Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

These things make even our greatest poet, when he attempts something like them, appear full of preconceived notions and over-sentimental. A wounded deer has been abandoned by his “velvet friends.” And Shakespeare is supposed to have been familiar with deer.

The wretched animal heav’d forth such groans

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round tears

Cours’d one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase …

As You Like It

I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous. Even the best trompe-l’oeil paintings lack it, but I have experienced it in listening to the noise made by a four year old child who could imitate exactly the sound of the water running out of his bath. Long, fine, thorough passages of descriptive prose fail to produce it, but sometimes animal or bird masks at the Museums of Natural History give one (as the dances that once went with them might have been able to do) the same immediacy of identification one feels on reading about Miss Moore’s

Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying that you have a badger

or the butterfly that

flies off

diminishing like wreckage on the sea,

rising and falling easily.

Does it come simply from her gift of being able to give herself up entirely to the object under contemplation, to feel in all sincerity how it is to be it ? From whatever this pleasure may be derived, it is certainly one of the greatest the work of Miss Moore gives us.

Sometimes in her poetry such instances “go on” so that there seems almost to be a compulsion to this kind of imitation. The poems seem to say, “These things exist to be loved and honored and we must, ” and perhaps the sense of duty shows through a little plainly.

Did he not moralize this spectacle?

O yes, into a thousand similes.

As You Like It

And although the tone is frequently light or ironic the total effect is of such a ritualistic solemnity that I feel in reading her one should constantly bear in mind the secondary and frequently sombre meaning of the title of her first book: Observations.

Miss Moore and Edgar Allan Poe

In the poem “Elephants,” after five stanzas of beautiful description of the elephant and his mahout, Miss Moore suddenly breaks off and remarks in rhetorical disgust,

As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at

much unease

thereby giving dramatic expression to one of the problems of descriptive poetry, although actually she has only used “as if” once, so far. It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things, even though there seems to be no help for it. But it may be noticed that although full of similes, and such brilliant ones that she should never feel the necessity of complaining, she uses metaphor rather sparingly and obliquely. In Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” he points out that it is not until the last two stanzas of “The Raven” that he permits himself the use of any metaphorical expression:

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

and

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor.

and then says that such expressions “dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated.” He has already stressed the importance of avoiding “the excess of the suggested meaning,” and said that metaphor is a device that must be very carefully employed. Miss Moore does employ it carefully and it is one of the qualities that gives her poetry its steady aura of both reserve and having possibly more meanings, in reserve. Another result is that the metaphor, when used, carries a long way, reverberating like her “pulsation of lighthouse and noise of bell-buoys.…”

Miss Moore has said in conversation that she has been influenced by Poe’s prose, and although it should not be pushed too far, an interesting study could be made of several points of comparison. Miss Moore and Poe are our two most original writers and one feels that Miss Moore would cheerfully subscribe to Poe’s remark on Originality: “The extent to which this has been neglected in versification is one of the most unaccountable things in the world,” and his painful edict that “In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation,” and also that it is greatly assisted by “an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.”

In fact, although it might have surprised him, one might almost say that in some respects Miss Moore is Poe’s Ideal Poet, the one he was unable to be himself.

Poe in his prose and Miss Moore in her verse strike a tone of complete truth-telling that is compelling and rare, — Miss Moore’s being so strong as to lend veracity to her slightest comment, inducing such confidence that for years I even believed her when she said,

Dürer would have seen a reason for living

in a town like this, with eight stranded whales

to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house.

I can imagine her writing Poe’s “Chessplayer” in verse, and I can imagine Poe writing parts of “The Hero,” with its melancholy, repeated o ’s, and

Where the ground is sour; where there are

weeds of beanstalk height,

snakes’ hypodermic teeth, or

the wind brings the “scarebabe voice”

from the neglected yew set with

the semi-precious cat’s eyes of the owl.

They both take delight in their wide reading and in sharing it, and both are capable of making something unexpected and amusing out of the footnote, that usually unsmiling paragraph.

And both are virtuosi, Miss Moore, of course, to a much higher degree. I do not want to go into problems of versification and shall simply say that the more one reads Miss Moore the more one is inclined to give up such problems and merely exclaim, “How does she do it!” She is able to develop some completely “natural” idea with so many graces and effects of hesitation and changes of mood and pace that one is reminded of what little one knows of the peculiarities of Oriental music. This constant high level of technical skill must cost her incredible effort, although one is rarely aware of it; but what may be an effort for her would for most poets be an impossibility.

Sometimes I have thought that her individual verse forms, or “mannerisms” as they might be called, may have developed as much from a sense of modesty as from the demands of artistic expression; that actually she may be somewhat embarrassed by her own precocity and sensibilities and that her varied verse forms and rhyme schemes and syllabic logarithms are all a form of apology, are saying, “It really isn’t as easy for me as I’m afraid you may think it is.” The precocious child is often embarrassed by his own understanding and is capable of going to great lengths to act his part as a child properly; one feels that Miss Moore sometimes has to make things difficult for herself as a sort of noblesse oblige, or self-imposed taxation to keep everything “fair” in the world of poetry.

Miss Moore and Zoography

This same willingness to do things in such a way as not to show off, not to be superior, is shown in Miss Moore’s amazingly uncondescending feeling for animals. A great deal has been said in the last twenty years about how authors should not condescend to their working class or peasant characters, and the difficulties standing in the way of honesty in such a relationship have been explained and explained. Surely it is also very hard to write about animals without “pastoralizing” them, as William Empson might say, or drawing false analogies.