Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I love the Baby Giant Panda;

I’d welcome one to my veranda.

Once, I found her consulting a large rhyming dictionary and she said, yes, it was “indispensable”; and I myself was congratulated on having rhymed “antennae” with “many.”

Besides “gusto” she admired the “courageous attack,” and for this reason she said she thought it a good idea to start off a poem with a spondee.

In Observations she seems undecided between free verse and her own strict stanza forms with their variations on “light” rhyme. Although she still professed to despise it, rhyme then seemed to win out for some years. However, by the time Collected Poems was published, in 1951, she had already begun a ruthless cutting of some of her most beautiful poems, and what suffered chiefly from this ruthlessness were those very rhymes and stanza forms she had so painstakingly elaborated in the years just before.

A conflict between traditional rhymes and meters came during the seven years (1946–53) Marianne worked on translating La Fontaine’s Fables. For my own amusement, I had already made up a completely unscientific theory that Marianne was possessed of a unique, involuntary sense of rhythm, therefore of meter, quite unlike anyone else’s. She looked like no one else; she talked like no one else; her poems showed a mind not much like anyone else’s; and her notions of meter and rhyme were unlike all the conventional notions — so why not believe that the old English meters that still seem natural to most of us (or seemed to, at any rate) were not natural to her at all? That Marianne from birth, physically, had been set going to a different rhythm? Or was the explanation simply that she had a more sensitive ear than most of us, and since she had started writing at a time when poetry was undergoing drastic changes, she had been free to make the most of it and experiment as she saw fit?

When I happened to be in New York during those seven years, I was usually shown the fable she was working on (or she’d read it on the phone) and would be asked to provide a rhyme, or to tell her if I thought the meter was right. Many other people must have had the same experience. These were strange requests, coming from someone who had made contemporary poets self-conscious about their crudities, afraid to rhyme “bone” with “stone,” or to go umpty-umpty-um. Marianne was doing her best, one saw, to go umpty-umpty-um when she sensed that La Fontaine had gone that way, but it seemed to be almost — I use the word again — physically impossible for her to do so. If I’d suggest, say, that “flatter” rhymed with “matter,” this to my embarrassment was hailed as a stroke of genius; or if I’d say, “If you leave out ‘and’ or ‘the’ [or put it in], it will go umpty-umpty-um, ” Marianne would exclaim, “E liz abeth, thank you, you have saved my life!” Although I too am mentioned in the introduction, I contributed next to nothing to the La Fontaine — a few rhymes and metrically smoothed-out or slicked-up lines. But they made me realize more than I ever had the rarity of true originality, and also the sort of alienation it might involve.

Her scrupulous and strict honesty could be carried to extremes of Protestant, Presbyterian, Scotch-Irish literalness that amazed me. We went together to see an exceptionally beautiful film, a documentary in color about Africa, with herds of gazelles and giraffes moving across the plains, and we loved it. Then a herd of elephants appeared, close up and clear, and the narrator commented on their feet and tread. I whispered to Marianne that they looked as if their feet were being lifted up off the ground by invisible threads. The next day she phoned and quoted my remark about the elephants’ walk, and suddenly came out with, “Elizabeth, I’ll give you ten dollars for that.” There was often no telling how serious she was. I said something like “For heaven’s sake, Marianne, please take it,” but I don’t believe it ever made an appearance in a poem. I confess to one very slight grudge: she did use a phrase of mine once without a note. This may be childish of me, but I want to reclaim it. I had been asked by a friend to bring her three glass buoy-balls in nets, sometimes called “witch balls,” from Cape Cod. When I arrived at the old hotel where I lived, a very old porter took them with my bag, and as I watched him precede me down the corridor, I said to myself, “The bellboy with the buoy-balls.” I liked the sound of this so much that in my vanity I repeated the phrase to Marianne a day or so later. You will find “The sea- / side burden should not embarrass / the bell-boy with the buoy-ball / endeavoring to pass / hotel patronesses” in the fifth stanza of “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks.” It was so thoroughly out of character for her to do this that I have never understood it. I am sometimes appalled to think how much I may have unconsciously stolen from her. Perhaps we are all magpies.

The deepest feeling always shows

itself in silence;

not in silence, but restraint.

These lines from her early poem “Silence” are simply another one of Marianne’s convictions. Like Auden, whom she admired, she believed that graceful behavior — and writing, as well — demands a certain reticence. She told me, “Ezra says all dedications are dowdy, ” but it was surely more than to avoid dowdiness that caused her to write this postscript in Selected Poems (1935): “Dedications imply giving, and we do not care to make a gift of what is insufficient; but in my immediate family there is one ‘who thinks in a particular way’ and I should like to add that where there is an effect of thought or pith in these pages, the thinking and often the actual phrases are hers.” This postscript was obviously meant for Mrs. Moore, and after her mother’s death in 1947, Marianne became more outspoken about dedications; however, when she wrote an acrostic on the name of one of her oldest and closest friends, it too was semi-concealed, by being written upside down.

The first time I heard Marianne read poetry in public was at a joint reading with William Carlos Williams in Brooklyn. I am afraid I was a little late. There was a very small audience, mostly in the front rows, and I made my way as self-effacingly as I could down the steep red-carpeted steps of the aisle. As I approached the lower rows, she spotted me out of the corner of her eye and interrupted herself in the middle of a poem to bow and say, “Good evening!” She and Dr. Williams shared the rather small high stage and took turns reading. There were two high-backed chairs, far apart, and each poet sat down between readings. The decor seemed to be late-Victorian Gothic; I remember a good deal of red plush, dark wood, and Gothic points, knobs, and incised lines. Marianne, wearing a hat and a blue dress, looked quite small and seemed nervous. I had the impression that Williams, who was not nervous in the slightest, was generously trying to put her at her ease. As they changed places at the lectern, he would whisper to her and smile. I have no recollection of anything that was read, except for a sea-monster poem of Williams’s, during which he gave some loud and realistic roars.

She seldom expressed opinions of other writers, and the few I remember were, to say the least, ambiguous or ambivalent. She developed the strategy of damning with faint praise to an almost supersonic degree. One writer whom I rather disliked, and I suspect she did too, was praised several times for her “beautifully laundered shirtwaist.” One day when I was meeting her in New York, she said she had just run into Djuna Barnes again, after many years, on the steps of the Public Library. I was curious and asked her what Djuna Barnes was “like.” There was rather a long pause before Marianne said, thoughtfully, “Well … she looked very smart, and her shoes were beautifully polished.”