Antigonish Review
#123
Michael Benigni
The Oracular Imagination in Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop's reputation has been growing steadily in recent years,
to the point where, in many circles, it does not seem an exaggeration
to place her among the handful of major post-war American poets. This
is remarkable considering the relatively small body of verse she published
in her lifetime and the seemingly limited thematic scope of her poems.
No small part of this phenomenon is due, no doubt, to the respect and
dedication given to her by her peers - from her contemporaries, Lowell
and Jarell, for whom she was a discovery, to the next generation of poets,
including Merrill, Ashbery, and many others for whom she was a major influence.
The reasons for admiring Bishop are many and varied, but one thing every
one of her peers agrees on is the preeminence of her craft. Lowell's judgment
from early on was that she was one of the "best craftsmen alive."
Years later, Ashbery called her "a writer's writer's writer."
When asked about her craft and influence in a 1968 interview, her good
friend James Merrill singled out the "unpretentiousness of her form,"
yet acknowledged that she, along with Stevens (and unlike Pound who wrote
"like a god") "write like angels."
Perhaps, then, this is the secret of her unique appeal, particularly
to contemporary writers (who, after all, often fall prey to the most unappealing
kinds of vanity). Hers is a humble speaking voice, clearly awed in the
presence of the natural world she most meticulously describes, in fact,
sublimely subsumed in the contemplation of it, and yet humourously dismissive
of the spiritual transformations that derive from it. But there is a deep
sense of transcendental yearning at the heart of Bishop's poetry, her
public disavowals of religious faith and her lack of bardic posturing
notwithstanding. For want of a better phrase, I should like to term this
quality "the oracular imagination" in Elizabeth Bishop. It exists
coincidentally and perhaps inextricably with those features that we most
commonly associate with her poetic stance - her dogged empiricism, her
tact and manners, her emotional restraint, her formalist aesthetics, and
her canny understatement. It is my contention, then, that it is this tug
toward the oracular imagination, the sudden welling up of the bardic or
sublime speaking voice, that gives Bishop her unique and subtle appeal
for many contemporary readers. One can trace this characteristic throughout
Bishop's career, in early poems such as "The Fish," to such
later masterpieces as "At the Fishhouses," "The Armadillo,"
and "The Moose." This essay will focus primarily on the oracular
imagination as it is manifested in two Bishop poems, the early uncontestable
masterpiece, "The Man-Moth," and the later, lesser-known "Sandpiper,"
which I believe is among her most perfect poems, and one which reveals
so much about her aims and methods.
Although published in her first book of poems North & South in 1946,
Elizabeth Bishop wrote "The Man-Moth" more than ten years earlier,
in 1935, when she was just twenty-four, right out of Vassar and living
alone in New York. Thus it is one of Bishop's earliest published poems
and probably her first great poem. However, it is not the kind of poem
casual readers may readily associate with Bishop; it is not, for example,
a poem like "The Fish," also from North & South, where the natural
world, the overt subject, is voiced in minutely objective detail in a
witty, understated way. That is the Bishop almost everyone recognizes
and duly admires; many of her poems proceed in this fashion. "The
Man-Moth" is a different kind of poem, though, the best of a small
class of very difficult, problematic, strange, surreal, and subjective
poem-fables, written very early in her career, which would also include
"The Unbeliever," "The Imaginary Iceberg," and "A
Miracle for Breakfast."
The poem's title, subject, and inspiration derive from a serendipitous
reading of a misprint of the word "mammoth" which appeared in
an unidentified New York Times article. Throughout her career, Bishop
had been coy or silent about the poem's genesis, and considering the poem's
status and importance in her poetic development, it is very tempting to
speculate on these matters. For her part, Bishop, in an interview published
in Poet's Choice in 1962, stated that she had forgotten the context of
the article, but hints at its significance in a very intriguing statement:
"But the misprint seemed meant for me," she explained; "An
oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times, kindly explaining New
York City to me, at least for the moment." It is interesting that
Bishop used the word "oracle" here, given the fact that oracular-sounding
pronouncements seem to be the most unlikely way to characterize Bishop's
typical speaking voice. Of course Bishop could have been speaking ironically
here (she was wonderfully adept that way in her interviews and letters),
but it seems to me that there's a strong element of truth in this statement,
and what follows in the interview is more straightforward though no less
relevatory: "One is offered such oracular statements all the time,"
she notes, "but often misses them, gets lazy about writing them out
in detail, or the meaning refuses to stay put. This poem seems to me to
have stayed put fairly well," The key here, then, is the self-admonition
about "getting lazy about writing them in detail." However,
it is the sheer weight of these accumulated details, their apparent self-referential
quality, the way in which they seem to spurn the very notion of a speaker
grounded in a natural world, that mark the enduring mystery of this poem.
Elizabeth Bishop does not write like this, usually. What, for heaven's
sake, is she doing here?
Some things about the poem, however, seem clear. Whatever else it does,
"The Man-Moth" takes as one of its subjects a particular place
and time, in this case a speaker's revelatory moment alone in New York
City. Moreover, in the previously mentioned interview, Bishop, the ever
self-effacing writer, in uncharacteristic candor declares that she hit
the target on this one; she admits that she was scrupulously attentive
to the "details" of this oracular experience. Remarkably, almost
thirty years later, she reveals that the poem still works for her - for
her, the meaning has "stayed put very well." These are very
strange sounding words indeed, given the uncharacteristic difficulties
of stance the poem presents, the way in which it seems to lend itself
to shifting critical interpretations. Is Bishop teasing her audience in
this interview? Or is there something else going on?
"The Man-Moth" is a very difficult poem to get a handle on.
What, then, is the meaning that has stayed put so well? Considering the
poem's aforementioned distinctive speaking voice, the strange way the
poem resists final interpretation, and Bishop's insistence on its "oracular"
genesis, the reader may be tempted to view the poem as a kind of autobiographical
fable. It is an event of the imagination, a plunge into the moment, a
significant moment when the artist comes into her own, so to speak, for
the first time. It's a strange, dream-like, symbol-laden, interior landscape
unlike anything Bishop had explored anytime before or since (at least
not to this degree), an impressionistic record of an artistic "coming
out," the poetic imagination's first flash of recognizing itself
in full splendor. It is the defining moment when the artist first realizes
the full force of her vocation. It is, in short, different and important.
It is not a subject proper to understatement, reserve, tact, emotional
control, or self-deprecating wit, those qualities we've come to expect
and admire when we seriously confront a typical Bishop poem. This poem
is unique, sui generis, because it has to be. It need only be done once,
if done right, if one has not missed the "oracular statements,"
or gotten "lazy about writing them out in detail."
If "The Man-Moth," then, somehow represents Bishop's state
of mind when she was considering the implications of her vocation as an
artist, what clues does the poem give to the influences that have shaped
her to that point and what is her attitude toward those influences? Before
examining the text of the poem for answers, it is perhaps best to consider
the milieu in which it was composed. It was New York, 1935. Eliot's "The
Wasteland," published scarcely more than a decade ago, was still
the most influential poem in English; every wannabe young talent who spoke
the language could not have helped being affected by it. The most important,
relevant, contemporary critical work would have been Edmund Wilson's monumental
study of the modern symbolist movement - Axel's Castle, published just
four years earlier. Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore were emerging as
major figures here in the U.S., Auden across the Atlantic. The Depression
was in full flower, Socialism was "in" for young intellectuals,
and "modernism" had by then emerged as a full-fledged artistic
movement with its established heroes and well known tenets.
Now we have Elizabeth Bishop, an extremely shy, lonely, twenty-four year
old aspiring poet just out of Vassar. She met Marianne Moore, her first
serious reader, who was encouraging, the year before, the year her insane
mother died; otherwise her literary contacts were pretty much confined
to her reading, which was, even by then, quite extensive. She had published
a little, but nothing very significant. In her letters and interviews
she tells us that among her poetic influences at the time were Auden and
more importantly Stevens among contemporaries. Hopkins and the Metaphysicals,
especially Herbert, were the more important influences, however. She had
read Baudelaire and the French symbolists and she was beginning to take
an interest in the French surrealists.
One can imagine then, the young poet, alone in her Manhattan apartment,
thinking about her new life and her aspirations as a poet, reading the
paper and encountering that fortuitous misprint, something of obvious
moment and force, something more than huge, something New York, something
"man-moth," and she's off:
Here, above,cracks in the buildings are filled with
battered moonlight.
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.
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.
The short first line with the conspicuous caesura is used to establish
both place and perspective - "Here, above," - but then is immediately
followed with an image that seems to undermine the perspective that has
been set up - "cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight."
The speaker puts us above, somewhere, looking into buildings with moonlight
- where could this be in the objectifiable world? Somewhere, underground,
presumably looking up - but then what are we above? The following line
complicates things further; now here "the whole shadow of man is
only as big as his hat." The reader is lost in space here, and remains
so for the rest of the poem. The scene is dream-like, surreal.
What then are the salient features that define this strange, hybrid Kafkaesque
creature and his habitat? For one thing he is conspicuously contrasted
to Man (I take "Man," in this context, to stand for a certain
kind of modern man, a kind of humanity that stands somehow in tragic opposition
to the fallen, artistic man). As an artist, The Man-Moth's vision/perspective
may be of larger scope, but, unlike the ordinary modern man, it is delusional
- "Man, standing below him, has no such illusions." Moreover,
the Man-Moth dwells habitually underground, only rarely emerging to the
surface where Man is. On the surface, he is unable to calibrate the world
in a way scientific man can. The moon is not something he can see, directly,
but only feel "her vast properties." In fact the moon is not
a thing at all to the Man-Moth, but a hole in the sky, that he must, nevertheless,
investigate. But one wonders how he is equipped to do so. We do know that
he fears his investigation, and we know, significantly that "what
the Man-Moth fears most, he must do." This is an insane kind of instinct
from modern, scientific Man's perspective, but for the Man-Moth fear is
not the issue. He is invulnerable to his failures; when he falls, for
example, he gets up, unhurt. The Man-Moth, to sum up then, is a contemporary,
comic, and American version of the French počtes maudits.
Of course there are many ways one might interpret this strange poem.
My intention here is not to explicate this poem line by line, but rather
to offer a kind of lens through which the poem might profitably be read.
My few remarks so far are meant to convince myself that this is a poem
about writing poetry (the dangers and rewards inherent in the vocation)
and that it represents Bishop's ars poetica at that specific time and
place when she recognized its full implications. What little criticism
that exists on the poem, it may be noted, offers widely divergent interpretations.
This is not a criticism of the poem nor of the critics themselves; truly
imaginative poems are open to multiple interpretations, and a poem like
this is fair game for the critical establishment. As I write this, I am
reminded of Stevens' famous dictum - "the poem should resist the
intelligence, almost successfully." If I do have one criticism of
the poem (and this is probably more due to my failure as a reader than
any shortcomings on Bishop's part), it is that I find that this poem ultimately
resists my intelligence too successfully. The oracular imagination here
is too overwhelmingly present; it is too "Man-Moth."
In wonderful contrast to the stark sublimations of "The Man-Moth,"
there is the splendid short lyric, "Sandpiper," also, I believe,
about the vocation of writing poetry, but everywhere different in tone
and stance. It was published in the 1965 volume Questions of Travel, among
the group of poems labeled "Elsewhere," which is to distinguish
them from those on Brazilian topics, where the poet then lived. In the
case of this poem, the "elsewhere" is some unspecified beach
on the Atlantic. Here, then, is the poem:
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of confused panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes.
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
-Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose, and amethyst.
Here, unlike "The Man-Moth," we have Bishop at perhaps her
most representative. The natural world is observed in the minutest of
details, the verse is formal and deft, the speaking voice is wry and self-deprecating,
and the imaginative leaps are absolutely clear yet almost unspeakably
subtle. And yet, as much as this poem works with its putative subject
(the wonderfully auspiciously named "sandpiper," a subject I
will get to in a bit), it can, I think, be even more profitably read with
an autobiographical gloss.
Of course, there's nothing original here; critics have noticed this feature
of the poem and Bishop herself admitted in a 1976 speech that there was
a bit of herself in the finical bird. However, it is the sense of the
poem being about the vocation of writing and defining the parameters of
imaginative vision that may be underappreciated or even overlooked. For
starters, let's take the title - "Sandpiper." The very sound
of the word, the way its name describes its essence, is one of the great
felicities of our language. One cannot help but think that Bishop was
totally aware of the revelatory quality of the name itself. In fact, I
believe that it was precisely this recognition that inspired the poem.
This is the reason why no article precedes the noun in the title. We are
not concerned with this particular bird, but rather with the essence of
the bird. This is a being that pipes its song from the sands. From this
recognition then, the miraculous quality that language has to name things,
the poem proceeds to make its revelations. The first thing that may strike
us is how aptly the name of the bird describes the speaker - what better
name for the Key West poet than "sandpiper"?
In the first line of the poem we have the bird oblivious to his surroundings;
the roarings of the ocean "he takes for granted." It is interesting,
in light of what has been said about the title, that the poem initially
appeals to the auditory imagination. If we can assent to read the ocean's
roarings in symbolic terms (this is not so much of a stretch considering
that the bird is soon to be personified as a student of Blake), perhaps
Bishop is suggesting that the artist/bird must ignore the common clamourings
of humanity, the rhetoric of the politicians, the advertisers, the movers
and shakers of the world. He has come to accept this fact of modern life,
"that every so often the world is bound to shake." In the final
two lines of the first stanza (for me a splendid achievement in mixing
the comic with the serious) the sandpiper responds to the roarings by
running, southward. The fact that "runs" is repeated here and
in other parts of the poem is significant. It is precisely this response
that the poet is attracted to, that forms the central paradox of the poem:
implicit in the insistent running image is the unanswered question. Why
he does not fly is a mystery, part of the bird's quirky charm. He neither
flies nor stands his ground, then, but rather: "He runs, he runs
to the south, finical, awkward,/in a state of confused panic, a student
of Blake." Like the Man-Moth (another creature who could fly but
doesn't; he climbs), the sandpiper responds to the challenge of his existence
in a state of "confused panic." This is wonderfully funny stuff,
charming and typical in its self-effacement, but Bishop then interjects
the figure of the Blakean student and then suddenly, without warning,
the poem moves from the comic to the oracular. Blake, of course, is the
perfect representation of the unself-consciously bardic personality. The
bird is a student of his; there is no other way to read this other than
understanding that the bird is searching for something transcendental,
notwithstanding (perhaps even paradoxically because of) his panicked fumblings.
This, at first blush, odd juxtaposition almost invites the reader to
judge the bird negatively, as a deluded, panicky coward who cannot deal
with the roaring imperatives of the real world. But then, given what follows,
we remember that Blake is the poet who, in "Auguries of Innocence,"
exhorted us "To see a World in a grain of Sand," and two lines
later "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand." Now the figure
becomes almost miraculously apt. The sandpiper (unlike the Man-Moth who
can palm a tear), of course, has no hands. But he has feet! The feet in
this poem are brilliant metonyms for the poet's gestures to the oracle.
He runs and runs with them. The water of the ocean "glazes over"
them as the hot beach "hisses like fat." He watches them as
he runs, or so he seems to; in truth he is watching the "spaces of
sand between" his toes that the Atlantic (still a symbol here) drains
away. But before the ocean casts them into oblivion, the sandpiper "stares
at the dragging grains," literally the grain caught between his toes.
He stares while the world is a mist, but then it becomes "minute
and vast and clear." He does not notice the ocean tides; they do
not matter now. For the sandpiper is "preoccupied,/looking for something,
something, something." But the poor bird is rewarded for his obsession.
The universe opens up to him. The grains are millionfold. Among the black,
white, tan, and gray colors are mixed the crystalline, paradisiacal shades
of "rose" and "amethyst."
One could go on speaking of the many excellences of this poem. For example,
the way the rhythms of the verse replicate the scene that is described
is probably worthy of an essay itself. As purely objective description,
the piece would qualify as excellent; however, given the poem's imaginative
import, and the subtle, seamless way it is woven into the fabric of the
poem, Bishop's achievement seems nothing short of miraculous. This is
a triumph of contextualizing the poetic imagination in the framework of
a seemingly ordinary experience. This is what for me separates "Sandpiper"
from "The Man-Moth"; the garden of "Sandpiper" has
real toads in them. In fact, as fine a poem as I felt this was, when I
read it out loud last night for the first time I found myself choking
over the words; part of me wanted to laugh, part of me to cry. I felt
like running somewhere myself. The poet Robert Graves had an interesting
trick for judging truly imaginative poems. He would simply write the poem
out in long hand, imagining himself writing the lines, and if the hair
on his wrist began to rise then he knew that the muse had been present.
Something like this is happening to me now, even as I write this.
A Note on the Sources
I decided not to take a scholarly stance on this, but
rather approach the essay as if I were giving a talk to an audience with
a general interest in poetry. But I did use some sources for this. In
addition to the primary texts on Bishop, I found these other sources most
helpful. The most useful source for me was Elizabeth Bishop and Her
Art, edited by Donald Hall, which is part of the Under Discussion
series and published by the University of Michigan Press. Other sources
were Robert Lowell's Collected Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics, by Marilyn May
Lombardi (Southern Illinois University Press), The Unbeliever: The
Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, by Robert Dale Parker (University of Illinois
Press), and Thomas J. Travisano's Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development
(University of Virginia Press). Finally, Seamus Heaney has two fine evaluative
essays on Bishop in two of his collections, The Redress of Poetry and
The Government of the Tongue, both Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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