I
Elizabeth Bishop is often celebrated as a poet’s poet. John Ashbery once called her the ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ (1977). Such descriptions imply that Bishop was somehow born to be a poet, but that being a poet was all she could do. In her lifetime Bishop frequently bridled at suggestions that she was aloof or ignorant of the problems of contemporary America, or indeed Brazil, where she lived for almost two decades. In an interview with Ashley Brown in 1966, she spoke of being ‘very aware of the Depression […]. After all, anybody who went to New York and rode the Elevated could see that things were wrong’ (1996, 22). While Bishop rarely worked in the so-called ‘real’ world herself, aside from the last decade of her life when she took up part-time teaching to help pay the mortgage, she was far more involved in non-literary life than most of her poetic peers. In the 1930s, for example, while still establishing herself as a poet, she considered enrolling in medical school before being talked round by Marianne Moore. Most of her friends were non-poets, including the physicist Jane Dewey, an expert in quantum optics who was rumoured to have worked on the development of the atom bomb during the Second World War. In Brazil, Bishop was on good terms with various architects and politicians, while in Key West and later San Francisco she acted as patron to at least two painters (Gregorio Valdes and Wesley Wehr). In her copy of Keats’s Letters, one is thus not surprised to find her highlighting Keats’s famous statement about the poet being ‘the most unpoetical of any thing in existence’ (1958, 387). In the words of her peculiar short poem ‘To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash’, Bishop was not interested in the poet’s own face ‘staring’ back at her in the mirror. She preferred living ‘in your world’ (l. 2).
Where did Bishop’s interest in looking at the world begin? The obvious answer is childhood. Certainly there are several poems and stories, nearly all of them set in Nova Scotia, in which ‘infant sight’, in the words of ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ (l. 74), is credited with sparking poetic travels. There are few twentieth-century poets who remember as much as Bishop. In ‘Poem’, Bishop calls this seen inheritance ‘the little that we get for free, / the little of our earthly trust’ (ll. 58–59). The repetition of ‘little’ serves to magnify rather than belittle her Canadian childhood. A master of miniatures like the New York artist Joseph Cornell she both admired and imitated, Bishop made looking and writing about small things her vocation. ‘No detail too small’, she wrote in one of her most autobiographical poems, ‘Sandpiper’ (l. 10). Bishop was not afraid of defending the intellectual, moral and political implications of such choices. Her poetic sandpiper is ‘a student of Blake’ (l. 4) and perhaps also of Edmund Burke. As Susan Rosenbaum points out, Bishop’s fascination with miniatures can be linked to an interest in the sublime:
For Bishop the sublimity of nature – its capacity to overwhelm the boundaries of the self – is most powerful not when the natural object is vast but when it is small, when it appears that the observer can control or possess the natural object, hold it in her hand. This belief in the human ability to possess nature – through collection and through language – is precisely what the poetic miniature refutes. (2007, 191)
My focus in this essay is not so much on the rich origins of Bishop’s observing habits, the lavender mud where she learnt how to become a sandpiper-poet, but on her celebration of a fellow author equally famous for examining grains of sand, the naturalist Charles Darwin. I want to read Bishop reading Darwin, in part to demonstrate the influence of Darwin’s writing style on Bishop’s poetry, in part to show how Bishop’s poetry often absorbs and refigures Darwin’s thoughts. Influence in this sense goes both ways. Bishop was clearly indebted to Darwin as a model of how an author might describe and think about the natural world. Darwinists, in their turn, may feel grateful to Bishop for making poetry out of thought, or on this occasion poetry out of Darwin’s thoughts.
Bishop was always fascinated by the aesthetics and ethics of looking. As Linda Anderson points out, ‘Some of Bishop’s most famous poems have at their centre the pleasure, fear or strangeness of looking and being looked at’ (2002, 165). She includes ‘The Fish’, ‘The Moose’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ in this group. According to Anderson, Bishop began her academic inquiry into the limits of the visual on a trip to Europe in 1935 when she saw many of Peter Brueghel’s paintings, including his famous ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’. Her interest in the world of scientific looking probably began in earnest a few years later, in the 1940s, specifically at the US Navy Optical Shop in Key West, ‘taking binoculars apart and putting them together again’ (Bishop, 1994, 115). Part of Bishop’s fascination with the Optical Shop was obviously aesthetic – ‘some of the things we worked with were beautiful, of course – the lenses and prisms, and the balsam for gluing them’ – but she was also interested in ‘the theory of the thing, why the prisms go this way or that way, or what “collimate” and “optical center” really mean’ (1994, 116). Bishop does not refer to any particular theory here, though she does place the word ‘theory’ in italics. The ‘theory of the thing’ may simply be a theory of optics. Or perhaps not. After all, Bishop’s original aim in applying for the job of grinding binocular lenses was not to earn money (she had enough to live on without working until the late 1960s) or to learn about lenses and prisms, but because it was ‘the only way of ever finding out what is going on in Key West now’ (1994, 115). The Second World War is obviously ‘what is going on in Key West now’, though working in the Optical Shop was perhaps the closest Bishop could get to a war zone in 1943. The job gave her access to what was in effect a heavily censored military zone. Bishop’s work on optics is obviously less historically significant than that of her friend Jane Dewey, yet in her own way she does offer us ‘the theory of the thing’ as well. Her poem ‘Roosters’, for example, is at least partially written from the perspective of the civilian population of Key West, woken from their beds each night by a series of ‘uncontrolled, traditional cries’ (l. 21).
Bishop’s reputation, not just as a person but also as a poet, has altered as more of this information about her politics has become known. The ‘famous eye’ is now equally known for her mysterious ‘I’, celebrated as a poet of description and introspection, or at least as a poet who deals in introspection through description. Her connections to Canada and particularly Nova Scotia are more apparent than they once were, as is her deep engagement with Brazilian culture and politics. In recent years her other artistic talents have also been revealed through the publication of her short stories, letters and paintings. Nevertheless, for most readers Bishop remains a sandpiper-poet drawn to the lyrical but ultimately useless recounting of grains of sand. She is still pictured as preferring ‘map-makers’ colors’ to historians’ stories (‘The Map’, l. 27). ‘Too much a granular poet to be properly gritty’, as a friend once told me.
In my opinion, Bishop’s poetry and her philosophy on life are a lot less dogmatic than this. She always includes other discourses and perspectives within her work, even those she does not believe in or disagrees with entirely. At the most literal level, the language of her poems, she frequently employs words and phrases that send most readers scurrying to the dictionary. The influence of Marianne Moore can probably be noted here, as well as Bishop’s more general concern for accurate description in keeping with her love of geography. Bishop is particularly pernickety about place. In ‘Love Lies Sleeping’, for example, the city’s colour spectrum is carefully described as ‘pale blue, blue-green, and brick’ (l. 24). At these moments, Bishop brings together a painterly concern for light and surface with a poetic concern for how memory and mood alter and revise first impressions. As Jamie McKendrick has noted, ‘her poems question how we perceive, not only through language but through the whole spectrum and gamut of the senses’ (2002, 141). Bishop’s appeal to a multi-sensory reading of the world can often be extremely direct. In ‘Questions of Travel’ she tells us what a pity it would have been ‘not to have seen’, ‘not to have pondered’ and ‘never to have had to listen’ (ll. 31, 33, 47, 55). Bishop significantly does not privilege one sense over the other. She slips from one mode of being to another. Her employment of language is similarly slippery. Her smooth lines often catch on a word or phrase one was not quite expecting. ‘The mosquitoes / go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos’ in ‘Florida’ (ll. 36–37). Sleeping passengers encourage a ‘dreamy divagation’ in ‘The Moose’ (l. 87). The rivers dissolve into a ‘watery, dazzling dialectic’ in ‘Santarém’ (l. 20). Bishop does not use foreign words, or foreign-sounding words, only for poetic effect. She likes to give things their proper names, or indeed their proper nouns. This extends to her naming of everyday objects in poems like ‘Sestina’, ‘Filling Station’ and ‘Under the Window: Ouro Prêto’, in which she remembers a Little Marvel Stove, an ESSO oil can and a Mercedes-Benz. This does not make her merely a lover of long words, but it does show off her eclecticism and, more importantly, her active engagement with the changing industrial and intellectual world in which she lived. While Bishop frequently criticised the impersonality of city life and the disappearance of local industries, her poems bear testimony to the new sounds and words of twentieth-century existence, whether that be the immigrant voices in Key West or the popularity of previously erudite philosophical discourse like ‘dialectic’. All find a home in her deliberately unhomely poems.
Bishop’s curiosity about other forms of knowledge has led critics to connect her to various different literary and philosophical traditions. In Anne Stevenson’s first book on Bishop, she compared her philosophy to that of Wittgenstein. Others have seen her as a Romantic, an anti-Romantic, a Transcendentalist, a Modernist, a Post-modernist, a Surrealist and an anti-Surrealist. Cheryl Walker’s recent book God and Elizabeth Bishop even argues the case for Bishop as a religious poet. ‘She lived poetically, and in a sense religiously’, Walker argues (2005, 145). I would like to make the case here for Bishop as a scientific poet influenced by Darwin, by which I mean a poet informed by Darwin’s scientific ideas and thinking, or, sometimes, simply his use of language. I do not know what Walker means when she refers to Bishop living ‘poetically’. A poetic vocation, as Donne, Herbert, Hopkins and others have shown, need not exclude religious faith. Similarly, I do not think poetry and science need necessarily be opposing professions or knowledge bases. As Albert Goldbarth cautions, ‘Perhaps the arts and the sciences have never slept together without one eye kept warily open’, yet ‘Even so, there have always been those whose spirits are willing to bridge that chasm’ (2001, ix, xi).
One of Bishop’s favourite writers was the naturalist Charles Darwin. She once described him as ‘my favorite hero, almost’ (1994, 544). The hesitation is typical of Bishop, who didn’t like to associate herself with any author, school of thought or tradition too firmly. Nevertheless, Darwin clearly meant a lot to her over most of her adult life. She was familiar with the letters and notebooks included in the Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (edited by Nora Barlow, 1933), alluding to it in correspondence with Pearl Kazin in 1953 and Anne Stevenson in 1964. She also cites from it in a 1953 letter to Marianne Moore:
I’ve just finished Darwin’s Diary on the Beagle – not the Journal, although I guess it’s mostly the same – and I thought it was wonderful. I think I’ll begin right away on all his other books. The pages about Rio de Janeiro are so true even today, and he’s such a hardworking young man, and so good. (Do you know that story about him and one of his little boys? – much later, of course. He took the little boy to the London Zoo and the little boy looked into a cage where a huge rhinoceros was lying asleep, and said, ‘Papa, that bird is dead.’) (1994, 257)
As Francesco Rognoni points out in a perceptive analysis of Bishop’s marked copies of The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and The Voyage of the Beagle, ‘Bishop must have read On the Origin of Species (1859), but was also keen on a more specialized treatise such as the Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842), recommended both to Anne Stevenson […] and – not without some sprezzatura – also to the London Times interviewer: “If you want to read a beautiful book, read that”’ (2003, 240).
Bishop took Darwin’s books with her to Brazil and in a famous 1964 letter to Anne Stevenson (so famous it is regularly referred to as ‘the Darwin letter’ by Bishop scholars) described his way of looking at the world as a model for any artist:
Reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic – and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (2008, 861)
Darwin’s ‘heroic observations’, particularly the movement from ‘facts and minute details’ to something ‘unknown’, is the dream of all scientists. In Bishop’s mind, it is the dream of all artists and readers too. Bishop’s lucid prose tricks us into thinking this process simple, when it is clearly anything but. ‘Endless’ looking, it is worth remembering, only takes Darwin so far in Bishop’s estimation. Those ‘observations’ are italicised for a reason. They register both Bishop’s admiration for a lifetime spent staring at the natural world and perhaps also something close to censure. What Bishop ultimately celebrates in Darwin’s writing is not the heroism of observation so much as what comes after it, the mysterious transformation of looking into language, self-awareness into self-forgetfulness. Darwin’s ‘observations’, like Bishop’s, are modified by something ‘unconscious or automatic’ to release their true creative potential. Bishop turns to the language of psychoanalysis and Surrealist art to describe this process. Poets of earlier eras might credit the imagination or soul. Regardless of what we choose to call it nowadays, Bishop noticed it in Darwin’s writing and it is as a writer that she responds to his work here.
Bishop admires Darwin, in other words, not so much for his ideas as for his method of converting them into language. Darwin is her ‘favorite reading’ (1996, 43), not her favourite philosopher or thinker. Bishop enjoys following his thought processes on the page, particularly the way in which thinking in language reveals how ‘one feels’ at the same time. She responds to the co-existence of intellect and emotion in his writing, what E. M. Forster famously called ‘the prose and the passion’ (1989, 188). Bishop depicts Darwin ‘sinking or sliding giddily’ between these alternatives like a skater attempting to pass over frozen water. ‘Sinking’ suggests the skater’s possible, perhaps even probable fall, ‘sliding giddily’ a willed carelessness in the face of such disaster. The giddy sensation sounds like dizziness or perhaps even drunkenness. At the same time, the abandonment of a common-sense reaction to danger is thrilling to Bishop, who, in the poem ‘One Art’, jokes in a similar vein about losing practically everything important to her, from lost door keys and a mother’s watch to ‘three loved houses’ and a lover’s ‘voice’ (ll. 11, 16). Bishop’s choice of language about Darwin suggests that she is also thinking about a specific geographical landscape (Atlantic Canada) and set of memories (of family relatives and friends struggling to keep their footing on the snow). In at least two recently published poems, Bishop recalls both her grandfather ‘trudging on splaying snowshoes / over the snow’s hard, brilliant, curdled crust’ and her mother returning home for her snowshoes so she did not fall through the ice (2006, 154, 156–57). The image of Darwin making a ‘beautiful solid case’ out of his ‘endless heroic observations’, before suddenly ‘sinking’ underneath them or ‘sliding’ away from them, thus also functions as an unconscious allusion to or forgotten memory of her own relatives in winter. The slip from Darwin’s ideas to her own feelings is a perfect example of what Bishop thinks Darwin’s writing can achieve. Observation and recollection can hardly be separated; the idea of Darwin’s loneliness as a young man overlaps with her own remembered loneliness as a young woman.
Annotations in Bishop’s copies of Darwin’s work show other affinities between them. Rognoni argues that while such markings are ‘unsurprising, they are also quietly revealing’ (2003, 241). Bishop had her own ideas on the art and usefulness of marginalia. In her short story ‘In Prison’ (1938) she writes of adapting her own ‘compositions’ so as not to ‘conflict’ with those written before her. ‘There will be no contradictions or criticisms of what has already been laid down’, she promises, ‘rather a “commentary”’ (1984, 188). In the poem ‘The End of March’, written forty years after ‘In Prison’, she does not seem to have changed her mind. Her dream-house remains a place in which to ‘read boring books, / old, long, long books, and write down useless notes’ (ll. 34–35). How does Bishop read Darwin? Are her notes in his books, as she herself predicted, ultimately ‘useless’?
According to Rognoni, some Darwin images remind Bishop of her own writings, while others give her ideas for future poems. Of the second category of annotations, Rognoni thinks it ‘tasteless and out of place to suggest a textual influence, or source: it is, rather, the almost instinctive acknowledgement of a form of attention akin to her own’ (2003, 241). Of the first category of annotation, those in which Bishop recognises in Darwin’s writings some of her own images or thoughts, one can certainly include the following passage, which must have resonated with her own childhood reminiscences of her mother’s scream: ‘The remembrance of screams, or other sounds heard in Brazil, when he was powerless to interfere with what he believed to be the torture of a slave, haunted him for years, especially at night’ (Darwin, 1958, 304). In Bishop’s prose masterpiece ‘In the Village’ the memory of her mother’s distressed scream as she attempted to recover from the sudden death of her husband is similarly haunting. Bishop remembers it as ‘the pitch of my village’, the sound her mother’s family is always ‘waiting for’ (1984, 251, 260). Other connections were undoubtedly less personal, but no less important for that. Darwin’s reflections on the difficult art of description, for instance – ‘In endeavouring to describe these scenes of violence one is tempted to pass from one simile to another’ (1962, 197–98) – probably chimed with Bishop’s observation in ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ that everything in the world might only be ‘connected by “and” and “and”’ (l. 65). Indeed, the temptation ‘to pass from one simile to another’ is in many ways the psychological dilemma enacted in the poem; the attempt on the part of the poem’s speaker to question biblical interpretations of the world and notice the rather ordinary yet still mysterious ‘family with pets’ (l. 73) that often lies behind such heavily framed stories. For both Darwin and Bishop, the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ (l. 3) were not to be found in any guidebook or travel story. They had to be discovered afresh and described anew with their own eyes.
Darwin’s reflections on the geology of Patagonia in The Voyage of the Beagle must also have confirmed in Bishop’s mind the accuracy of her conclusion to ‘At the Fishhouses’. Indeed, the language of both texts is so similar one might almost be tempted to suggest Bishop must have read it before writing the poem in 1946, were it not for the fact that Bishop’s copy of the book was only published in 1962. Nevertheless, the affinities between both passages do at least prove Bishop to be a Darwinist long before she sat down to read Darwin properly. Here, then, is Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle (Bishop marked the whole passage with a vertical line in the margin and underlined the last seven words as indicated below):
When we consider that all these pebbles, countless as the grains of sand in the desert, have been derived from the slow-falling of masses of rock on the old coast-lines and banks of rivers; and that these fragments have been dashed into smaller pieces; and that each of them has since been slowly rolled, rounded, and far transported, the mind is stupefied in thinking over the long, absolutely necessary, lapse of years. (1962, 172)
Here is Bishop’s conclusion to ‘At the Fishhouses’:
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
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.
(ll. 67–83)
Comparing the passage and poem, Bishop must have felt as if she had found a kindred spirit, and perhaps also a kindred writer. Darwin’s description is less like a diary entry or scientific treatise, more like a prose poem. Indeed, one could argue that the beauty of the writing possibly distracts from, or at least competes with, an understanding of the facts. Darwin’s ‘heroic observations’ as Bishop termed them take second place to a sudden feeling of wonder. The ‘mind is stupefied in thinking over the long, absolutely necessary, lapse of years’. In Bishop’s words, we see Darwin as a ‘lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown’. This movement, from an observable world of facts and details to a giddy immersion in an unknown world of rocks and rivers, is precisely what occurs in ‘At the Fishhouses’ too. Regardless of when it was written in the history of Bishop’s reading of Darwin’s works, it is arguably her most Darwinian poem, just as, in a strange way, Darwin’s comment in The Voyage of the Beagle represents his most Bishopesque prose. While historically Darwin comes first, Bishop second, affinity and sympathy are less easy to plot on a time chart.
Of the second category of annotation, those in which Bishop appears to lift and transform images in Darwin for her own purposes, I am more willing than Rognoni to be ‘tasteless’. Darwin’s description of an earthquake in The Voyage of the Beagle seems, to give one example, a key intertext for Bishop’s great poem about human identity, ‘In the Waiting Room’. For Darwin:
There was no difficulty in standing upright, but the motion made me feel almost giddy: it was something like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body.
A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; – one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced. (1962, 303)
In Bishop’s poem, the earthquake is as much internal as external, though triggered by ‘an oh! of pain’ (l. 37) that comes from several places at once: an aunt’s mouth, a niece’s reply, reading about a volcano’s eruption in the National Geographic, and the poem itself summing up the experience:
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I – we – were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
(ll. 48–59)
Bishop’s earthquake, ‘the sensation of falling’, is no less real than Darwin’s for being metaphorical. Indeed, Darwin’s earthquake is real precisely because it is described through poetic language: ‘like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice’. Darwin describes his external earthquake, the sensation of feeling ‘almost giddy’, by making prose poetry out of the various associations linked to this sensation in his mind. He is tempted, and one might argue he gives in to the temptation, ‘to pass from one simile to another’. Bishop describes her internal earthquake, a similar sensation of feeling giddy, by making poetic links as well. The more she looks, the more she realises she looks like other people, not just her aunt, but anyone, including ‘those awful hanging breasts’ in the pages of the National Geographic:
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities –
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts –
held us all together
or made us all just one?
(ll. 75–83)
Her consideration that we are ‘all just one’ is of course a Darwinian conclusion about life, but the debt to Darwin in this poem and elsewhere is, I would argue, more about language and word association than it is ever about thought. Darwin makes sense of the world through description. Like a poet, he thinks through simile. Bishop’s imagination works in remarkably similar ways. Indeed, ‘In the Waiting Room’ is, at its heart, a poem about similarity told through simile. Or, as Zachariah Pickard puts it, ‘Bishop’s interest is not in the Darwin who solves the question of species, but the Darwin who first imagines it’ (2009, 69). Her focus is on the young man making his discoveries on the Beagle rather than the middle-aged man writing them up in England.
III
Darwin’s influence is obvious in Bishop’s last collection, Geography III (1976), particularly in ‘In the Waiting Room’ and also in the doomed naturalist in ‘Crusoe in England’, fated to register everything. (Bishop’s Crusoe might be described as a proto-Darwin whose ‘heroic observations’ enhance rather than lighten his feelings of self-pity.) It is also present at the very beginning of Bishop’s career. In the letter to Anne Stevenson about Darwin, Bishop marvelled at the transition in his writing from ‘facts and minute details’ to ‘sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown’. ‘Sinking or sliding’ were key activities for Bishop, who frequently depicted her experiences of the world vertically. In a significant notebook entry from 1937, when she was just twenty-six years old, a year younger than Darwin when he arrived home in England on the Beagle in 1836, Bishop likened artistic genres to methods of transportation:
Prose = land transportation
Music = sea transportation
Poetry = air transportation (in its present state)
It is hard to get heavy objects up into the air; a strong desire to do so is necessary, and a strong driving force to keep them aloft.
Some poets sit in airplanes on the ground, raising their arms, sure that they’re flying.
Some poems ascend for a period of time, then come down again; we have a great many stranded planes. (2006, 31)
Bishop’s ideas on poetry are a little gnomic. Why should poems ‘ascend’ and what does this mean? Which poets ‘sit in airplanes on the ground, raising their arms’? Perhaps she is alluding to the idea of the Romantic sublime here, with its celebration of lofty heights and promontory perspectives? Her poems certainly spend a good deal of the time up in the clouds, often literally. In ‘Song for the Rainy Season’, for example, her house has its own ‘private cloud’ within which to hide (l. 20). In ‘Night City’ the view from the plane shows an apocalyptic vision of blood and fire. In ‘The Unbeliever’ she even has a cloud speak. Cloud-lines provide both distance and safety. As well as giving the poet a bird’s eye view, they also prevent her from being seen. She can see us but we can’t see her. Much as Bishop wants to remain up there, however, her poems frequently bring her down here. Her Romantic sublime is no more than a passing mood.
One of her most memorable ‘air crash poems’ is the enigmatic early work ‘The Man-Moth’, in which her eponymous creature begins the night scaling skyscrapers before quickly retreating ‘to the pale subways of cement he calls his home’ (l. 26). The Man-Moth is a comi-tragic vampire. In place of a coffin to house his body, the Man-Moth rides the subway, always seating himself ‘the wrong way’ (l. 29), desperately trying to keep his gaze (and hands) off the electrified ‘third rail’:
[…] He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
(ll. 36–40)
Bishop critics have never quite known what to make of this poem. Most have interpreted its mysterious protagonist as at least partly drawn from the poet’s own life. The third rail is usually the key element in such biographical readings. For James Fenton it represents ‘the temptation to commit suicide’ (1997, 14), for Marilyn May Lombardi ‘the dangers of alcoholism’ (1995, 115), for Jeredith Merrin the poet’s ‘gender in-betweenness’ (1993, 167). While biography certainly underlies Bishop’s poetry, I do not see how we can shuffle out one aspect of the life over any other.
In fact, reading ‘The Man-Moth’ again I wonder whether it is in fact a kind of ars poetica on how both to create and indeed interpret poetry. The poem famously began life in a misprint (‘man-moth’ for ‘mammoth’). The paratext immediately draws attention to a human being’s relationship to textual matter. Specifically it asks us to imagine the poet herself reading a newspaper. But why does Bishop ask the reader to do this? She might just as well have let the poem speak for itself. A footnote on the genesis of the poem is not quite the same as a first draft, but it is giving something away. Bishop often lets these kinds of details slip. The dedication to the poem ‘Anaphora’ (‘In memory of Marjorie Carr Stevens’) encourages us to read for elegy. The subtitle to ‘The Bight’ (‘On my birthday’) hints at personal revelation. In both cases, natural phenomena remind the poet of events in her own life. Looking out becomes looking in. I think the same process is at work in ‘The Man-Moth’, which suddenly changes from a poem about a hypothetical imaginary creature to a poem about a very real dilemma: the risk of extracting and releasing emotion from unsafe places, be that a person or poem. The Man-Moth’s general behaviour throughout the poem is reminiscent of a scientist, specifically the sort of scientist Bishop imagines Darwin to be. Both are heroic observers eventually caught out by their own observing powers. The Man-Moth’s aims are as lofty as those of Darwin. Where the Man-Moth appears to be a new species, Darwin is of course most famous for his theory about the origin of species. The Man-Moth’s decision to seat himself ‘facing the wrong way’ and always ‘travel backwards’ (ll. 29, 32) is also analogous to Darwin’s work on evolution. The language of the poem even evokes a laboratory with its references to an ‘inverted pin’, ‘a temperature impossible to record in thermometers’ and an ‘unbroken draught of poison’ (ll. 5, 8, 37).
The poem is constructed like an experiment as well. Bishop employs six eight-line stanzas, the first line of every stanza reaching out halfway across the page like the reading of an irregular heartbeat. This formal slipperiness evokes both the newspaper misprint that prompted the initial poem and the tonal shifts that mark the finished version. If the Man-Moth himself is a largely imaginary creature, albeit one linked through behaviour to a moth and through language to a mammoth, there is an extent to which the poem ‘The Man-Moth’ might also be seen as a new kind of poetic species. For most of the poem, we are completely bewildered, lost, like the Man-Moth, ‘in black scrolls on the light’ (l. 21). Bishop wittily alludes to this feeling of confusion in the penultimate stanzas of the poem, when she sends the Man-Moth down an ‘artificial tunnel’ (l. 34). This is no dead end, however. As in the cliché, there is light, albeit of the flashlight variety, at the end of the tunnel.
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
(ll. 41–48)
The Man-Moth’s peculiar investigations have turned the reader into an investigator too. Bishop realises as much, hence her teasing invitation (‘If you catch him’). But what does the Man-Moth do in the poem and what is he so reluctant to hand over in the final stanza? Is his ‘only possession’ a single tear? If so, what do we gain by watching him until he is ready ‘to hand it over’? Bishop compares the tear to ‘the bee’s sting’. This appears to suggest that the Man-Moth is willing to die to take his secret with him. It is literally a life/death matter.
Bishop’s point, her sting in the tail, is not finally that the Man-Moth is this person or that, or that the ‘one tear’ represents one emotion or another, but that at the end of all investigations of life is an ‘eye’, an eye that pays attention to the world and an eye that pays attention to the people who do the looking on our behalf. In this poem she arguably does both. She is both the Man-Moth who looks at the world from a perspective most other human beings ignore or ridicule and the reader who notices those people involved in a life spent looking. The Man-Moth, like Darwin, is, at the end of the poem, simply another ‘lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown’. For Bishop, ‘facts and minute details’ lead to tears as much as knowledge, or perhaps to a knowledge of life measured in terms of tears. In this sense, if one takes Bishop’s point that Darwin is one of the best models of how scientific ‘observations’ become discovery, knowledge and ultimately art, it could be argued that this Darwinian model is the one she employs in her own poetry. Her writing is an example of how ‘facts and minute details’ are transformed into a different kind of knowledge, one that, like Darwin’s work, frequently involves ‘sinking or sliding’ into the unknown.
Bishop’s quirky interpretation of Darwin appears to me to be the next evolutionary step in thinking about her own ars poetica. At the same time, reading Bishop reading Darwin also encourages us to consider the aesthetic and formal nature of Darwin’s own writing, to think of Darwin not just as a naturalist but as a proto-poet too, one who prepares the linguistic just as much as the scientific ground for writers like Bishop to follow.