops poking out above the clouds look like “the
hulls of capsized ships, / slime hung and barnacled.” This im-
age of the capsized ships is, barring the title, the first explicit
indication of travel, and it is a strange one in that it implies
stranding – the end of travel. The speaker seems stuck in an
alien landscape with “too many waterfalls,” where “the
crowded streams / hurry too rapidly.” Nothing is as it should
be, the tourist seems to have received more of the unexpected
than she bargained for, and the first question of travel to oc-
cur is the simplest of all: “Should we have stayed at home
and thought of here?” Such a question can have only one an-
swer, but Bishop takes an entire poem, and a long one by her
standards, to provide it, which suggests that “Questions of
Travel” presents a final reckoning for her, a final resolution
of the conflict between the tourist and the traveller.
The impetus for travel in this poem seems resolutely touris-
tic: the desire to see “the sun the other way around” or the “ti-
niest green hummingbird in the world” or “some inexplicable
old stonework.” Planning in advance, the traveller travels to
see spectacular sights, “instantly seen, and always, always de-
lightful.” As in “Arrival at Santos,” doing so is a form of
“childishness,” and, as in both “Arrival at Santos” and “Bra-
zil, January 1, 1502,” it is portrayed as more a product of the
imagination than reality: the speaker characterizes these things
Travel 163
as both “a play” and “our dreams.” In the final image of the

second stanza, the characterization of tourism reaches its peak:
asking if there is “room / for one more folded sunset, still quite
warm,” the speaker summons up the image of fresh laundry
stored in a closet and exposes this sort of travel as an attempt
to store up sights like linen, a reduction of the diversity and
strangeness of the world to a domestic familiarity. This second
stanza reprises a number of terms and ideas from the first two
poems of the series, and, to this point, “Questions of Travel”
functions as a conclusion to the argument about travel and
tourism advanced in them, exposing the touristic impulse as the
opposite of Bishop’s usual poetics of scrutiny and description,
with its embrace of whatever the world may present.
The third stanza, however, moves beyond this indictment,
arguing that even a trip begun with dubious motives can have
worthwhile results. A number of the things listed in the second
stanza are reworked in the third: the “strangers in a play” be-
come trees “gesturing / like noble pantomimists”; the “tiniest
green hummingbird” becomes “the fat brown bird / who sings
above the broken gasoline pump”; and the “inexplicable old
stonework” becomes the bird’s cage, a “bamboo church of Je-
suit baroque.” All of these things, together with the “wooden
clogs / carelessly clacking,” are located along the “road” or at
the “filling-station.” And, in locating them there, Bishop an-
swers her earlier speaker’s dismissal of such “necessities” as
“ports” and “stop[ping] for gas.” Similarly, she also learns to
find value in things whether they “care what impression they
make,” like the “careful and finicky … wooden cage,” or not,
like the “disparate wooden clogs,” un-“tested” for “identical
pitch.” The “connection” between the “crudest wooden foot-
wear” and “the whittled fantasies of wooden cages,” the very
question of what any given culture might choose to care about
or not, presents itself to be “pondered, / blurr’dly and incon-
clusively” (rather than “complete[ly] comprehen[ded] … im-
mediately”). The speaker has stopped rushing from attraction
to attraction, ignoring or dismissing what comes between, and

settled into a more familiarly Bishopesque pattern of reacting
carefully to the world as it reveals itself.
Or, to follow the thinking of this poem more closely, she
has learned to appreciate the world as it reveals itself, while
rushing from attraction to attraction. For Bishop is not dis-
missing tourism entirely. In answer to the self-critical ques-
tions of the second stanza – “Should we have stayed at
home?” “Is it right to be watching strangers … ?” “What
childishness is it … ?” – she answers that it “would have
been a pity” not to have seen what she sees in the third
stanza. The implication is, in Fussell’s terms, that the touris-
tic impulse is redeemed by the way that it enables travel; if
clogs and fat birds were all that Brazil had to offer, no one
would ever go there. In “Arrival at Santos” she lays out the
tourist/traveller distinction as, at least partially, a develop-
ment or growth from childishness to maturity. Here, she
picks that development up again, framing tourism as an early
stage of travel, the initial mindset that gives way to the more
open and mature ways of the traveller. This development
marks a large step not only within the world of these three
poems but also within the larger schema of Bishop’s think-
ing. It posits a new openness to goals, a new willingness to
admit that a true disinterested Darwinian observation cannot
exist, that no concentration is perfectly useless.
Having arrived at the conclusion that the touristic urge im-
pels the traveller for better or for worse, Bishop takes a step
backward and depicts the traveller examining the source of
that particular urge. She presents a miniature debate, embod-
ied in two complicated rhetorical questions that present al-
ternative arguments about the source of travel. Her first
tentative explanation is couched in ironical paradox:
“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Travel 165
This question provides a particularly negative explanation of

travel: the traveller, insufficiently imaginative to travel men-
tally, is forced to seek out the real places behind his or her men-
tal images. Unfortunately, however, it is “imagined places”
that the traveller seeks rather than real ones, the mental images
and not their source, hence the potential for the disappoint-
ment expressed in “Arrival at Santos” or for the blindness to
reality depicted in “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” This particular
explanation of the urge to travel is hardly flattering, but it is
relatively clear in its implications, and it plays well into the
Fussellian terms that Bishop has been playing with throughout
these poems.
The next question is more complicated:
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one’s room?
It is hard to know what exactly in Pascal is being questioned

here, and this presents a major crux in the poem. Presum-
ably, what Bishop has in mind is Pascal’s assertion that
“men’s many worries and the perils and sadnesses to which
they expose themselves” are the “result of one single thing,
which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room” (39).
Pascal is looking at things in a more universal way, thinking
not of a trip to Brazil but of everything from “the court” and
“warfare” to “conversation” and the “distractions of gam-
ing” (39). He seems critical of the general restlessness of hu-
manity, of our inability to be satisfied with what we have and
where we are. To that extent, he sounds a great deal like the
implied speaker of the first question, but Bishop’s traveller is
asking whether Pascal could be “not entirely right,” and the
effect is a qualification of her own initial position. Pascal is
used as a reductio ad absurdum of her own argument, the
completely static endpoint of the sort of questioning in which
she is engaged. The two sentences then exist as a proposition
and a qualification: we travel only for a fault in ourselves,

but it would be excessive never to leave home for this reason.
Such a reading agrees with the general thrust of the poem,
beginning with an attitude that is critical of the source of
travel but then reasserting the validity of the act itself.
But it may be more complicated than that. Pascal goes on
to qualify his initial assertion, claiming that the “the fact that
play and women’s conversation, war, the great endeavours
are so sought after” is a product of “the natural misfortune
of our weak and mortal condition, a condition so miserable
that nothing can console us if we think about it too much”
(39–40). Such things do not “actually produce any happi-
ness,” but “the bustle distracts us and keeps us from think-
ing” (40). Pascal’s larger point provides a new reading of the
speaker’s “lack of imagination.” We cannot just sit in our
rooms because we lack the imagination to distract ourselves
from our own mortality. All human activity, then, however
futile it might seem, is part of the effort we make to distract
ourselves. Pascal’s example is the hunt. It is, of course,
“hardly reasonable to spend all day chasing after a hare that
one wouldn’t want to buy” (40), but that is hardly the point.
Similarly, it might seem childish that, “while there’s a breath
of life / in our bodies, we are determined to rush / to see the
sun the other way around,” but that may also hardly be the
point. In this sense, there is no real distinction between tour-
ist and traveller; it hardly matters whether the sights and
sounds are expected (“imagined places”) or not so long as
they keep us moving.
Read in this way, with a fuller understanding of what the
reference to Pascal implies, the speaker’s self-questioning
takes on a much darker, more serious tone, all the more so
since she is questioning Pascal’s conclusion. Pascal is not crit-
ical of the hunter, who is only a victim of “our nature,” but
of “those who philosophize upon this and who think the
world hardly reasonable” (40). The fear of mortality is
Travel 167
hardly unreasonable, in which case it is unkind to label the

traveller an escapist. But by questioning Pascal on this front,
Bishop turns that argument around, asking not that we ex-
cuse all amusements equally but, rather, that we condemn
them. With this more complete reading of Pascal, the syntax
of those two questions changes, and the “Or” that joins
them takes on a less oppositional sense: rather than a propo-
sition and a limiting qualification, the two questions become
alternate ways of dismissing travel. They then mean some-
thing more like this: we travel because we cannot handle our
own mortality; Pascal finds such behaviour understandable
and excusable, but he may have been wrong to do so.
This stanza is hardly clear to begin with, and I fear that, by
presenting these two distinct readings, I have only made it
less so. If Bishop intends the reader to stop at the simpler
reading, then the stanza is kept in balance: one question crit-
ical of travel opposed to one critical of not travelling. Alter-
nately, assuming that she means to reject Pascal’s larger
argument against just sitting quietly in one’s room, Bishop
presents a second argument against travel, although the spe-
cific grounds on which she questions Pascal are left unex-
plained. There are strong arguments for both readings. The
simpler one provides a more natural reading of the syntax,
and its balance and self-questioning are in a general way
more characteristic of Bishop. The more complicated read-
ing, however, gives Bishop credit for a fuller engagement
with Pascal (or shows her giving her reader credit for a fuller
engagement with Pascal), and it also accords with a tendency
she has of ending poems with intensely convoluted and delib-
erately irresolvable statements. It is also hard to imagine that
someone with Bishop’s interest in the “element of mortal
panic and fear underlying all works of art” (cpr 144) would
fail to notice and engage with Pascal’s argument about “the
natural misfortune of our weak and mortal condition.” And
so I am hesitant to prefer one reading to the other.
A certain amount of confusion may be intended, however.

This is not, after all, Bishop speaking, nor her speaker, but
“the traveller” writing a series of questions in “a notebook.”
By presenting them in both italics and quotation marks,
Bishop pushes these two stanzas far from any authoritative
voice and casts them as inherently provisional. Any sugges-
tion of a consistent argument or line of reasoning dissolves in
the last stanza of the poem:
Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?” (Her ellipsis)
Is it the choice of destination or of origin that is not free? and,

either way, what does that imply? What was going to follow
that “here, or there”? Why was it so decisively cut off? There
is no clear answer to these questions, and this elliptical passage
is followed not by a strong concluding remark but by a re-
statement of the basic question that first arises near the begin-
ning of the second stanza – “Should we have stayed at home”
– with the added uncertainty as to the location of “home.” If
we try to read the poem as a whole, as the coherent develop-
ment and statement of a single position, we are bound to be
disappointed or, worse, to try to force a resolution on those
confused last lines. Instead, it is crucial to remember the dis-
tinctions of voice and, further, to be sure to reinscribe that fi-
nal question, all of those final questions, into the long
rhetorical chain that begins in the first line of the third stanza –
“But surely it would have been a pity / not to have …” Subor-
dinated to this proposal, the confused jottings of the traveller
become a part of the total experience of travel, along with
“hear[ing] / the sad, two-noted, wood tune / of disparate
wooden clogs” and “stud[ying] history in / the weak calligra-
phy of songbirds’ cages” – another of the many things that
“surely it would have been a pity” not to have done.
Travel 169
In the end, we do get a not-unexpected answer to the ques-

tion of whether or not we should have stayed at home, “wher-
ever that may be.” What is striking, however, about this poem,
and about these three poems read as a group, is how very seri-
ously Bishop is willing to examine a question that she can re-
ally only answer in one way. She subjects travel to an
unusually close scrutiny, loading the dice against it so as to test
it as thoroughly as possible. She brings up the distinction be-
tween tourist and traveller in “Arrival at Santos,” but, unlike
Fussell, she does not use tourism as a scapegoat or a sub-
category to which she can exile all the less attractive elements
of travel. Instead, she presents the traveller as, first and fore-
most, a tourist, a creature who shares certain intellectual pat-
terns with the Portuguese conquerors in “Brazil, January 1,
1502.” She gives us a brief glimpse of a more interesting men-
tality in “Arrival at Santos,” but the bulk of these two poems
is devoted to the dissection and display of the traveller’s less
attractive side. It is only in “Questions of Travel” that travel
begins to be redeemed, and it is only redeemed in an acciden-
tal, confused way. One only experiences the real benefits of
travel (the “fat brown bird”) en route to the next tourist at-
traction (the “tiniest green hummingbird in the world”); travel
exists only as a by-product of tourism.
That the benefits of travel are incidental things spotted en
route from “one more folded sunset” to the next fits well
with many of Bishop’s general intellectual habits and argu-
ments – that epiphany comes when one least expects it, that
morality can consist in avoidance, that abstract knowledge
can only come from empirical scrutiny. Happily, Bishop’s un-
usually strident initial position on time and narrative has
given way to a more characteristic understanding of the in-
terrelation of opposites. But things are interestingly reversed
here. Throughout this book, I have been pointing to Bishop’s
notion that one achieves large things by trying to do small
ones, achieves epiphany, for instance, by focusing on minute
facts, but here she is arguing that one might need larger
things to help motivate one to do the smaller ones, that hu-

man beings may not be set up to scrutinize detail for its own
sake, and that we need to be forgiving of arrogance and pre-
sumption since they are our only paths to the careful exami-
nation that is so important. In true Bishop style, this added
wrinkle only serves to push the larger things further from us:
if we are interested in “history,” say, we must first look for it
in the wrong-but-obvious place (the “inexplicable old stone-
work”) in order to stumble across it in the right-but-hidden
place (“the weak calligraphy of songbird’s cages”).
The net effect of this argument is to portray the traveller,
and the poet or thinker who follows the traveller’s path, as a
hapless, bumbling sort of creature, as someone who does not
know the end of his or her own story. And here Bishop’s fas-
cination with travel can be seen as an extension of the ideas
about narrative expressed in “Time’s Andromedas.” The dif-
ference is that she has agreed to a provisional sort of narra-
tive and admitted the basic human need for a sense of
direction, for some slight grain of purpose to set things in
motion, admitted, with Ricoeur, that “time becomes human
time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a
narrative” (1:3). In “Time’s Andromedas,” she describes the
Realist author as a “mechanical band-master” who leads ev-
erything to “the same tune” since everything is “in his mind
from the very beginning” (110), and, in reaction to this, she
advocates a sort of master-less novel, something Beckett-like,
perhaps. Here, however, she is willing to allow for some mu-
sic, as long as it is quiet enough to let us hear other things
and as long as it can change to accommodate what we hear.
At first glance, narrative in all its many implications of ret-
rospection, direction, tourism, and expectation seems to be the
enemy of description in all of its many implications of scrutiny,
observation, disinterestedness, and receptivity. However, in
much the way that my first few chapters reveal Bishop’s rela-
tionship to the world as a complex and many-staged process –
Travel 171
fleeing from the historical world towards the physical world

and slipping, from there, into the world of ideas – this chapter
reveals how Bishop’s travel poetry enacts a similarly convo-
luted process: a desire for the large and memorable enables the
observation of the small and simple, which, in turn, reveals
something newer, larger, and more memorable still; a hint of
narrative sets in motion the events that lead to true observa-
tion, which brings forth an order and revelation that no narra-
tive could find. The basic intellectual method of careful,
almost random observation still holds, but just as Jarrell’s re-
view shows how such scrutiny can have motives more com-
plex than the pleasures it brings, Bishop’s travel poems show
how it can have motives more presumptuous. In both scenar-
ios, the endpoint is unexpected, even unconnected to those ini-
tial motives, but in both scenarios, the motives are there,
hovering in the background.
8
Description
Poetry, like fiction, has a time-sense, and it is worth extending

the ideas laid out in “Time’s Andromedas” to the formal –
rather than thematic – elements of Bishop’s poetics. Generally,
critics writing about Bishop have used the question of time to
buttress arguments about the “mind thinking”: the notion
that Bishop’s goal is to capture the feeling of a mind in the pro-
cess of working out a thought rather than a mind relating a
fully formed idea. The distinction is one Bishop found in an
essay on Baroque prose by Morris Croll and used in both a pa-
per of her own about Gerard Manley Hopkins and, more self-
referentially, a 1933 letter to Donald Stanford. In that letter,
she describes the “sort of poetic convention” she is interested
in (oa 12) by quoting Croll’s assertion that the prose writers
of the Baroque period tried to “portray, not a thought, but a
mind thinking” since they “knew that an idea separated from
the act of experiencing it is not the idea that was experienced”
(Croll 430, oa 12, the quote also appears in “Gerard” 7).
Whether or not the notion of a mind in action “remained
a touchstone” that “turned up often in [Bishop’s] writing”
(Millier 54), it has certainly been so for her critics, and this
statement is, as Barbara Page puts it, “often cited as a key to
Bishop’s method” (205). The method to which it is often cited
as the key varies from critic to critic, however, and this mind
Description 173
thinking is, variously, an indication of “postmodern narra-

tive” (Travisano, “Elizabeth” 101–2), a “Stevensian spirit” of
“visionary ‘mystical exaltation’” (McCabe, eb 93–4), or “an
American pragmatism” (Harrison 4). Reduced to its most ba-
sic premise, however, the mind thinking is not far from Eliot’s
definition of the lyric as “the poet talking to himself” (Three 4),
and Bishop is really saying something relatively familiar about
lyric poetry’s attempt to capture the process of emotion rather
than state its outcome.
In light of the fact that the Hopkins essay was written
shortly after “Time’s Andromedas,” not to mention the fact
that the title “Time’s Andromedas” is taken from a Hopkins
sonnet, it is tempting to see the idea of the mind thinking as a
redirection of Bishop’s early ideas about time into a more
practical direction: the time-bound novel is clearly not to be,
and so she finds a rough approximation of it in the lyric
poem, the relative brevity of which allows for a minute re-
cording of intellectual action, which the novel, with its bulk
and extension over time, cannot support. However, this in-
terpretation relies on too simple a transition from real time
to intellectual time and does justice to neither the complexity
of Bishop’s thought nor the contrasting urges of her poetry.
In fact, these two undergraduate essays point in two funda-
mentally different directions, and if we are to draw conclu-
sions about Bishop’s poetry from them, they must be more
complicated conclusions than have hitherto been posited. In
other words, it is crucial to separate the arguments of these
two essays before positing a theory of poetry that takes both
into account. “Time’s Andromedas” leads to a poetry that
clings to real time and that I will call “descriptive”; the
Hopkins model put forth in Bishop’s essays and letters, on the
other hand, clings to an intellectual time and leads to a poet-
ics that I will call “associative.” This distinction is not unlike
the one between intensive and expansive imagery with which
this book begins – one set of practices clings more resolutely
to reality, and the other represents an imaginative departure

from it. But separating these two notions is really just the
first step towards understanding how Bishop brings them to-
gether. As always, the key to Bishop’s method is the complex
interrelation of seeming opposites. What makes Bishop’s po-
etry her own is the way she brings together – by keeping
apart – these two very different approaches to time, the way
she privileges description in order to enable association.

The standard reading of Bishop’s undergraduate essays sug-
gests that they point in the same direction, and that, taken to-
gether, they delineate what James Longenbach calls a “kind of
associational structure” that runs throughout Bishop’s poetry
(27). To say that the Hopkins essay advocates an associational
structure is fair enough, but the relationship to time that
Bishop advocates in “Time’s Andromedas” is far from associa-
tive. A writer who lines up the time of narrating strictly to the
narrated time binds his or her intellectual motions to the con-
crete world of sequential events. The result is essentially reac-
tive, revealing not a mind thinking so much as a mind existing
in reality. Croll’s mind thinking might begin with the objective
world, but this is only a launching point: “The first member”
of the Baroque period “exhausts the mere fact of the idea”
and the “other members” express “a new apprehension of the
truth expressed in the first” (Croll 433, quoted in oa 12). This
mind thinking, unlike the mind inherent in Bishop’s ideal
novel, is not reacting to the progression of time but, rather,
acting upon a single moment or idea. Bishop’s mind moves
along in “time that can be felt and realized” (“Time’s” 119);
Croll’s mind abandons real time in favour of a “a series of
imaginative moments occurring in a logical pause or suspen-
sion” (Croll 433, oa 12).
Everything towards which Bishop is moving in “Time’s
Andromedas” comes from the realization that real time does
Description 175
not stop in the way that fictional time does. Realism is based
on retrospective narration from a single, still moment in
time, from the novel’s end. As Genette puts it, what may be
the “most powerful” fiction “of literary narrating” is that it
“involves an instantaneous action, without a temporal di-
mension” (Genette 178). Croll’s mind thinking, like the Real-
ist narrator, speaks from a similarly still moment and so is
very far from the author of Bishop’s projected novel. While it
is not quite right to apply such terms to what Croll is talking
about, his Baroque writers are all time of narrating with little
or no narrated time. To put it in simpler terms, Croll’s Ba-
roque writers capture the passing of an intellectual time that
is different from real time, and much of what I argue in this
chapter comes from that simple observation. The mind
thinking and Bishop’s imaginary novelist are two very differ-
ent things – two very different things in which Bishop shows
an interest but two very different things nonetheless. What
Croll describes can be called associational since the sequence
of ideas is determined by the associative function of the hu-
man mind; what Bishop describes in “Time’s Andromedas”
is not associational since the sequence of ideas is determined
by external facts in the world, even if they are filtered
through a subjective reordering. In order to do justice to
those two early essays and trace the development of their ar-
gument about time in Bishop’s poetry, it is essential to sepa-
rate their ideas clearly rather than include everything under
the heading of association.
Part of what makes it tempting to see everything in terms of
association is a simple fact of genre. Whatever the eventual
complexities of her own practice, Bishop wrote during an era
that privileged the lyric, and the bulk of her early poetry – up to
the middle of Questions of Travel – is, in the grossest sense, lyr-
ical (i.e., neither dramatic nor epic). Lyric poetry in its purest
form takes place in a sort of eternal present, a single moment
that, while it can reach out to both past and future, need not
address the passing of time and real events. It can address real
events – Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” for example, is
brought to an end by the departure of the bird – but poems that
refer too often to external events tend to drift into the realm of
the dramatic monologue. The lyric, in this way, accords with
Croll’s description of Baroque prose in that it comprises “a se-
ries of imaginative moments occurring in a logical pause or sus-
pension.” Insofar as this is the case, it can be said to tend
towards association, and insofar as Bishop operates within the
lyric mode, it is tempting to see her poetics as essentially associ-
ational in this sense. We even have her explicit approval to do
so in that she describes the practice of association as “the sort
of poetic convention I should like to make for myself” (oa 12).
But “Time’s Andromedas” describes something fundamentally
different from the associational lyric, and, in order to bring it
into a discussion of her poetry, it is necessary to ask whether,
while intending to “stake[] claims” and “la[y] out certain mea-
surements” on a “novel-site” (“Dimensions” 103), it describes
another sort of poetic convention – whether a set of ideas that
proves unwieldy and unworkable in prose fiction can find a
more natural home in poetry. Ideally, there should be evident in
Bishop’s poetry a more reactive, time-tied principle, working
either against or in alternation with association – a mode that is
as dependent on the passage of objective time and the world of
objective reality as the novel she hoped to write.
Description is inherently tied to the world of objective real-
ity, but the question is whether it also depends on the passage
of objective time. Does description mimic the actual, temporal
process of observation? This is a tricky question and a crucial
one for Bishop in that it reaches to the heart of “what it means
to be a visual poet” (Costello 5). In order to work through
some of the issues at hand, I want to turn briefly to the ideas
about time and description in Lessing’s Laocoön, which is fun-
damentally concerned with the relationship between time and
poetry. Lessing’s overall argument is that, since poetry is made
Description 177
up of “articulated sounds in time” and painting is made up of

“figures and colors in space,” their subjects should be selected
appropriately – “bodies” being “the true subjects of painting”
and “actions” being “the true subjects of poetry” (78). De-
scriptive poetry thus intrudes on painting’s proper sphere and
is doomed to failure. As Lessing argues, “the poet is able to
show the elements of beauty in succession only” and “the con-
centrating glance which we try to cast back on the parts after
they have been enumerated fails” since it “lies beyond the
power of human imagination to picture to oneself what the
composite effect of this mouth, this nose, and these eyes will
be” (104). Reading descriptive poetry is, in a memorable sim-
ile, like watching someone roll stones “up a mountain for the
building of a splendid edifice on the summit” only to lose con-
trol of them and watch them roll “down the other side of their
own weight” (105).
Lessing’s argument is based on the assumption that objects
existing in space do not also exist in time, or that their exis-
tence in time is secondary. In other words, he assumes that,
when we look at a thing, we are engaged in the concurrent ap-
prehension of all of its individual components. But we actually
apprehend visual phenomena in separate glances, reconstruct-
ing the totality in our minds. He is correct that, while we do
this visually on a regular basis, it is more difficult to do so with
words, but that may not be the point of the descriptive poem.
Concerned as he is with classical notions of unity, Lessing is
interested only in the sum total of a visual experience. But a
descriptive poem is not necessarily an attempt to capture a
unified visual impression; instead, a descriptive poem may be
an attempt to capture the experience of scrutiny, of the exten-
sion of visual attention over time. A descriptive poem does not
try to communicate to the reader what a thing looks like, al-
though it may well do so, so much as what it feels like to look
at it. Time does not defeat description because description
does not aspire to timelessness.
The blason, for example, records the sequential sense im-

pressions received by the thinking subject as the eye of the
speaker moves slowly over the female form from head to toe,
pausing to describe each body part. As Lessing suggests, the
sequential description of individual body parts is not an effec-
tive way of producing an accurate visual picture of a particular
woman; however, the point of the blason is not to record the
physical reality of the woman in question but, rather, to con-
vey the mounting erotic charge of looking at her. The actual
appearance of the woman is almost irrelevant to the poem,
and, not surprisingly, the blason tends to rely on the universal-
izing roses-and-lilies imagery of courtly love. But the blason is
too organized for Bishop’s tastes; it implies both a conscious
control of the process of observation and an adherence to the
actual organization of objects in the world. What is more com-
mon in Bishop’s poetry is a form of description that conforms
more closely to her notion of “experience-time.” Here, the
various parts of the object perceived arrive in an order that
seems almost random, like pennies sinking through water,
mimicking more closely the actual way in which one perceives
an object. A quick scan produces a general impression of a
given object quickly, but the process of careful scrutiny revisits
each aspect individually, though rarely in a conscious or con-
trolled manner. The individual sense impressions, like the
events of Bishop’s projected novel, arrive one after another in
an order based on an unconscious scrambling of their objec-
tive organization. Description, in this sense, takes time, but
not an organized sort of time. It takes something more like
Bishop’s experience-time.
A purely descriptive poem, however, one that merely re-
corded raw sensory data, without comment, in the semi-
random order in which it arrived, would be of little interest.
Indeed, this is what people mean when they dismiss something
as “mere description.” Description, in the sense in which I
am using the word here, is more of an abstract principle, the
Description 179
inverse of association. Most poems exist somewhere along the

spectrum between the two, although lyric poetry tends towards
the associative end of things, and a purely associative poem
would not raise eyebrows in the way that a purely descriptive
one would. There is also the possibility of narrative time, which
gives us a three-dimensional world of poetic temporality, in
which each poem is pulled in several directions at once. “The
Fish” (cp 42–4) illustrates this tripartite scheme extremely well.
The poem flirts with narrative, in that it has a beginning and an
end, but it does not quite engage with the world of cause and ef-
fect. At times, Bishop even explicitly rejects causation:
I looked into his eyes

…
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
More generally, the many observations of which the poem is

made up do not cause and are not caused by one another; one
could reorder them without disturbing the logic of the poem.
And though the ending is clearly caused by what happens in
the middle, the precise workings of this causation are a subject
of constant critical discussion. The poem also involves some
amount of association as each individual aspect of the fish is
subjected to the speaker’s imagination. But no single departure
from real time takes more than a few lines, and, on the whole,
the poem keeps up with real time, which plays a fundamental
framing role since the poem can only occupy as much time as a
“tremendous fish” can survive in the air:
While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen
…
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers. (my emphasis)
Bishop tempers association with description such that the

poem never lags too far behind real time, and the poem’s
structure is essentially descriptive: a piscine blason in which
the speaker’s eye drifts slowly and half randomly over the
fish, sequentially scrutinizing individual details as it goes:
I admired his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
…
hung five old pieces of fish-line. (my emphasis)
The poem is a little bit narrative in its framing, a little bit as-
sociational in its metaphoric flights, and generally descriptive
in its motion.
Any single poem is likely to contain some mixture of these
three modes, and there may be some use in calculating each
poem’s particular blend. In this sense, I hope to have provided
a set of terms that can be used to talk about the sort of rhetor-
ical relationship that any given poem, or any given moment in
any given poem, has to time. However, my real goal is to reach
a more general conclusion about Bishop’s poetry, and leaving
narrative aside for the moment, the contrast between associa-
tion and description provides a useful way of talking about
Bishop’s relationship to detail. “The Bight” and “Brazil, Janu-
ary 1, 1502” are both topographical descriptive poems, but
they vary dramatically in this respect. In the simplest sense,
“The Bight” is decidedly descriptive, moving, item by item,
over a very particular landscape. The level of detail and the
steadfast attention paid to it suggest that this is not a general-
ized landscape, or a landscape imagined in order to fit some
particular poetic purpose, but a real landscape. The progres-
sion of the poem is directed not by internal imaginative associ-
ation but by external physical arrangement. In “Brazil,
Description 181
January 1, 1502” (cp 91–2), on the other hand, particular im-

ages and details of landscape are presented in order to explain
and demonstrate an intellectual point: that “Nature greets our
eyes / exactly as she must have greeted” those of the sixteenth-
century Portuguese explorers. The landscape that the poem de-
scribes is an idea, a capitalized personification of “Nature,”
disconnected from real time and, insofar as the poem claims to
describe a landscape of five hundred years past, imagined.
As such, the landscape of “Brazil” is, by Bishop’s standards,
far from exact. Rather than enumerate the specific Brazilian
flora and fauna as she does in “Song for the Rainy Season,”
where “blood-black / bromelias, lichens, / owls and the lint / of
the waterfalls” occupy the first stanza (cp 101), she contents
herself by asserting merely that the landscape is “filling in with
foliage.” The generality of the term “foliage” is hardly made
clearer by her introduction of size – “big leaves, little leaves,
and giant leaves” – which, rather than describe any particular
size or sizes, merely introduces the idea of size. Things gradu-
ally become more concrete as she introduces first the muted,
relatively indistinct colours of the foliage (“blue, blue-green,
and olive”) and then some more particular details (the “occa-
sional lighter veins and edges” of the leaves and “a satin under-
leaf turned over”). The mode is still indefinite, however, and
Bishop is describing “leaves” in general, some of which have “a
satin underleaf”; she is not talking about the satin underleaf of
a particular plant. Gathering strength, she does finally name a
particular plant, the “monster ferns,” and then, on this slightly
firmer base, tentatively introduces her first simile: “flowers,
too, like giant water lilies / up in the air,” which, in turn, leads
to a more distinct and ambitious selection of colours: “purple,
yellow, two yellows, pink, / rust red and greenish white.” The
flora has been filled in like a painting: first the darker, more
solid and less differentiated foliage in the background, then a
highlight or two, a lighter vein, a satin underleaf, followed by a
recognizable plant, and then the more distinct, vivid, and
colourful flowers in the foreground. The painterly aspect is

hardly surprising, since the poem is explicitly framed around
the notion of a tapestry, both in its epigram – “ … embroidered
nature … tapestried landscape” – and in the last lines of this
first stanza, which describe the flowers as “fresh as if just fin-
ished / and taken off the frame” (ellipses hers).
If the first stanza paints the setting, the second stanza in-
troduces allegorical embellishments: “big symbolic birds” and
“dragons” representing “Sin.” Posed for the artist, the birds
perch in “profile,” and the lizards stay so still “in the fore-
ground” that they “scarcely breathe.” Finally, in the third
stanza, human figures are introduced in the form of “the
Christians” and “those maddening little women,” and we
move from setting to subject. The poem has thus built itself
up consciously, from background to foreground, landscape
to figure, while simultaneously moving up the great chain of
being from plant to animal to human life. This is not an eye
moving over a present landscape, picking out details, but a
mind filling in a schema of “landscape.” In this sense the
poem is associational. It does not exist in real time but,
rather, in a static intellectual time.
Although the poem’s title contains a date, the opening lines
with their contrasting tense – “Nature greets our eyes / ex-
actly as she must have greeted theirs” (my emphasis) – make
clear that the poem will not be constrained by history. The
speaker of the poem, though historically situated in a general
way (or, if the poem is read in tandem with “Arrival at Santos,”
a specific way), is not subject to real time or to the influence
or demands of external events or reality. Rather, the external
world presents materials, which she then shapes, arranges,
and orders to her purpose from within a still lyric moment.
That Bishop should present Brazil in these terms, as a prod-
uct of the artistic imagination rather than an objective reality
to be described, accords with the purpose of the poem: to
show how the “eye, and ear,” in Wordsworth’s phrase, “half
Description 183
create” what they perceive (2:262), how the Christians could

cross an ocean and still find “it all / not unfamiliar” and
“corresponding” “to an old dream.”
“The Bight” (cp 60) works entirely differently, right from
its dating subtitle: “[On my birthday],” to its conclusion that
the “untidy activity” of the external world “continues” de-
spite the speaker’s observation. Both poems are about anni-
versaries, but they present very different senses of how one
finds the world when one turns back to it after the passing of
time. Unlike “Brazil,” “The Bight” is located very specifi-
cally in a particular moment – “low tide” on the speaker’s
“birthday” – and describes a very particular landscape. The
definite article abounds (“the water,” “the boats,” “the
birds,” “The Bight”), and many of the things described, like
the “little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock” and
the “frowsy sponge boats,” are highly individual. Rather
than unidentified foliage, there are specific types of birds
(“Pelicans,” “man-of-war birds”), and things are precisely
observed, down to the materials from which they are made
(“jackstraw,” “chicken wire”) and their eventual destina-
tions (the “Chinese-restaurant” trade). Where “Brazil” de-
scribes Brazil in a general, timeless sense, unchanged for five
centuries, “The Bight” describes this particular bight in these
particular moments. As the very first line makes clear, the
poem describes the bight only when it is “like this.”
Both poems are notable for an abundance of detail, but the
details function differently. In “Brazil,” detail fills and makes
real an imagined landscape; it helps describe a creation of po-
etic association. In “The Bight,” detail provides starting points
for associative leaps; it gives the poet a description upon which
to associate. The poem is, after all, made up of little similes,
but the poet’s association does not change or constitute the
bight. “[I]f one were Baudelaire / one could probably hear [the
water] turning to marimba music,” in which case the “little
ocher dredge” will obligingly play the “dry perfectly off-beat
claves.” But one need not be Baudelaire, and, at the end of the
poem, the dredge, though it plays its claves – “Click. Click.” –
still “brings up a dripping jawful of marl.” The process of the
world, its “untidy activity,” is unaffected by the observer. It
just goes on, “awful but cheerful.”
The reference to Baudelaire is not incidental, and “The
Bight” is a sort of reply to his “Correspondances” (1:11).
Baudelaire’s poem is concerned with the ways in which the
world is connected to the observer and the ways in which
sensory impressions are connected to one another. The ob-
serving subject, for Baudelaire, “passes through forests of
symbols who watch him with friendly looks.” Nature and
observer interrelate in much the same way that “smells, col-
ors and sounds reply to one another like long echoes, merg-
ing from afar in a deep, shadowy unity.” All of these
elements, the poet, nature, sight, sound, and smell, come to-
gether and “sing the transports of the soul and the senses,”
but Bishop will allow no such union. Rather, whatever corre-
spondances she establishes through the many similes that
make up the poem amount to “torn-open, unanswered let-
ters. / The bight is littered with old correspondences.” Where
Baudelaire is caught up in a rapture of friendly gazes and
mingling echoes, Bishop is left firing into a void, sending out
signals that remain “unanswered.” Though she tugs at the
strictures of description with every image, the speaker never
achieves the “transport” of association. If one were to chart
the poem, representing descriptive time horizontally and as-
sociational time vertically, “The Bight” would look some-
thing like the bouncing line of a heart-monitor.
Not so “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” which also echoes
Baudelaire at times. “Brazil” seeks to show a world sub-
jected to the imagination, a world, as she puts it, “corre-
sponding” to “an old dream.” Her take on this sort of world
is at best ambivalent: it is not “the transports of the soul and
the senses” that are sung but “L’Homme armé”; it is not the
Description 185
sights and sounds that “reply to one another like long echoes
from afar” but “those maddening little women” who keep
“calling, / calling to each other.” The hints of Baudelaire in
this poem may be accidental, but the associational mindset
that frames the poem, that characterizes the way “our eyes”
see, Baudelairean or not, stands accused of violence. The
Portuguese carry their intellectual time with them to the New
World and ignore the real time in which they are immersed,
remaking their surroundings to correspond to their static in-
tellectual present, shaping a particular January day to fit
their – and our – notion of “Januaries.”
These two poems thus constitute a statement of poetics, a
demonstration of the implications of these two distinct poetic
modes. Association, in this case, does not come off well. How-
ever, I do not wish to suggest that there is anything simple or
clear-cut in Bishop’s preference for the descriptive since she en-
gages in association often enough elsewhere. Rather, Bishop is
engaged in two different projects at different times and, most
often, in an attempt to unify the two. On the one hand, there
is the attempt to write poetry that takes place, like Croll’s ver-
sion of Baroque prose, in mental time rather than real or phys-
ical time; on the other hand, there is the attempt to write
a poetry that is strictly tied to real time, that conveys the time-
sense of careful observation. But perhaps the most characteris-
tically Bishopesque poems are those that enact the tension
between these two tendencies. The heart-monitor model I ap-
plied to “The Bight” describes a surprising number of her po-
ems, from “The Map” (1936) all the way to “Santarém”
(1978), but, more to the point, it describes a large number of
those poems that no other poet could have written: “The
Map” and “Santarém,” again, but also poems like “The Man-
Moth,” “A Cold Spring,” “Cape Breton,” “Questions of
Travel,” “Song for the Rainy Season,” “Filling Station,” “The
End of March,” “Poem,” and “Large Bad Picture,” among
others. In a Darwinian way, each of these poems is faithfully
bound to what it describes and the time-sense of description,

but each uses this base to make forays into association.
For Bishop the strictures of description function as a sort of
corrective to the excesses of association, much like the rules of
poetic form, to which Bishop also frequently submits, correct
the excesses of linguistic sprawl. One might say that writing a
poem that is held firmly to an objective intellectual structure is
like writing a villanelle or a sonnet, and writing a poem bound
to a particular time-sense is like writing in metre. Employing
form does not prevent one from deviating from it; in fact, po-
etic form serves to highlight and give meaning to deviation.
Similarly, Bishop’s use of description does not rule out associa-
tion so much as give it added meaning; description’s constant
forward progress keeps Bishop from excessive associative
flights and, in so doing, gives added meaning to those flights
she does make. Most importantly, however, Bishop’s particu-
lar method of mixing description and association allows her to
maintain an unusually complex set of truths. Truth is a notion
to which Bishop returns surprisingly often in discussions of
her own poetry: “I always tell the truth in my poems. With
The Fish, that’s exactly how it happened. It was in Key West,
and I did catch it just as the poem says” (Monteiro 42); “the
incident with the moose, it really happened” (Monteiro 85);
“[i]t was all true … it was all exactly the way I described it”
(Monteiro 117). But to tell the truth in poetry is not the same
as simply to tell the truth. “Brazil, January 1, 1502” looks at
one thing and sees another. As such, it tells the truth about
what it sees but not about what is there; it tells a subjective
truth and an objective lie. “The Bight” tells two truths simul-
taneously – the objective truth of the bight and the subjective
truth of the similes with which it is described – without con-
fusing the two or allowing one to crowd out the other. From
its inception, the poem is constructed along the lines of bal-
anced honesty, employing both subjective and objective truth,
association and description.
Description 187
In a fundamental way, Bishop is firmly committed to tell-

ing both of these truths, and she insists that it is only by tell-
ing both that we can ever really tell either. To leave behind
the specific sense of description I have been pursuing in this
chapter and return to a larger, more general notion of what
Bishop aims for in her poetry, description is more than just
the accurate presentation of physical reality. Rather, Bishop’s
art of description combines physical fact with intellectual re-
action, showing not just things as they are but also the feel-
ings, ideas, and implications to which they lead. Each of my
chapters pursues this argument in some form or another, ar-
guing that Bishop’s poetics unites the conscious and the un-
conscious, scrutiny and epiphany, the empirical and the
abstract, the aesthetic and the moral, reality and narrative,
traveller and tourist, description (in the modal sense) and as-
sociation. Bishop’s focus on the concrete details of the physical
world, in all of its various forms, is always the first step – if
only the first step – in the immense aesthetic and intellectual
endeavour that is her oeuvre.
In his lectures on pragmatism, William James describes the
relationship between empirical facts and abstract ideas
through a striking conceit that, interestingly, echoes and re-
verses the imagery of Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” I would
like to quote it here, at the climax of this study:
Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts,

and let the air above it represent the world of abstract
ideas. Both worlds are real, of course, and interact; but
they interact only at their boundary, and the locus of ev-
erything that lives, and happens to us, so far as full experi-
ence goes, is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the
sea of sense, bounded above by the superior element, but
unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. We get our oxy-
gen from it, however, we touch it incessantly, now in this
part, now in that, and every time we touch it, we turn back
into the water with our course re-determined and re-

energized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists are
indispensable for life, but irrespirable by themselves, and
only active in their redirecting function. (58)
Were I to appropriate this image fully to Bishop’s poetics, I

would want to change a few things. The emphasis on borders
clashes with Bishop’s more fluid notion of interconnectedness,
and I would prefer that we were frogs – at home in both ele-
ments, though residing in the water. Regardless, James’s image
embodies the descriptive method of Bishop’s poems quite
nicely: they circulate through a “sea of sense” but touch the
abstract “incessantly,” turning back to the sensory each time,
“re-determined” and “re-energized.” There is one thing, how-
ever, that James does not account for, and that is the powerful
pleasure of Bishop’s climactic forays into the air. As a poet,
Bishop is free to fantasize in a way that a philosopher like
James is not, and so poems like “The Fish” can begin with
James’s occasional visits to the surface, slowly building up en-
ergy through sip after little sip of air until some mysterious
limit is exceeded and we find ourselves flung out of the water
in which we had so peacefully been swimming. There is noth-
ing particularly pragmatic about that, but it is what gives
Bishop’s poetry its capacity to astound.
Conclusion
For all the deeper honesty of her poetry, Bishop was often
rather disingenuous in her letters, and so it is with a grain of
salt that we must take the famous line about a “perfectly use-
less concentration” (dl). There is a strange doubleness to it,
a way in which it is both accurate and misleading. On the
one hand Bishop is dedicated to a concentration so intense
that it precludes conscious intention, and each individual act
of observation is indeed perfectly useless in and of itself. But
behind the (false) modesty of this statement is a more serious
engagement: the concentration in which Bishop is interested
is anything but useless. Indeed, it is supremely useful, “neces-
sary” even for the creation of “art” (dl). And the creation of
art is, after all, Bishop’s life-work.
To bring out that strange doubleness is the point of this
book. My goal has been to trace Bishop’s misleadingly modest
emphasis on descriptive scrutiny as the road to intellectual rev-
elation, to show both how the world of things is the point of
access to the world of ideas and how the world of ideas is al-
ways waiting behind the world of things. I have traced this
particular pattern through a variety of iterations: from the
conscious and unconscious mind through associative and de-
scriptive poetic modes. I have also traced it through a variety
of intensities: from the rigorous, description-only applications
of her youth (“Time’s Andromedas”) to the gentler (“Ques-

tions of Travel”), more fluid (“Santarém”) positions of her
maturity. I have even examined the various sources of this pat-
tern: from an intellectual admiration for Darwin to an under-
standably fearful reaction to the difficulties of the postwar
world. This basic pattern comes in many shapes and sizes, but
it is, at its heart, a very simple thing, and one that we are used
to ascribing to Bishop in a general, unthinking way. The
method of this study is to take that unthinking ascription up
and examine it in some detail, to move beyond merely saying
that Bishop is deeply involved in description and scrutiny and
to ask instead how that fact would teach us to read her poetry.
In one sense, I hope to have answered that question quite
thoroughly in these pages. However, in these final moments, I
want to take it up again in a more literal way than I have so
far. Up to this point, I have put forth a variety of readings and
interpretations of individual texts, but I have been relatively
quiet on the question of methodology. Standard practice
would have had me declare my theoretical outlook in the
opening pages of this study, but I have my reasons for remain-
ing silent up to this point. I am interested in poetics, in how a
poet goes about constructing a poem (or a body of poetry),
and that makes me, methodologically speaking, a close reader.
But to announce close reading as one’s method leaves one vul-
nerable to all the many criticisms that the twentieth century’s
great proponents of close reading, the New Critics, so richly
deserved. Hence my coyness: I need the body of my argument
– the sum total of this book’s accomplishments – to redeem my
method or, at least, to purchase my reader’s indulgence.
I do share the New Critics’ interest in the text itself, and
close reading is for me a way to bring to the fore the most
poetic elements of poetry: form, structure, detail. However,
where the New Critics allowed their love of the text to trans-
late into a prohibition against context, I am far less doctri-
naire. Instead, what I have tried to do throughout this study
Conclusion 191
is examine Bishop’s work from the inside out, beginning with

only a very general approach (description) and bringing in a
variety of more particular contexts as they are summoned by
the texts in question. As my reader has no doubt noticed, de-
scription is not for me a topic so much as a framework, an
umbrella under which a particularly wide variety of contexts
– from Victorian natural history to narratology – might fit.
Each of these various contexts could easily provide the guid-
ing conceit of an entire critical study, and that is how much
recent work on Bishop has functioned. The author chooses a
context against which to read Bishop’s work, be it thematic
(Fortuny’s book on travel), intellectual (Harrison’s on prag-
matism), historical (Roman’s on the Cold War), or theoreti-
cal (Zhou’s Bakhtinian study), and then moves through her
poetry with that context in mind. My goal has been to strike
a balance between the rigorous textuality of the New Critics
and the rigorous contextuality of this more contemporary
mode of criticism, and I hope to have been looser and more
flexible than either of these more committed methods allow.
And so I offer flexibility as the rationale of my method,
and this book as its justification. Whatever my reader takes
from it will argue more strongly for me than anything I could
say here. However, I would like to add one crucial notion,
which is that my method imitates Bishop’s. As I argue
throughout this study, her point of entry is almost always the
minute particulars, the details rather than the concepts. She
reads the world as I read her poetry: from the inside out, be-
ginning with the text (things) and only after minute scrutiny
allowing contexts (ideas) to come into play. What poet could
more invite close reading of the sort in which I engage here?
Indeed, Bishop’s poetry is engaged in an incessant close read-
ing of the world around her. But let me make that argument
more concretely by examining a topic that I have been avoid-
ing throughout this book: ekphrasis. In a book dedicated to
the idea of description, ekphrasis is both an obvious and a
difficult topic. In classical rhetoric, “ekphrasis” simply

means description, but in current use the word has come to
denote a poem that engages with a work of art – most famil-
iarly a poem about a painting. Ekphrasis, in this more mod-
ern sense (and that is how I will use it from this point
onward), has been unusually safe from accusations of being
“merely descriptive,” and it has proved an unusually popular
topic with scholars of twentieth-century poetry. Indeed,
while there are but few scholarly books about poetic descrip-
tion that reach into the twentieth century (Spiegelman,
Weatherhead), there are any number about ekphrastic poetry
that do so (e.g., Aisenberg, Heffernan, Hollander).
The aesthetic viability of ekphrasis results from a few dif-
ferent factors, easily illustrated by one of the century’s most
famous ekphrastic poems, W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux
Arts” (237). In the simplest sense, an ekphrastic poem allows
the poet to describe without having to bother with the minu-
tiae of description: since the reader is usually expected to
have seen the artwork in question, the poet is relieved of the
technical burden of actually bringing it before the reader’s
eyes. And so Auden can list the elements in “Brueghel’s
Icarus” – “ploughman,” “sun,” “white legs,” “green / wa-
ter,” “expensively delicate ship” – without giving any sense
of how the painting actually looks. The adjectives, where
they exist, are either generic (“white,” “green”) or too spe-
cific to be visually helpful (“expensively delicate”); the nouns
are consistently plain (“sun,” “legs,” “boy,” “ship”); and
there is none of the intensive imagery that might help bring
the poem to life, visually speaking. Neither is there any paint-
erly language in the poem, any notion of foreground or back-
ground or composition, nothing to indicate spatial relations
or make clear that this is a painting rather than a narrative.
Because the painting is famous, Auden can bypass the
work of describing it and go straight to his point. But even
what description he does include is made safe against the
Conclusion 193
possibility of insignificance by the pre-established impor-

tance of a Brueghel housed in a world-class museum. Works
of art have considerably more cultural heft than a landscape
or a fish, and so an ekphrastic poem carries an air of aes-
thetic depth that renders it immune to accusations of dwell-
ing on the mundane. Though Auden’s tone is surprisingly
light – “dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s
horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree” – the impor-
tance of his topic is never in doubt. Indeed, such is the point
of the poem: that there is no such thing as insignificance in
these paintings, that even in the most seemingly trivial details
the admirable “Old Masters” are “never wrong.” Auden is
careful to front-load the poem with the paintings’ pedigree:
the title reminds us that they have received the stamp of offi-
cial recognition, and the second line that they represent the
cumulative wisdom of the past (the term “Old Masters” is
more approbative than precise, including all the best painters
from a nearly five-hundred-year period). So while ekphrasis
is, technically, a form of description, it is safe from ever being
thought of as “mere description.”
And just as ekphrasis comes preinsured against insignifi-
cance, it also comes prepackaged with an interpretive strategy.
The praise (overt or otherwise) of the artist described can be
read as a statement of poetics (or at least aesthetics), a descrip-
tion not only of a work of art but also of the poet’s ideas about
art. In this case, Auden puts forth a poetics of understatement,
an aesthetics dedicated to resisting the urge to magnify suffering
to tragic proportions. He makes this idea quite clear in the con-
tent of the poem – “even the dreadful martyrdom must run its
course / Anyhow in a corner” – and he also embodies it in his
own casual tone: that “Anyhow” deflates things more than the
“corner” ever could. The reader is always clear on what to do
with this description – retrieve from it a set of attitudes towards
art and suffering – and this basic method applies to any ek-
phrastic poem. Further, this particular aspect of the ekphrastic
poems makes it particularly germane to the twentieth century’s

preoccupation with meta-aesthetics, making it no surprise that
the form should prove popular throughout the century.
Given all of these advantages, it is far from surprising that
the ekphrastic poem should prove popular in an age that is of-
ten rather dubious about description: it is relieved of certain
functional necessities, inherently interesting, culturally speak-
ing, and accompanied by a ready-made meta-poetic interpreta-
tion – it is description without risks. But while ekphrasis may
be contemporary poetry’s most significant mode of descrip-
tion, it is for that very reason an inappropriate topic for this
book, which is, after all, about the importance of seemingly in-
significant things in Bishop’s poetry. For a poet dedicated to
careful, disinterested scrutiny of whatever life gives, it is cheat-
ing to scrutinize a Breughel since it is, as it were, prescruti-
nized. By piggybacking on the work of another artist, the
ekphrastic poet jumps directly to the larger questions (suffer-
ing) without having to deal with the smaller things that mean
so much to Bishop (what kind of ship is it?). However popular
ekphrasis might be with her contemporaries, it is the antithesis
of Bishop’s own poetics of description.
I have perhaps been cheating somewhat by using Auden’s
poem as my example, and certainly there are ekphrastic po-
ems that do not press their advantages so relentlessly. But
Bishop, characteristically, goes all the way to the other ex-
treme: her two fully ekphrastic poems – “Large Bad Picture”
and “Poem [About the size of an old-style dollar bill]” – es-
chew all of the conventional advantages of ekphrasis. They
are most emphatically not about Breughels but about paint-
ings by the speaker’s “Uncle George” (actually her “great-
uncle”; cp 177), and she must actually describe them in
considerable detail, losing the simplest technical advantage
of ekphrasis. Similarly, Uncle George’s lack of skill (the first
painting is a “Large Bad Picture”) or success (the second has
“never earned any money in its life”; 176) leaves Bishop to
Conclusion 195
establish the significance of the poems entirely on her own,

without ekphasis’s usual guarantee of import. Nor is it safe
to assume that we can read these poems in any simple way as
statements of aesthetics. Unlike Auden’s Old Masters, Uncle
George is not “always right”; indeed, Bishop’s speaker is re-
luctant to credit him with any “vision” at all (177). How-
ever, if we cannot read the poem as a statement of aesthetics,
we can instead read it as a statement of critical methodology:
it will not teach us how to paint or write, but it will teach us
how to look at a painting or read a poem.
Neither of these poems is ekphrastic in the sense outlined
above. Within the world of Bishop’s poetry, paintings are no
different than natural objects, and, not surprisingly, the same
process of scrutiny before revelation is required. To rephrase
that in methodological terms, Bishop is close reading these
paintings in her usual manner. Indeed, “Poem” (cp 176–7)
applies this process to Uncle George’s painting to great effect.
The opening stanza deals immediately with the questions of
value and importance under discussion here, but in a charac-
teristically bemused manner. The financial theme is intro-
duced – the painting is “the size of an old-style dollar bill, /
American or Canadian” – but the currency is outdated (“old-
style”), of indeterminate origin (“American or Canadian”),
and, therefore, of unknown worth. Indeed, the financial lan-
guage of the first line seems introduced only to be brushed
aside since the painting “has never earned any money in its
life.” Instead, it is “Useless and free,” a “minor family relic /
handed along collaterally.” The word “relic” is used here
more in the modern sense of something outdated and value-
less than in its original religious sense, and the painting is
handed “along collaterally” rather than handed down as
part of an inheritance. Not only does the painting lack value,
financial or otherwise, but it is actually something one tries
to be rid of, something “taken from a trunk and handed
over” because its current owner will “probably never / have
room to hang” it. The speaker begins by stripping the paint-

ing of any importance or value; she reduces it to the mere
fact of itself, making of it a “Useless” object on which to fo-
cus her “perfectly useless concentration.”
With all potential ekphrastic import removed, Bishop’s
speaker starts in on her close reading, building up her sense
of the painting from scratch. The second stanza is a descrip-
tive list, not just of the objects in the painting, but of the
painting as an object. She sees the painting in terms of brush
strokes as well as things: a “gray-blue wisp” may or may not
be a “church steeple”; the cows are “two brushtrokes each,
but confidently cows”; what seems at first “a slanting stick”
reveals itself on closer inspection to be first “a wild iris” and
then paint “fresh-squiggled from the tube”; the clouds are
“the artist’s specialty”; and a “specklike bird” “flying to the
left” may actually be a “flyspeck” looking like a bird. By fo-
cusing in on Uncle George’s technique, Bishop’s speaker
keeps the fact of the painting before her eyes at the same time
as she inventories its contents. Her close reading maintains a
focus on the poetics of the text (the technique of the paint-
ing), while gradually building up a sense of its meaning (the
objects it depicts), without, yet, any reference to context (the
significance of those objects).
It is only in the third stanza that her eye – to adapt a
phrase from “Over 2,000 Illustrations” – drops through the
lines the paintbrush has made and into the scene itself:
“Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!” At this point
context enters the poem in the form of geography (the place)
and biography (the farmer, Miss Gillespie), but the speaker is
only half-interested in these things. Even as she recognizes
the particular landscape, she continues to foreground the fact
of the painting. The barn is still “one dab” of “titanium
white” paint; “the steeple” is still “filaments of brush-
hairs.” She does not yet lose sight of the textuality of the text
because it is not the place itself that is important so much as
Conclusion 197
the fact that Uncle George painted it. There is nothing re-
markable in this landscape, “this literal small backwater.”
What is remarkable is that two people should each have
“looked at it long enough to memorize it,” and it is that real-
ization that finally leads to a relaxation of the speaker’s care-
ful scrutiny.
Though she “never knew him,” the speaker and Uncle
George “both knew this place,” and their:
visions coincided – “visions” is

too serious a word – our looks, two looks:
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other.
A careful reader might object to this sudden resolution since a

great deal of the poem so far has concerned how very uncer-
tainly Uncle George’s art copies from life. However, the resolu-
tion is not between art and life (as those quotation marks help
make clear) but between “life and the memory of it.” In one
sense Uncle George slips out of the poem as the paintedness of
the painting is lost. The final lines return to the “cows” and
“iris” of the first stanza but without the qualifying clauses that
assert their artificiality. The speaker seems now to be looking
at her memory instead of (or as much as) the painting, and
Uncle George as artist has vanished. In another sense, how-
ever, the speaker keeps Uncle George in the poem but on new
terms: as a fellow looker rather than a visionary, as a fellow
reader of the world rather than a creator of art. Indeed, the in-
creasing emphasis on the first person plural in that last stanza
– first representing the speaker and George but then gradually
broadening to a universal “we” in the final lines – suggests
that, far from a unique vision, and more, even, than a particu-
lar shared memory, what is being revealed here is an experi-
ence common to all, a fundamental fact about “our abidance”
that comes clear only in Bishop’s typically circuitous manner.

The poem eventually connects place and memory and commu-
nity, suggesting that our sense of connection to others is tied
up in our shared memories of particular locations or things.
Bishop’s speaker moves here, as she so often does, from con-
crete physical detail, to a localized recognition, and then out-
ward into a fugitive epiphany.
As a whole, the poem paints an elegant portrait of how
Bishop would have us read her. We must begin by throwing
out our conventional notions of value and importance, clean-
ing our minds of any single, predetermined critical context.
Then, with a remarkably minute attention to detail, we must
take up the task of examining the poem before us, with a par-
ticular attention to its poetics, to the way it presents what it
does. For it is only by keeping method and technique in mind
that we come to feel the importance that Bishop places on the
objects she describes. And it is the awareness of that effort and
care that produces a curious appreciative parity with the poet
– not awestruck by her accomplishment or the depth of her vi-
sion but comfortable in her presence, impressed by her dedica-
tion, and looking along with her at some fact of life that we
had not thought of until we read about it in the poem, not val-
ued until we saw someone else valuing it. The process may
seem “cramped” and “dim,” the gains “little,” but it is the
only way to appreciate the particular flavour of Bishop’s po-
ems, so “live, [so] touching in detail.”
Not surprisingly, Bishop’s advice on reading is not so very
different from her advice on living, thinking, or writing. And,
once again, I have put forth a version of that very same intel-
lectual model I have been chasing throughout this study.
Hardly surprising, perhaps, but I hope some justification for
my approach to her work. A familiar trope of Bishop criti-
cism is that she, like her Sandpiper, is “a student of Blake”
(cp 131), able to “see a World in a Grain of Sand” (Blake
209). However, where Blake’s faith in the imagination allows
Conclusion 199
him to see a world in a grain of sand, Bishop’s “finical”

Sandpiper must “focus” to the point of “obsess[ion]” on
“millions of grains,” “black, white, tan, and gray, / mixed
with quartz grains, rose and amethyst” (cp 131). Like Darwin,
she must have “all sorts of facts which could possibly have
any bearing” (Origin 95). She can achieve Blake’s fourfold
universal vision but only, like Darwin, by looking at the uni-
verse piece by piece, grain of sand by grain of sand, only by
deploying her own particular poetics of description. It seems
only fair that we, as readers and critics, should bring to her
poems that same level of tireless scrutiny.
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and David Pellauer. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984, 1985, 1988.
Rognoni, Francesco. “Reading Darwin: On Elizabeth Bishop’s
Marked Copies of The Voyage of the Beagle and The Autobiog-
raphy of Charles Darwin.” In Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell & Co, ed.
Suzanne Ferguson, 239–48. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 2003.
Works Cited 207
Roman, Camille. Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War

View. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Rubin, William S. Dada and Surrealist Art. New York: Abrams, n.d.
Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her
Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.
Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. John Wilders.
London: Routledge, 1995.
Shattuck, Roger. “Introduction.” In The History of Surrealism, by
Maurice Nadeau, trans. Richard Howard, 11–34. New York:
MacMillan, 1966.
Shigley, Sally Bishop. “Dazzling Dialectics”: Elizabeth Bishop’s
Resonating Feminist Reality. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.
Spiegelman, Willard. How Poets See the World: The Art of Descrip-
tion in Contemporary Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Spires, Elizabeth. “Questions of Knowledge.” Field 31 (1984): 20–3.
Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Twayne, 1966.
– Letter to Elizabeth Bishop. 28 October 1963. Elizabeth Bishop
Suárez-Toste, Ernesto. “‘Straight from Chirico’: Pictorial Surreal-
ism and the Early Elizabeth Bishop.” Studies in the Humanities
23, 2 (1996): 185–201.
– “Une Machine À Coudre Manuelle: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Everyday
Surrealism.’” Mosaic 33, 2 (2000): 143–60.
Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Journey and Its Narratives.” Trans. Alyson
Waters. In Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geogra-
phy, 1600–1830, ed. Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, 287–96.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Travisano, Thomas. “Elizabeth Bishop and the Origins of Narrative
Postmodernism.” In Kelly, 87–104.
– Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1988.
Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. The Edge of the Image: Marianne Moore
and Williams Carlos Williams. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1967.
208 Works Cited
Williams, William Carlos. Collected Poems. Ed. Christopher

MacGowan. 2 vols. New York: New Directions, 1988.
– Paterson. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Direc-
tions, 1992.
Wolff, Tobias. Old School. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” In The Common Reader, ed.
Andrew McNeillie, 146–54. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984.
Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. Ed. E. de Selincourt. 5 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.
Yeats, W.B. The Poems. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York:
Macmillan, 1989.
Zhou Xiaojing. Elizabeth Bishop: Rebel in Shades and Shadows.
New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Index
abstract vs. empirical knowl- binaries, Bishop’s treatment

edge, 73–97 of, 11
accumulation, 62–5 Blake, William, 198–9
aesthetics vs. politics, 98–124 blason, the, 178
allegory, 22–9 Bly, Robert: on “At the Fish-
Altieri, Charles: on modernism houses,” 34–5
and science, 60–1 Bök, Christian, 61
Arp, Hans, 52 “Brazil, January 1, 1502”: and
“Arrival at Santos”: and travel, travel, 159–62; association
152–9 and description in, 180–5
association vs. description, Breton, André : on science, 61;
173–88 on surrealism, 41–57
“At the Fishhouses”: and Bunyan, John, 119–20
knowledge, 86–97; relation
to “The Weed,” 73–4 cartography, 66
Auden, W.H.: “Musée des “Cirque d’Hiver”: politics and
Beaux Arts,” 192–4; “Sep- aesthetics in,114–18
tember 1, 1939,” 116–18 close reading, 190–1
“A Cold Spring”: and imagery,
Baudelaire, Charles: “Corre- 15–16
spondances,” 184–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: on
“The Bight”: association and the imagination 34–5; Lyri-
description in, 183–5 cal Ballads, 30
210 Index
control, 30–1, 36, 85 expansive vs. intensive imagery,

Costello, Bonnie: on “At the 15–19
Fishhouses,” 89–92; on mas-
tery and flux, 84–5; on mod- “Filling Station,” 56
ernism and postmodernism, “The Fish”: allegory vs. descrip-
6–7 tion in, 25–6; association, de-
“The Country Mouse” and “In scription and narrative in,
the Waiting Room,” 67–8 179–80; imagery in, 29–32;
Croll, Morris: on Baroque and Jarrell’s review, 110–13
prose, 173, 174–6 Fussell, Paul: on travel and
Culler, Jonathon: on travel and tourism, 150–2
tourism, 151–2
Gascoyne, David: Short Survey
Darwin, Charles, 58–9, 199; of Surrealism, 44–5
vs. surrealism, 52–3 gender and sexuality: as inter-
Darwin Letter, The, 4–5, 46–8, pretive bases, 32–3
52–5, 68–9; and surrealism “The Gentleman of Shalott”:
39–57 and allegory 27–8; and surre-
description: as an idea 3–4; vs. alism, 50
association 173–88 Goldensohn, Lorrie: on Bishop
“Dimensions for a Novel,” and surrealism, 43
128, 137–8
Harrison, Victoria, 32–3
ekphrasis, 191–8 Heaney, Seamus: on “At the
Eliot, T.S.: on allegory, 22–3; Fishhouses,” 88–91
on Dante, 17–18; on science, Hemingway, Ernest: and “The
60 Fish,” 110–12
empirical vs. abstract knowl- Herbert, George: “Love Un-
edge, 73–97 known” and “The Weed,”
“The End of March,” 33–4 83–6
Ernst, Max, 42–3; Histoire
naturelle, 52 intensive vs. expansive imagery,
evolution, Darwin’s theory of, 15–19
70–1 “In the Village,” 138
Index 211
“In the Waiting Room” and Moore, Marianne: and sci-

The Darwin Letter, 67–9 ence, 59–61, 63–4
morality vs. politics, 101
James, William, 187–8 Mullen, Richard: on Bishop
Jarrell, Randall: review of and surrealism, 39–41
North & South, 101–14
New Criticism, 190–1
Kalstone, David: on Questions nouveau roman, the, 137
of Travel, 149
Kelly, Lionel: on fear and “One Art,” 36–7
form,112–13 “Over 2,000 Illustrations and
a Complete Concordance”:
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, and narrative, 142–4
Lacoön, 176–8
Longenbach, James: on Jarrell, Paradis, James: on Darwin,
107 64–6
Lowell, Robert: review of “Paris, 7 A.M.”: and narra-
North & South, 78 tive,139–42
Lyrical Ballads, 30 Pascal, Blaise,165–7
“Poem”: and ekphrasis,
“The Man-Moth”: allegorical 195–8
interpretations of, 24–5; and Politics: vs. aesthetics, 98–
imagery, 19–33; and surreal- 124; Bishop’s, 99–100; vs.
ism, 49 morality, 101
McCabe, Susan, 32–3 postmodernism, 6–8
McNally, Nancy: on Bishop’s Pound, Ezra: and science, 60,
clarity, 15–18 63–4
Miles, Josephine: Jarrell on, power, 30–1
105–7 Proverbs, 119–20
Milton, John, 36
modernism: and fiction, 131; “Quai D’Orléans”: politics
and science, 59–62 and aesthetics in, 121–3
“The Monument”: and surre- “Questions of Travel”: and
alism, 49–50 travel, 162–70
212 Index
rhetoric, 35–6 Travisano, Thomas: on Bishop

Richardson, Dorothy: Pilgrim- and surrealism, 43
age, 132–7
Ricoeur, Paul: Time and Narra- “The Unbeliever”: and alle-
tive, 128–30, 135, 144 gory, 28–9; politics vs. aes-
romanticism, 34–5; and natu- thetics in,118–20
ral history, 65–6
Victorian natural history, 62–6
“Santarém”: and narrative,
144–7 “The Weed”: and knowledge,
Science: modernist ideas about, 74–86; relation to “At the
59–62 Fishhouses,” 73–4
Shattuck, Roger: on surrealism, Williams, William Carlos: on
45 science, 60–2
Stein, Gertrude, 132 Wolff, Tobias: on Hemingway,
Stevenson, Anne: correspon- 111
dence with Bishop, 39 Woolf, Virginia: “Modern
Suárez-Toste, Ernesto: on Fiction,” 131–2, 137;
Bishop and surrealism, 42–3 Mrs Dalloway, 133–4
surrealism, 39–57 Wordsworth, William, 30
synthesis, 64–6 World War II, 103–5
“Time’s Andromedas,” 127–37 Yeats, W.B.: “The Unbeliever”

Todorov, Tzvetan: on travel and, 118
writing, 149

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elizabeth bishop’s poetics

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Legal deposit second quarter 2009

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free

McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pickard, Zachariah, 1976–

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Bishop, Elizabeth, 1911–1979 – Criticism and interpretation.

ps3503.i785z75 2009 811′.54 c2008-906400-3

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/14 Sabon.

This book was made possible through the financial support of

St Louis for their help and for permission to quote from

The following abbreviations are used for Bishop’s work:

cp Complete Poems: 1927–1979. New York: Noonday,

Unless otherwise noted, all italics and emphases appearing in

purpose of this book is to rectify that situation by asking what,

Charles Darwin as an aesthetic role model and which, conse-

Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-

In many ways, this entire book amounts to an exploration

epiphany, knowledge, morality, narrative, travel, and, fi-

profound distaste. For Costello, postmodernism is a reaction

And so, while I have addressed it briefly here, and while it

each of which has a particular thematic focus and each of

altogether – the historical world of human beings and their often

At the largest level, all of this is meant to lead my reader

More fundamentally, however, my focus differs from much

things, by which I mean the poems themselves. I hope, like

Throughout this book, I use the word “description” in a

her readers, and the objects depicted in her poetry. So while

is interested enough in frogs qua frogs to think in this way. But

likely places as her early, highly descriptive landscape poems

Bishop offers no details that might help a reader to decide

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to

What she is describing – the way a person’s shadow falls

vividness; everything is arranged and framed such that a

magnetically attracted to the moon has immense thematic

well together” (210). Implicitly, Eliot is equating metaphor

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

of difference” (Harrison 59), “the unknown or the uncon-

interpretations, making it, like “The Fish,” a demonstration

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast

This passage describes a sensation that is explicitly indescrib-

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,

Such an image refuses to treat the Man-Moth as an oddity, as

metaphor suggests an inexpressible void, “an entire night it-

the poem remains an intellectual puzzle instead of a visible

He sleeps on the top of a mast

Though the poem is no clearer than “The Gentleman of Sha-

“I must not fall.

Whatever the Unbeliever does not believe in – and, again, this

and rendering him approachably real. These two different ef-

(my emphasis), the speaker of “The Man-Moth” tells the

holding “a flashlight to his eye” and forcing him to hand

between individuals to the presence or absence of a phallus

crypto-dream-house, that crooked box

Each of these offhand intensive images has an expansive ele-

definites,” of mere objects, which “(as objects) are essentially

Zachariah Pickard - Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description-McGill-Queen's University Press (2009)

Zachariah Pickard - Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description-McGill-Queen's University Press (2009)

Zachariah Pickard - Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description-McGill-Queen's University Press (2009)