Post by ekswitaj on Aug 29, 2008 0:15:26 GMT 2
Swimming with the Sacaca: Water and The Life of the Mind in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry - Helen Frost
In Elizabeth Bishop’s writing, a constellation of images suggests that she could see, distinctly, her own mind alive and in motion, and that she viewed poetry as a way of entering that mind-life. Poetry was not a description of what she found in her living mind, but was itself a way of moving, or swimming, within it. I suggest the verb “swimming” as more specific than “moving” because Bishop perceived mind to be a liquid element, related to the rest of life’s realities in the way that water is related to land, no less substantial for being in constant flux and motion.
Bishop had begun thinking through her approach to poetry as early as 1934, when she was an undergraduate at Vassar. As she matured, she developed and articulated a sense of the movement and timing of poetry, and her belief that a poem should hold within it a sense of the mind in the act of imagining. We can see her thinking about this within her stories and poems, often in imagery having to do with water--rivers, oceans, coastlines, and waterfalls; and the living creatures that move in and around it, or emerge from it-- fish, dolphins, a river spirit, a sandpiper. Through tears, the water imagery becomes connected to our emotions, making explicit the sense of being “moved to tears.”
In the opening lines of “Questions of Travel,” this portrayal of the movement of water through the world and through our minds and eyes is achieved by the use of imagery which glides in and out of metaphor so smoothly we hardly know we are “traveling” with Bishop:
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep traveling, traveling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime hung and barnacled. (CP, 93)
The first five lines are all one sentence, with the waterfalls in the first line being “here,” which seems at first to mean only a geographical location, until we have read to the fifth line when that “here” is transformed by the ambiguity of “under our very eyes” to include also an emotional center. The next line pushes the image so that it is unambiguously a metaphor of tearstains, taking us directly into the emotional territory of being almost in tears, then suggesting that the ships we travel on would capsize if we did not occasionally allow the streams to spill over into waterfalls/tears.
Bishop never quite tells us what she feels like crying about in this poem, but the opening stanza gives an emotional depth to the rest of the poem, mixed as it is with joy and longing, the thrill of discovering new places and the homesickness which is always felt more acutely by those who have no secure home to return to. The waterfalls fall through the poem, and we see the mind of the poet moving with them.
The book Questions of Travel is arranged in two sections, one centered in Brazil (at a time when Brazil was new to Bishop), the other centered in Bishop’s Nova Scotian childhood. The short story “In the Village,” originally published, I believe accurately, as a long prose poem, is positioned between them. The story draws on an important time in Bishop’s life, when she was a pre-literate child in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Her mother has come home from a sanitarium, to which she returns by the end of the story, leaving the child in the care of her grandparents.
The scream which necessitates the mother’s return, and the shame the child is made to feel about it, are both palpably present, not only in that story, but in much of Bishop’s work. In Questions of Travel, particularly, there is a radiance from the story out into the poems, and the poems in the two sections cast light through the story onto each other. The poem in the second section which especially reflects the imagery and emotion of “Questions of Travel” from the first section, is “Sestina.”
“September rain falls on the house,” begins the first stanza, and in the second stanza, the September rain becomes conflated with the grandmother’s “equinoctial tears.” Everything in the poem is crying except the child--the grandmother, the rain, the almanac, the kettle, and finally the child’s drawing, in which both the buttons on the man’s shirt and the flowers in the flower bed are associated with tears.
The structure of the book, especially the central placement of “In the Village,” leads us to link this child with the poet and to reflect back on “Questions of Travel.” In both poems, the child/poet/traveler is ambivalent about the meaning of “home” and is watching emotion/rain/tears swirl all around her, ambivalent, too, about whether to allow those tears to spill over. “Questions of Travel” ends with the somewhat inscrutable question “Should we have stayed at home,/ wherever that may be?” and “Sestina” ends with “the child draws another inscrutable house.”
If we allow our minds to travel back and forth between the poems, we get a deeper sense of the emotion in each--the child sitting in the grandmother’s kitchen, her own parents nowhere in the picture, and the woman arriving in a new country unsure of what home she has, either “here or there.” When we are thus carried into the depth of these poems, we are moved, possibly to a point where our own tears “spill over,” by our own associations with home, travel, and whatever may be raining down on that emotional landscape for us.
The imagery of “At the Fishhouses” supports the idea that Bishop sees a connection between the water in the body and the water on the earth, and the poem gives insight into her process of bringing them together. At the beginning of the poem, they are close, but separate. “The air smells so strong of codfish/ it makes one’s nose run and eyes water” is followed within a few lines by “the heavy surface of the sea,/ swelling slowly as if considering spilling over.”
But by the end of the poem, Bishop is addressing her reader as “you” and overtly suggesting the taking in of the sea into the body (“If you tasted it...”). This creates a remarkable effect, and the process of the poem is worth looking into in some detail.
On one level, the poem is “about” exactly what it claims to be about; it describes in precise detail what Bishop experiences when she visits Nova Scotia, meets an old fisherman friend of her grandfather, offers him a cigarette, and talks with him about codfish and herring and the decline in the local population.
Then her eye travels from the water’s edge down into the water, and there the poem moves into deeper abstractions. As the poem moves into the water, it begins to tell us that water means more than water. “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,/” (no commas--all of these qualities are of a piece, inherent in each other) “element bearable to no mortal,/ to fish and to seals...”
Fish and seals are mortal if they are literal--that they are not mortal in this context suggests that they are something else, as well as being fish and seals, but we do not yet know quite what. The poet, now speaking as “I,” develops a relationship with “One seal particularly” and that relationship draws her and her reader closer to the sea. The seal is still a seal, but we are alerted to the fact that there is more going on than what is immediately meeting our eye. We still don’t quite know what it is, but we know we are moving somewhere. We read “The water seems suspended/ above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones” and we are thus kept “in suspense”/ suspended “above the stones and then the world.”
Then, Bishop address her reader as “you,” and she takes that reader directly to the heart of the poem:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. (CP 64-66)
The sea is not exactly equated with either knowledge or imagination, but is “like what we imagine knowledge to be” making both the sea and our imagination of knowledge comparable to “a transmutation of fire.” This is the only place in the poem where Bishop uses that “we” and it is precisely here that the whole poem “moves us” in a new way--the poem is moving, and alive, because we are allowed to move up to this moment and through it, and then, remarkably, back through the poem again, seeing it “swinging above the stones.”
If the water is “like what we imagine knowledge to be,” then the old man sitting netting with his almost invisible net and his worn and polished shuttle is “like what we imagine the poet to be.” The poem thus tells us about its own making: the smell of codfish, so strong it makes “one’s eyes water” is like that sense that the air is full of poetry; “the heavy surface of the sea... is opaque”--a recognizable sense that imagination/knowledge can feel impenetrable; evidence of fish--their silvery scales everywhere--creates a translucence and iridescence. If the sea is “like what we imagine knowledge to be,” the fish would be like the poems that swim within that imagined knowledge, and their scales would be the evidence that sometimes the fish do come out of the water.
“The old man accepts a Lucky Strike” is still exact and literal, as an old fisherman lighting a cigarette, but now it is also a lucky strike for the fisherman/poet, a turning point for this poem. The old man “waits for a herring boat to come in,” and the sequins/scales he wears are evidence that he has scraped fish before, that he has found “the principal beauty” of unnumbered fish/poems.
The old man “was a friend of my grandfather” and his faith and patience lead the poet towards the water much like reading poetry by a “poet-ancestor” can lead us into a poem. On this encounter with the fish and seals, they seem to be the living, breathing poems the poet is seeking. The particular seal, curious and interested in music, appears now to be like this particular poem. He is “like me a believer in total immersion,” and he emerges from that total immersion to show an interest in the “I” of the poem.
Once the seal/poem has made itself known, there is a brief tug-of-war, the poet singing Baptist hymns (believing in baptism by total immersion--in this cold dark deep absolutely clear knowledge) as well as “A Mighty Fortress is our God” (setting up a resistance to the poem/knowledge). The seal/poem emerges from the water, disappears, reappears “with a sort of shrug/ as if it were against his better judgment.” Judgment weighs the water against the land behind and beneath it, the “water seems suspended” and then “indifferent, “icily free above the stones...and then the world.”
At this moment of suspension, Bishop goes into the water/knowledge of the poem, taking us with her, tentatively at first, “If you should dip your hand in,” then immediately to the aching bones, burning hand, the “transmutation of fire/ that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.” She has already told us that she, like the seal, is a believer in total immersion, and this aching and burning results from just a dip of the hand. We are left to imagine the result of total immersion, then invited to imagine tasting this water, taking it into ourselves, the bitterness, brine, and the fact that it would “surely burn your tongue.”
As we imagine thus tasting the water, imagining that it is knowledge, we circle back to the line which sent us into this reading of the poem on our first time through.
“It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:” What more do we see, now, about knowledge and about the process of moving towards it? It is frightening and seductive at the same time; it has to be emotional knowledge she is talking about, knowing the truth of things we might prefer not to know. In Bishop’s case, such knowledge may have had to do with her mother’s inability to love and nurture her when she was a child, and the maternal imagery of the closing lines of the poem support that possibility without closing off others. That is, Bishop may be moving in her own “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free” personal knowledge, but the poem allows us to move, utterly free, in our own. Perhaps “what we imagine knowledge to be” is more frightening, finally, than the knowledge itself.
The entire process of the poem supports its closing lines, our knowledge “flowing and drawn”--as we have been flowing with the poem, we have drawn its knowledge into ourselves. “And since/ our knowledge is historical,” (there is a movement out of the poem, beyond it) the poem is, at the same time “flowing, and flown.” It is with us in the present, as we acquire knowledge, and it is part of our historical knowledge, the emotional understanding we have gained through immersion in the poem, whether that immersion has been total, or has been a dipping in of the hand and a taste on the tongue.
There is movement, too, from one poem to another, and from the prose to the poems and back. For example (and there are many examples), after reading “At the Fishhouses,” we get a deeper sense of “Questions of Travel” and “Sestina,” the clouds spilling over into waterfalls and the rain in both poems are even more clearly “about” some knowledge the poems do not wish to admit to themselves. In “Sestina” the knowledge, like the rain and the tears, surrounds the child but is not allowed into her consciousness, while the more self-aware woman of “Questions of Travel” allows herself (after listening to rain “so much like politicians’ speeches,” which, after two hours relents, leaving her in a “sudden golden silence”) to question Pascal, thinking through her questions about home and travel.
Even in “The Map,” the first poem of her first book, Bishop was thinking about the relationship between water and land, and what we see in “At the Fishhouses” gives us a deeper sense of what she was getting at in the earlier poem, though it would be a mistake to set up any simple metaphoric equations and plug them in from one poem to another. We see growth and change--movement--from earlier work to later.
Still, “The Map” can function something like the endpaper of an adventure story, which a reader might glance at before beginning the book, then return to as the story unfolds. On Bishop’s “Map,” “Land lies in water” and the entire poem explores the relationship between land and water.
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of the long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under? (CP 3)
Here, the land is tugging at the sea, while in “At the Fishhouses,” the sea/knowledge pulls at the “rocky breasts” of the land. Imagination and the life it draws upon interpenetrate each other and “The Map” presents a picture of the way in which the mind conceives this process.
The structure of “The Map” is highly symmetrical, with two stanzas of even-numbered, exactly rhymed lines on either side of a longer stanza, unrhymed and with an uneven number of lines. The interplay between these differently structured stanzas is something like the interplay between the land and water, which is the poem’s surface subject, and that between the poetic imagination and the rest of the world, which goes on beneath the surface of the poem.
When, towards the end of North & South, the book that begins with “The Map,” a fish becomes visible, in the often-anthologized poem, “The Fish,” it is “a tremendous fish/...battered and venerable/ and homely.” The speaker in this poem holds the fish “half out of water, with my hook/ fast in a corner of his mouth.” Again, the poem can, and should, initially, be appreciated as a marvelous and triumphant “fish story” on an absolutely literal level. But reading the poem in the context of other Bishop poems, such as the ones I have discussed here, yields more.
Bishop is not yet dipping her hand into the sea, or tasting it, as she will in “At the Fishhouses,” and she is not swimming with this “tremendous fish” as she will in “The Riverman.” She is neither, however, trying to “provide a clean cage for invisible fish,” as she did in “The Map.” She is out on the water of her imagination/knowledge in a “little rented boat” with a rusted engine and bailer and “sun-cracked thwarts.” That is a vivid metaphor for the insecurities which can beset a writer, and Bishop, for all her successes (she only received one rejection for a poem in her life) was full of such insecurities.
And yet, here is this tremendous fish, appearing in the first line of the poem, the poem announcing its own presence, though not subverting itself by saying so directly. The fish hangs there, much like a poem which presents itself to a poet as a “grunting weight,” almost speaking a defiant challenge: What are you going to do with me?
Bishop’s response is a loving one. She sees the fish. There is no fight between them, just a deep and detailed seeing. The humility of the poet in the face of a tremendous poem is what allows the poem to have a life of its own, and in this poem, the voice of the poet is one of utter humility.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light. (CP 43)
The poem, too, tips towards the light, and the fact of the vision, the process of seeing, is included in the poem along with what is seen: “and then I saw” and “I stared and stared.” What is seen is the “five-haired beard of wisdom/ trailing from his aching jaw.” The fish has almost been caught at least five times, but has gotten away, and now here he is, filling up the little rented boat with victory. The poem reaches its famous conclusion, “until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!/ And I let the fish go.” Rainbows are a result of light shining through water, and in this case, they are spread on the bilge water of the little rented boat.
My suspicion that this may suggest the triumph of the poem (and of the poet, through the specific poem) in the face of the poet’s anxieties and insecurities, is supported a passage from Brett Millier’s biography of Bishop. Writing about the winter of 1939-1940 in Key West, the winter in which Bishop wrote “The Fish,” Millier notes, “The project [an essay on which Bishop was working] dragged on and on, giving Elizabeth several opportunities to castigate herself for her inability to finish anything, work steadily, or write for an audience” (153-154).
I am not suggesting that Bishop set out to write a poem about not being able to write, and that this poem came of it. It may not even have been the triumph of the poem that she saw when she “stared and stared,” but there is that sense of relief and release in the poem which would be comparable to seeing a rainbow in the bilge water, or to completing a tremendous poem in the middle of a period of frustration about writing. It is worth noting that Bishop does not keep the fish, or make any kind of monument of it. She lets it go, lets it swim in its own element.
Note the progression of imagery from early poems to later ones, of a movement further and further into the water. In “The Map,” there is “a clean cage for invisible fish;” in “The Fish,” “a tremendous fish” is “held...beside the boat/ half out of water” and then released. “At the Fishhouses” has the poet singing hymns to a seal who is “like me a believer in total immersion,” though in this poem the poet’s immersion is not total, but rather a dipping in, and a tasting of the “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” sea.
The last poem I will consider in this grouping is “The Riverman,” a long poem written in the voice of “A man in a remote Amazonian village [who] decides to become a sacaca, a witch doctor who works with water spirits.” (CP 105) In this poem, the poet goes right into the water and swims, and because the water is a river, it is moving, even as the swimmer moves.
Bishop got the details for her poem from a book by Charles Wagley, Amazon Town. But it is clearly more than an anthropological study for her. In 1937, many years before she wrote “The Riverman,” she “dreamed and recorded in her notebook what she would say for forty years was her ‘favorite’ dream.”
The fish was large, about 3 ft. long, large--scaled, metallic like a goldfish only a beautiful rose color. I myself seemed slightly smaller than life-size. We met in water...clear, green, light (--more like the cut edge of plate glass, or birch leaves in bright sun, than emerald). He was very kind and said he would be glad to lead me to the fish, but we’d have to overtake them. He led the way through the water, glancing around at me every now and then with his big eyes to see if I was following. I was swimming easily with scarcely any motion. In his mouth he carried a new, galvanized bucket ( I even think the red & blue paper label was still stuck on the front.) He was taking them a bucket of air--that’s how he’d happened to meet me. I looked in--enough water had got in to make the bucket of air a bucket of large bubbles, seething and shining--hissing, I think, too. I had a vague idea they were to be used as decorations, for some sort of celebration (Millier,117).
“The Riverman” contains elements of this dream, and has details which tie it to some of the other poems I have discussed, as is evident even in these opening lines:
I got up in the night
for the Dolphin spoke to me.
He grunted beneath my window,
hid by the river mist
but I glimpsed him--a man like myself.
I threw off my blanket, sweating;
I even tore off my shirt.
I got out of my hammock
and went through the window naked. (CP 105)
The Dolphin speaks to him, something like the seal in “At the Fishhouses” and he grunts beneath the window, like the fish grunting beside the boat in “The Fish.” The Dolphin is hidden by the river mist, and the man is sweating--both already in an element of water, the water of the earth and the water of the body.
The man is called into the river by the Dolphin and when he goes in, a door opens inward “groaning a little, with water/ bulging above the lintel.” This is reminiscent of the waterfalls/tears of “Questions of Travel” and with just such a brief hint of emotion, he “looked back at my house,/ white as a piece of washing/ forgotten on the bank,/ and I thought once of my wife,/ but I knew what I was doing.” There is also a flash to the backward glance at the Christmas trees in “At the Fishhouses” before the dipping of the hand into the icy waters. The entire poem is made richer by such associations with imagery from earlier Bishop poems.
The riverman follows Luandinha, a river spirit, through “room after room/...from here to Belém/ and back again in a minute./ In fact, I’m not sure where I went,/ but miles, under the river.” This is a confident and ambitious poem, and it says a great deal about confidence and ambition. The riverman travels with the river spirits “every moonlit night:”
When the moon shines on the river,
oh, faster than you can think it
we travel upstream and downstream,
we journey from here to there,
under the floating canoes,
right through the wicker traps,
when the moon shines on the river
and Lunandinha gives a party. (CP 107)
The movement has become easy and natural, the swimmer cannot be trapped. When Bishop finally writes a poem of total immersion in moving water, it is not terrifying, not “cold dark and deep” (though, in the moonlight, it is “absolutely clear”). Within the imagery she has set up in earlier poems, the poet and the poem are one in “The Riverman,” swimming with absolute freedom and clarity in the liquid element where poems live.
The penultimate stanza of the poem gives both a visionary and rational sense of the joy and importance of such swimming:
Why shouldn’t I be ambitious?
I sincerely desire to be
a serious sacaca
like Fortunato Pombo,
or Lucio, or even
the great Joaquim Sacaca.
Look, it stands to reason
that everything we need
can be obtained from the river.
It drains the jungles; it draws
from trees and plants and rocks
from half around the world,
it draws from the very heart
of the earth the remedy
for each of the diseases--
one just has to know how to find it.
But everything must be there
in that magic mud, beneath
the multitudes of fish,
deadly or innocent,
the giant pirarucus,
the turtles and crocodiles,
tree trunks and sunk canoes,
with the crayfish, with the worms
with tiny electric eyes
turning on and off and on.
The river breathes in salt
and breathes it out again,
and all is sweetness there
in the deep, enchanted silt. (CP 108)
The riverman is ambitious, as Bishop was ambitious for her poetry. This poem is a mix of the pragmatic and the magical, the visionary and the analytical, and it is clear that all of that is needed. The fish, like poems, are in this water in multitudes, and they are recognized in their dual nature as “deadly or innocent.” Ultimately, they provide the riverman with a “magic cloak” as he swims through the final stanza:
traveling fast as a wish,
with my magic cloak of fish
swerving as I swerve,
following the veins,
the river’s long, long veins,
to find the pure elixirs. (CP 108-109)
In this poem, “the land lies in water,” as in the opening line of “The Map,” and the relationship between the land and the water is one of absolute harmony, the river drawing its magic from all the land it crosses, as poems draw theirs from all the detritus of everyday living. The silt, that mixture of land and water, is given as “deep, enchanted.”
The poem ends with the promise of “health and money,” pragmatic concerns addressed through a mixture of magic and reason:
When the moon shines and the river
lies across the earth
and sucks it like a child,
then I will go to work
to get you health and money.
The Dolphin singled me out;
Luandinha seconded it. (CP 109)
The image of the river sucking the earth like a child is similar to the image of “what we imagine knowledge to be” in “At the Fishhouses,” except it is so much gentler. There is no longer a “cold hard mouth” deriving sustenance from “the rocky breasts/ forever, flowing and drawn,” but rather a moon shining on a relaxed river that “lies across the earth” when it sucks what it needs.
“Look, it stands to reason,” Bishop can finally claim. She looks and looks, stares and stares, and then she stands her vision up to her reason, and knows, as she swims, alive with her readers in this living poem, “that everything we need/ can be obtained from the river.”
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
---Questions of Travel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.
Millier, Brett. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
In Elizabeth Bishop’s writing, a constellation of images suggests that she could see, distinctly, her own mind alive and in motion, and that she viewed poetry as a way of entering that mind-life. Poetry was not a description of what she found in her living mind, but was itself a way of moving, or swimming, within it. I suggest the verb “swimming” as more specific than “moving” because Bishop perceived mind to be a liquid element, related to the rest of life’s realities in the way that water is related to land, no less substantial for being in constant flux and motion.
Bishop had begun thinking through her approach to poetry as early as 1934, when she was an undergraduate at Vassar. As she matured, she developed and articulated a sense of the movement and timing of poetry, and her belief that a poem should hold within it a sense of the mind in the act of imagining. We can see her thinking about this within her stories and poems, often in imagery having to do with water--rivers, oceans, coastlines, and waterfalls; and the living creatures that move in and around it, or emerge from it-- fish, dolphins, a river spirit, a sandpiper. Through tears, the water imagery becomes connected to our emotions, making explicit the sense of being “moved to tears.”
In the opening lines of “Questions of Travel,” this portrayal of the movement of water through the world and through our minds and eyes is achieved by the use of imagery which glides in and out of metaphor so smoothly we hardly know we are “traveling” with Bishop:
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep traveling, traveling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime hung and barnacled. (CP, 93)
The first five lines are all one sentence, with the waterfalls in the first line being “here,” which seems at first to mean only a geographical location, until we have read to the fifth line when that “here” is transformed by the ambiguity of “under our very eyes” to include also an emotional center. The next line pushes the image so that it is unambiguously a metaphor of tearstains, taking us directly into the emotional territory of being almost in tears, then suggesting that the ships we travel on would capsize if we did not occasionally allow the streams to spill over into waterfalls/tears.
Bishop never quite tells us what she feels like crying about in this poem, but the opening stanza gives an emotional depth to the rest of the poem, mixed as it is with joy and longing, the thrill of discovering new places and the homesickness which is always felt more acutely by those who have no secure home to return to. The waterfalls fall through the poem, and we see the mind of the poet moving with them.
The book Questions of Travel is arranged in two sections, one centered in Brazil (at a time when Brazil was new to Bishop), the other centered in Bishop’s Nova Scotian childhood. The short story “In the Village,” originally published, I believe accurately, as a long prose poem, is positioned between them. The story draws on an important time in Bishop’s life, when she was a pre-literate child in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Her mother has come home from a sanitarium, to which she returns by the end of the story, leaving the child in the care of her grandparents.
The scream which necessitates the mother’s return, and the shame the child is made to feel about it, are both palpably present, not only in that story, but in much of Bishop’s work. In Questions of Travel, particularly, there is a radiance from the story out into the poems, and the poems in the two sections cast light through the story onto each other. The poem in the second section which especially reflects the imagery and emotion of “Questions of Travel” from the first section, is “Sestina.”
“September rain falls on the house,” begins the first stanza, and in the second stanza, the September rain becomes conflated with the grandmother’s “equinoctial tears.” Everything in the poem is crying except the child--the grandmother, the rain, the almanac, the kettle, and finally the child’s drawing, in which both the buttons on the man’s shirt and the flowers in the flower bed are associated with tears.
The structure of the book, especially the central placement of “In the Village,” leads us to link this child with the poet and to reflect back on “Questions of Travel.” In both poems, the child/poet/traveler is ambivalent about the meaning of “home” and is watching emotion/rain/tears swirl all around her, ambivalent, too, about whether to allow those tears to spill over. “Questions of Travel” ends with the somewhat inscrutable question “Should we have stayed at home,/ wherever that may be?” and “Sestina” ends with “the child draws another inscrutable house.”
If we allow our minds to travel back and forth between the poems, we get a deeper sense of the emotion in each--the child sitting in the grandmother’s kitchen, her own parents nowhere in the picture, and the woman arriving in a new country unsure of what home she has, either “here or there.” When we are thus carried into the depth of these poems, we are moved, possibly to a point where our own tears “spill over,” by our own associations with home, travel, and whatever may be raining down on that emotional landscape for us.
The imagery of “At the Fishhouses” supports the idea that Bishop sees a connection between the water in the body and the water on the earth, and the poem gives insight into her process of bringing them together. At the beginning of the poem, they are close, but separate. “The air smells so strong of codfish/ it makes one’s nose run and eyes water” is followed within a few lines by “the heavy surface of the sea,/ swelling slowly as if considering spilling over.”
But by the end of the poem, Bishop is addressing her reader as “you” and overtly suggesting the taking in of the sea into the body (“If you tasted it...”). This creates a remarkable effect, and the process of the poem is worth looking into in some detail.
On one level, the poem is “about” exactly what it claims to be about; it describes in precise detail what Bishop experiences when she visits Nova Scotia, meets an old fisherman friend of her grandfather, offers him a cigarette, and talks with him about codfish and herring and the decline in the local population.
Then her eye travels from the water’s edge down into the water, and there the poem moves into deeper abstractions. As the poem moves into the water, it begins to tell us that water means more than water. “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,/” (no commas--all of these qualities are of a piece, inherent in each other) “element bearable to no mortal,/ to fish and to seals...”
Fish and seals are mortal if they are literal--that they are not mortal in this context suggests that they are something else, as well as being fish and seals, but we do not yet know quite what. The poet, now speaking as “I,” develops a relationship with “One seal particularly” and that relationship draws her and her reader closer to the sea. The seal is still a seal, but we are alerted to the fact that there is more going on than what is immediately meeting our eye. We still don’t quite know what it is, but we know we are moving somewhere. We read “The water seems suspended/ above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones” and we are thus kept “in suspense”/ suspended “above the stones and then the world.”
Then, Bishop address her reader as “you,” and she takes that reader directly to the heart of the poem:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. (CP 64-66)
The sea is not exactly equated with either knowledge or imagination, but is “like what we imagine knowledge to be” making both the sea and our imagination of knowledge comparable to “a transmutation of fire.” This is the only place in the poem where Bishop uses that “we” and it is precisely here that the whole poem “moves us” in a new way--the poem is moving, and alive, because we are allowed to move up to this moment and through it, and then, remarkably, back through the poem again, seeing it “swinging above the stones.”
If the water is “like what we imagine knowledge to be,” then the old man sitting netting with his almost invisible net and his worn and polished shuttle is “like what we imagine the poet to be.” The poem thus tells us about its own making: the smell of codfish, so strong it makes “one’s eyes water” is like that sense that the air is full of poetry; “the heavy surface of the sea... is opaque”--a recognizable sense that imagination/knowledge can feel impenetrable; evidence of fish--their silvery scales everywhere--creates a translucence and iridescence. If the sea is “like what we imagine knowledge to be,” the fish would be like the poems that swim within that imagined knowledge, and their scales would be the evidence that sometimes the fish do come out of the water.
“The old man accepts a Lucky Strike” is still exact and literal, as an old fisherman lighting a cigarette, but now it is also a lucky strike for the fisherman/poet, a turning point for this poem. The old man “waits for a herring boat to come in,” and the sequins/scales he wears are evidence that he has scraped fish before, that he has found “the principal beauty” of unnumbered fish/poems.
The old man “was a friend of my grandfather” and his faith and patience lead the poet towards the water much like reading poetry by a “poet-ancestor” can lead us into a poem. On this encounter with the fish and seals, they seem to be the living, breathing poems the poet is seeking. The particular seal, curious and interested in music, appears now to be like this particular poem. He is “like me a believer in total immersion,” and he emerges from that total immersion to show an interest in the “I” of the poem.
Once the seal/poem has made itself known, there is a brief tug-of-war, the poet singing Baptist hymns (believing in baptism by total immersion--in this cold dark deep absolutely clear knowledge) as well as “A Mighty Fortress is our God” (setting up a resistance to the poem/knowledge). The seal/poem emerges from the water, disappears, reappears “with a sort of shrug/ as if it were against his better judgment.” Judgment weighs the water against the land behind and beneath it, the “water seems suspended” and then “indifferent, “icily free above the stones...and then the world.”
At this moment of suspension, Bishop goes into the water/knowledge of the poem, taking us with her, tentatively at first, “If you should dip your hand in,” then immediately to the aching bones, burning hand, the “transmutation of fire/ that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.” She has already told us that she, like the seal, is a believer in total immersion, and this aching and burning results from just a dip of the hand. We are left to imagine the result of total immersion, then invited to imagine tasting this water, taking it into ourselves, the bitterness, brine, and the fact that it would “surely burn your tongue.”
As we imagine thus tasting the water, imagining that it is knowledge, we circle back to the line which sent us into this reading of the poem on our first time through.
“It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:” What more do we see, now, about knowledge and about the process of moving towards it? It is frightening and seductive at the same time; it has to be emotional knowledge she is talking about, knowing the truth of things we might prefer not to know. In Bishop’s case, such knowledge may have had to do with her mother’s inability to love and nurture her when she was a child, and the maternal imagery of the closing lines of the poem support that possibility without closing off others. That is, Bishop may be moving in her own “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free” personal knowledge, but the poem allows us to move, utterly free, in our own. Perhaps “what we imagine knowledge to be” is more frightening, finally, than the knowledge itself.
The entire process of the poem supports its closing lines, our knowledge “flowing and drawn”--as we have been flowing with the poem, we have drawn its knowledge into ourselves. “And since/ our knowledge is historical,” (there is a movement out of the poem, beyond it) the poem is, at the same time “flowing, and flown.” It is with us in the present, as we acquire knowledge, and it is part of our historical knowledge, the emotional understanding we have gained through immersion in the poem, whether that immersion has been total, or has been a dipping in of the hand and a taste on the tongue.
There is movement, too, from one poem to another, and from the prose to the poems and back. For example (and there are many examples), after reading “At the Fishhouses,” we get a deeper sense of “Questions of Travel” and “Sestina,” the clouds spilling over into waterfalls and the rain in both poems are even more clearly “about” some knowledge the poems do not wish to admit to themselves. In “Sestina” the knowledge, like the rain and the tears, surrounds the child but is not allowed into her consciousness, while the more self-aware woman of “Questions of Travel” allows herself (after listening to rain “so much like politicians’ speeches,” which, after two hours relents, leaving her in a “sudden golden silence”) to question Pascal, thinking through her questions about home and travel.
Even in “The Map,” the first poem of her first book, Bishop was thinking about the relationship between water and land, and what we see in “At the Fishhouses” gives us a deeper sense of what she was getting at in the earlier poem, though it would be a mistake to set up any simple metaphoric equations and plug them in from one poem to another. We see growth and change--movement--from earlier work to later.
Still, “The Map” can function something like the endpaper of an adventure story, which a reader might glance at before beginning the book, then return to as the story unfolds. On Bishop’s “Map,” “Land lies in water” and the entire poem explores the relationship between land and water.
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of the long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under? (CP 3)
Here, the land is tugging at the sea, while in “At the Fishhouses,” the sea/knowledge pulls at the “rocky breasts” of the land. Imagination and the life it draws upon interpenetrate each other and “The Map” presents a picture of the way in which the mind conceives this process.
The structure of “The Map” is highly symmetrical, with two stanzas of even-numbered, exactly rhymed lines on either side of a longer stanza, unrhymed and with an uneven number of lines. The interplay between these differently structured stanzas is something like the interplay between the land and water, which is the poem’s surface subject, and that between the poetic imagination and the rest of the world, which goes on beneath the surface of the poem.
When, towards the end of North & South, the book that begins with “The Map,” a fish becomes visible, in the often-anthologized poem, “The Fish,” it is “a tremendous fish/...battered and venerable/ and homely.” The speaker in this poem holds the fish “half out of water, with my hook/ fast in a corner of his mouth.” Again, the poem can, and should, initially, be appreciated as a marvelous and triumphant “fish story” on an absolutely literal level. But reading the poem in the context of other Bishop poems, such as the ones I have discussed here, yields more.
Bishop is not yet dipping her hand into the sea, or tasting it, as she will in “At the Fishhouses,” and she is not swimming with this “tremendous fish” as she will in “The Riverman.” She is neither, however, trying to “provide a clean cage for invisible fish,” as she did in “The Map.” She is out on the water of her imagination/knowledge in a “little rented boat” with a rusted engine and bailer and “sun-cracked thwarts.” That is a vivid metaphor for the insecurities which can beset a writer, and Bishop, for all her successes (she only received one rejection for a poem in her life) was full of such insecurities.
And yet, here is this tremendous fish, appearing in the first line of the poem, the poem announcing its own presence, though not subverting itself by saying so directly. The fish hangs there, much like a poem which presents itself to a poet as a “grunting weight,” almost speaking a defiant challenge: What are you going to do with me?
Bishop’s response is a loving one. She sees the fish. There is no fight between them, just a deep and detailed seeing. The humility of the poet in the face of a tremendous poem is what allows the poem to have a life of its own, and in this poem, the voice of the poet is one of utter humility.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light. (CP 43)
The poem, too, tips towards the light, and the fact of the vision, the process of seeing, is included in the poem along with what is seen: “and then I saw” and “I stared and stared.” What is seen is the “five-haired beard of wisdom/ trailing from his aching jaw.” The fish has almost been caught at least five times, but has gotten away, and now here he is, filling up the little rented boat with victory. The poem reaches its famous conclusion, “until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!/ And I let the fish go.” Rainbows are a result of light shining through water, and in this case, they are spread on the bilge water of the little rented boat.
My suspicion that this may suggest the triumph of the poem (and of the poet, through the specific poem) in the face of the poet’s anxieties and insecurities, is supported a passage from Brett Millier’s biography of Bishop. Writing about the winter of 1939-1940 in Key West, the winter in which Bishop wrote “The Fish,” Millier notes, “The project [an essay on which Bishop was working] dragged on and on, giving Elizabeth several opportunities to castigate herself for her inability to finish anything, work steadily, or write for an audience” (153-154).
I am not suggesting that Bishop set out to write a poem about not being able to write, and that this poem came of it. It may not even have been the triumph of the poem that she saw when she “stared and stared,” but there is that sense of relief and release in the poem which would be comparable to seeing a rainbow in the bilge water, or to completing a tremendous poem in the middle of a period of frustration about writing. It is worth noting that Bishop does not keep the fish, or make any kind of monument of it. She lets it go, lets it swim in its own element.
Note the progression of imagery from early poems to later ones, of a movement further and further into the water. In “The Map,” there is “a clean cage for invisible fish;” in “The Fish,” “a tremendous fish” is “held...beside the boat/ half out of water” and then released. “At the Fishhouses” has the poet singing hymns to a seal who is “like me a believer in total immersion,” though in this poem the poet’s immersion is not total, but rather a dipping in, and a tasting of the “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” sea.
The last poem I will consider in this grouping is “The Riverman,” a long poem written in the voice of “A man in a remote Amazonian village [who] decides to become a sacaca, a witch doctor who works with water spirits.” (CP 105) In this poem, the poet goes right into the water and swims, and because the water is a river, it is moving, even as the swimmer moves.
Bishop got the details for her poem from a book by Charles Wagley, Amazon Town. But it is clearly more than an anthropological study for her. In 1937, many years before she wrote “The Riverman,” she “dreamed and recorded in her notebook what she would say for forty years was her ‘favorite’ dream.”
The fish was large, about 3 ft. long, large--scaled, metallic like a goldfish only a beautiful rose color. I myself seemed slightly smaller than life-size. We met in water...clear, green, light (--more like the cut edge of plate glass, or birch leaves in bright sun, than emerald). He was very kind and said he would be glad to lead me to the fish, but we’d have to overtake them. He led the way through the water, glancing around at me every now and then with his big eyes to see if I was following. I was swimming easily with scarcely any motion. In his mouth he carried a new, galvanized bucket ( I even think the red & blue paper label was still stuck on the front.) He was taking them a bucket of air--that’s how he’d happened to meet me. I looked in--enough water had got in to make the bucket of air a bucket of large bubbles, seething and shining--hissing, I think, too. I had a vague idea they were to be used as decorations, for some sort of celebration (Millier,117).
“The Riverman” contains elements of this dream, and has details which tie it to some of the other poems I have discussed, as is evident even in these opening lines:
I got up in the night
for the Dolphin spoke to me.
He grunted beneath my window,
hid by the river mist
but I glimpsed him--a man like myself.
I threw off my blanket, sweating;
I even tore off my shirt.
I got out of my hammock
and went through the window naked. (CP 105)
The Dolphin speaks to him, something like the seal in “At the Fishhouses” and he grunts beneath the window, like the fish grunting beside the boat in “The Fish.” The Dolphin is hidden by the river mist, and the man is sweating--both already in an element of water, the water of the earth and the water of the body.
The man is called into the river by the Dolphin and when he goes in, a door opens inward “groaning a little, with water/ bulging above the lintel.” This is reminiscent of the waterfalls/tears of “Questions of Travel” and with just such a brief hint of emotion, he “looked back at my house,/ white as a piece of washing/ forgotten on the bank,/ and I thought once of my wife,/ but I knew what I was doing.” There is also a flash to the backward glance at the Christmas trees in “At the Fishhouses” before the dipping of the hand into the icy waters. The entire poem is made richer by such associations with imagery from earlier Bishop poems.
The riverman follows Luandinha, a river spirit, through “room after room/...from here to Belém/ and back again in a minute./ In fact, I’m not sure where I went,/ but miles, under the river.” This is a confident and ambitious poem, and it says a great deal about confidence and ambition. The riverman travels with the river spirits “every moonlit night:”
When the moon shines on the river,
oh, faster than you can think it
we travel upstream and downstream,
we journey from here to there,
under the floating canoes,
right through the wicker traps,
when the moon shines on the river
and Lunandinha gives a party. (CP 107)
The movement has become easy and natural, the swimmer cannot be trapped. When Bishop finally writes a poem of total immersion in moving water, it is not terrifying, not “cold dark and deep” (though, in the moonlight, it is “absolutely clear”). Within the imagery she has set up in earlier poems, the poet and the poem are one in “The Riverman,” swimming with absolute freedom and clarity in the liquid element where poems live.
The penultimate stanza of the poem gives both a visionary and rational sense of the joy and importance of such swimming:
Why shouldn’t I be ambitious?
I sincerely desire to be
a serious sacaca
like Fortunato Pombo,
or Lucio, or even
the great Joaquim Sacaca.
Look, it stands to reason
that everything we need
can be obtained from the river.
It drains the jungles; it draws
from trees and plants and rocks
from half around the world,
it draws from the very heart
of the earth the remedy
for each of the diseases--
one just has to know how to find it.
But everything must be there
in that magic mud, beneath
the multitudes of fish,
deadly or innocent,
the giant pirarucus,
the turtles and crocodiles,
tree trunks and sunk canoes,
with the crayfish, with the worms
with tiny electric eyes
turning on and off and on.
The river breathes in salt
and breathes it out again,
and all is sweetness there
in the deep, enchanted silt. (CP 108)
The riverman is ambitious, as Bishop was ambitious for her poetry. This poem is a mix of the pragmatic and the magical, the visionary and the analytical, and it is clear that all of that is needed. The fish, like poems, are in this water in multitudes, and they are recognized in their dual nature as “deadly or innocent.” Ultimately, they provide the riverman with a “magic cloak” as he swims through the final stanza:
traveling fast as a wish,
with my magic cloak of fish
swerving as I swerve,
following the veins,
the river’s long, long veins,
to find the pure elixirs. (CP 108-109)
In this poem, “the land lies in water,” as in the opening line of “The Map,” and the relationship between the land and the water is one of absolute harmony, the river drawing its magic from all the land it crosses, as poems draw theirs from all the detritus of everyday living. The silt, that mixture of land and water, is given as “deep, enchanted.”
The poem ends with the promise of “health and money,” pragmatic concerns addressed through a mixture of magic and reason:
When the moon shines and the river
lies across the earth
and sucks it like a child,
then I will go to work
to get you health and money.
The Dolphin singled me out;
Luandinha seconded it. (CP 109)
The image of the river sucking the earth like a child is similar to the image of “what we imagine knowledge to be” in “At the Fishhouses,” except it is so much gentler. There is no longer a “cold hard mouth” deriving sustenance from “the rocky breasts/ forever, flowing and drawn,” but rather a moon shining on a relaxed river that “lies across the earth” when it sucks what it needs.
“Look, it stands to reason,” Bishop can finally claim. She looks and looks, stares and stares, and then she stands her vision up to her reason, and knows, as she swims, alive with her readers in this living poem, “that everything we need/ can be obtained from the river.”
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
---Questions of Travel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.
Millier, Brett. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.