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Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III

Elizabeth Bishop’s last published book, the 1976 Geography III, was not composed in any knowledge of certain death; Bishop died suddenly, two years after the appearance of that collection, at sixty-eight. Nonetheless, she was writing several of its poems—and other poems composed after its publication, to be included here—with approaching death in mind. My title “Caught and Freed” in fact comes from one such poem, called “Sonnet,” concerning the moment when the poet, after death, becomes her poems. I begin, however, with a failed poem, the 1974 “Breakfast Song,” from a recent edition containing Bishop’s manuscript drafts that were never released by Bishop for publication.1 This unsatisfactory poem (addressed to the young woman who was Bishop’s partner) illustrates baldly (and therefore very clearly) the difficulty of the attempt to take a steady and comprehensive view of emotional life and repellent death within a single poem. The twenty-two lines of “Breakfast Song” cannot find an adequate binocular vision; in fact, they do their utmost to keep the picturing of ugly death separate from the picturing of erotic life. The six opening lines and three closing lines, serving as brackets, present life undisturbed by the idea of dying, but the middle of the poem offers a grisly view of the poet’s future burial in which all warmth will be lost:

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I’ve grown accustomed to?
—Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it’s true.
It’s just the common case;
there’s nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
Your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.

 

The closing reprise of life does not mention, as the opening did, the funny face or the coffee-flavored mouth or even the past night’s warmth, because it wishes to sequester all of life’s meaning in a pair of blue eyes—“awfully blue / early and instant blue.” The eyes’ intensity, their dawn-earliness, and their instant blue are life. What the poet sees in the beloved’s eyes is freshness, readiness, quickness of response.

So what is wrong with this piece of verse? It looks with its right eye, and it sees blue; it looks with its left eye, and it sees filth. The two elements, life and death, can muster no arc of resemblance bringing them together as experiences of a single sensibility. The speaker is struck by the beauty and warmth of love; then she fears being mated with the cold and ugly stranger, Death. Her recoil from her look at “ugly death” returns her to the blue eyes in an amnesiac way; the last three lines, unable to integrate the two looks, affect not to remember—as they immerse themselves in the blue of the saving grace—the vision of the sordid grave. Willed amnesia is not, in the end, a valid recourse for an imaginative mind. And there is another drawback: the bedding down with Death in “that cold, filthy place” resonates more intensely in the mind of the reader than do the blue eyes.

By contrast, the light-winged poem called “Sonnet,”2 composed too late for inclusion in Geography III, is successful in holding death and life in a single conceptual frame, that of inorganic objects. Although it gestures to the form of the sonnet in its fourteen lines, it also jests with that form by turning its divisions upside down and altering its breadth. In Bishop’s “sonnet,” the sestet precedes the octave rather than the octave the sestet,3 and its lines are merely two beats wide (in lieu of the true sonnet’s five-beat width):

Caught—the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed—the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

 

Sestet and octave in “Sonnet” are not separated by white space but are distinguished by syntactic means: each occupies a single sentence. The sestet sentence, opening with the word “Caught,” introduces (as symbols of the body) two inorganic devices of exact measurement—a spirit-level and a compass, whereas the octave sentence, beginning with the word “Freed,” displays its instrument of exact measurement—a thermometer—as already broken. Bishop turns away from such fastidious exactness of measurement with her closing image of a sun-generated “rainbow-bird” flashing its spectrum here and there from the beveled edge of a mirror, just as her spirit, after death, will flash from the shaped edges of poems that mirror her world.

There is an architectural solidity to this poem, as it divides personhood into a period during which it is caught, and a second period—with a longer number of lines—when it is freed. Although these periods of imprisonment and liberty are clearly distinguished by their first words, “Caught” and “Freed,” they are united as manifestations of a single sensibility by their grammatically parallel present participles—“wobbling” and “wavering” in the first state, “running” and “flying” in the second. These reveal that the “creature” being observed has not changed, in its transition, its active manner of action but merely the nature of that action. Nor has the spirit creature (the bubble of the level, the needle of the compass) changed, in its freed state, its “genetic code” as the determining element of an instrument of measurement: in our first sight of its freed state as mercury, it is still derived from its measuring instrument, a thermometer. The long, narrow shape of the level, the compass needle, and the thermometer is retained in the bevel from which the “rainbow-bird” springs. There is wit in this poem: its feelings have found for themselves unexpected correlatives that parallel, but do not repeat, religious images of the spirit caught in the body, of the erring and unresolved will, and of the conscience’s regulation of temperance (here altered to temperature). Just as the image of the bubble caught in the spirit-level echoes old images of the soul as a dewdrop, so the image of the undecided compass needle, recalling the erring human will, sums up Bishop’s vacillations between North and South, Nova Scotia and Brazil, her “questions of travel.”

Supplied with her refurbished religious emblems of imprisonment and freedom—“Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”—Bishop must decide on her stance toward her material. She chooses not to enter the lyric in propria persona—there is no “I” here—but rather elects a stance of objectivity, that of an impartial observer who can view, disinterestedly, the antithetical states of being caught and being freed. An observer capable of this degree of impartiality, in a religious poem, would be God or a devout speaker, judging the spirit happier in its freed state than in its captivity within the body. But Bishop’s poem will not impersonate God and will not introduce the speaker as a Christian believer. On the contrary: Bishop’s poem is scientific not only in its symbolic use of instruments of precise measurement but also in its impersonal knowledge of the two states it analyzes, “caught” and “freed,” presenting them as a chemist might present alternative states of water as ice and steam. The divided and undecided creature of the first state is still as “mercurial” as ever in the second state—but now the mercury runs free, once the thermometer, broken, need no longer monitor the spirit’s intemperance: “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51). And Bishop’s final mirror is still a mirror, capable of accurate (if reversed) representation, though it now lacks a person standing before its judging eye; empty, it need not reflect a particular image color from the available spectrum but can let its whole inner being flash free from its beveled edge, flying “wherever / it feels like.” The gaiety celebrated in the last word is never available untroubled during life, when the spirit is still “fettered in feet, and manacled with hands” (Marvell). Yet an aura of precision remains: if the mirror were not beveled, shaped with an exactly calibrated edge, it could not generate the “rainbow-bird.” The spirit “level” has been transformed into a rhyming mirror-“bevel,” subsuming once again the first caught state and the final freed one under a single arc.

Unlike “Breakfast Song,” “Sonnet” does not inflict a “hard” conceptual separation on life and death: the bubble can move around in the spirit-level until it finds its harmonious center; the compass needle can take various positions until it stops at its true north; the mercury can live in and out of the thermometer. And Bishop does not entirely oppose life and death but fuses the two halves of her poem by inserting in both, as we have seen, metaphors of instrumentation, participles of voluntary activity, and matching rhymes. In “Breakfast Song,” life was organic and warm, death inorganic and cold; in “Sonnet,” the inorganic bubble and needle, mercury and mirror, undergo—as the poet at her death becomes her poems—a graceful metamorphosis into an image combining the inorganic with the organic—a “rainbow-bird.” In Bishop’s poem “Insomnia,” the moon sought “a mirror in which to dwell,” a mirror now transformed into the dwelling place of the rainbow-bird, who is liberated when the straight bevel interacts with the white light invisibly bearing within itself the multicolored spectrum.4 (The “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” of Bishop’s freed fish finds an echo here.)

And whereas the trimeters of “Breakfast Song” have no marked representational function, the slender dimeters of “Sonnet” mimic the fine rectangular shapes, horizontal and vertical, of Bishop’s related images—the spirit-level, the compass needle, the thermometer, and even the bevel. In their lightness of rhythmic motion, the dimeters help to release the confined spirit. The rhyming of two symbols within each part—as the “creature divided” rhymes with the “needle . . . undecided,” and the mercury running “away” rhymes with the rainbow-bird, “gay”—makes the sonnet a four-part poem—symbol-symbol, symbol-symbol—as well as a two-part one of sestet and octave. By these similar patterns of rhyming, the caught body and the freed spirit are made to resemble, and to be congruent with, each other. Bishop’s imagining of the human being, in “Sonnet,” has room within it for processes of both living and dying and for the tension between them, as well as for the weary desire for freedom from the body. The speaker, it is clear, feels straitened by the body and impatient of the will’s life-long wavering. But instead of emphasizing the confinement and fatigue of the aged state, the poem imagines its opposite—the exhilaration of liberty, the turn from tragedy or stoicism to an envisioned brilliance of being.

The pressure of death within life makes itself felt in Bishop’s last overtly elegiac poems, especially in her elegy “North Haven,” written after the death in 1977 of her close friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell. And will this late poem, like “Breakfast Song,” establish a “hard” division between life and death, or will it, like “Sonnet,” find a way to unite them within a binocular view? Although Bishop’s elegy for Lowell warns us (with its epigraph “In memoriam: Robert Lowell”) that it is an elegy, it “pretends” during its first four stanzas that it is not one. Rather, it occupies itself at first with defining life as pure sense perception, apparently untroubled by temporality. I’ll come in a moment to the final stanzas, but I will begin with the first four.

Simple perception is always momentary, a brief bodily registering. “North Haven” opens with a stanza of such perception, recording nothing more than a boat on the water, new cones on the spruce trees, the quiet appearance of the bay, and a single cloud in the sky. Living, in this prelude, is indistinguishable from seeing and describing: change, though implied in the “new” evergreen cones, is not central to it. Setting off this moment of pure perception by italicizing it, Bishop intimates a sense of homecoming and pleasure in her seasonal return to the island of North Haven (off the coast of Maine, in Penobscot Bay). Is this vista not enough (the poet asks by her repeated auxiliary “can”) by which to characterize the state of being alive?

I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin, the sky
no clouds, except for one long, carded horse’s-tail.

When the poem resumes, the speaker allows time to enter briefly, but undisturbingly, allowing us to know that she was here “last summer.” She continues the joyous inventory of her surroundings and remarks on her responses to them, realistic and imaginative: “The islands haven’t shifted since last summer, / Even if I like to pretend they have.” It is true that a glancing sense of another person or persons enters half concealed in the word “our” in stanza three—“This month our favorite [island] is full of flowers”—but the pronoun is faint beside the delighted catalog of the blossoming species the poet sees, all of them familiar, all of them “returned” (like herself) and bent to a single purpose, “to paint the meadows with delight.” Perception continues with further abundantly collective specification, reproducing last summer’s field of flowers in today’s identical one, amassing a plenitude of flower names (capitalized as if in a seed catalogue) with allusions to flower-loving fellow poets (Shakespeare, Marianne Moore):

 

Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,

Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,

the Fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,

and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.5

 

In stanza four, Bishop inserts the first disturbing note of the poem as she attempts to repeat her recognition of the perennial flowers by announcing the return of the “same” birds (adding the sense of hearing to a poem hitherto restricted to sight while retaining the continued emphasis on pure sense perception). But if the daisies seem identical to those of last year, the birds, the poet admits, may or may not be so. Bishop denies them the species immortality of Keats’s nightingale: “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!” Rather, Bishop questions Keats’s certainty: “The Goldfinches are back, or others like them. . . . / Nature repeats herself, or almost does.” The “or’s” are concessives; perhaps these are different species of finches; maybe the sparrows’ song—which the poet thinks she recognizes—has been altered. For the moment, she tries to insist, by specifying its five-note character, that the song is still the same:

The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the white-throated Sparrow’s five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.

These tears are the tears of elegy, hitherto suppressed in Bishop’s insistence on remaining within the timeless precincts of perception, as she maintains her intense desire to keep the island untainted by death. The poet has wished to see her island impervious to change, but the death of her friend has been hovering underneath all her grateful recognitions of returned flowers and recognized birds. Lowell’s death has been threatening to occupy Bishop’s consciousness and is, I think, responsible for the way she makes each stanza of perception and warm naming slow down at the close, as if unwilling to move forward. The last line of each stanza of the poem is always a retarding hexameter, unexpected after the preceding (mostly) pentameter lines.6 Now the hitherto-suppressed death, “hiding” in these reluctant hexameters, is about to come forcibly into view.

At the close of the fourth stanza, Bishop voices the distinction, central to the poem, between the recursive action of cyclical nature (to repeat) and the voluntary action of perfection-seeking writers (to revise). Yet the poet bafflingly juxtaposes the two verbs, one impersonal, one human, in an italicized line:

Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

 

This onomatopoeic line imitates birdsong, its first half echoing (in the spelling and long “e” of “repeats”) the “pleading and pleading” of the sparrow, replicating Nature’s predictability: plead, plead, plead; repeat, repeat, repeat. But what of the second half of the line? It makes a new triple “birdsong,” but makes it out of a “human” word, “revise,” which, like Lowell’s death, has been waiting under the surface of the poem. For the moment, its surprising intellectual appearance, immediately following the repeating perceptual birdsong, remains an unaccountable one.

The presence of the dead friend—when Bishop makes it appear, apparently unbidden, in the speaker’s resistant perceptions—introduces, against nature’s comforting replications, time as a non-repetitive, non-recursive presence, tapering off into loss:

Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first “discovered girls
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer.
(“Fun”—it always seemed to leave you at a loss. . . .)

Because it is normal, in writing elegy, to mention early in the poem the death occasioning it, Bishop’s postponement of the arrival of the other, shadowy half of the early “we” (which generated the mention of “our” island) is unsettling. We are puzzled to find the poet’s friend lamented so late, and in such apparently banal fashion, being quoted as having, on this island, “‘discovered girls’ / and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.” The island, hitherto populated (to the speaker’s view) solely by flowers and birds, now takes on a new (if vanished) population of adolescents and sailing parties and romances. The island is no longer nature; it is society. The speaker can no longer greet with joy the daisies and the goldfinches; she is being forced, by memory, into social interchange and loss. The reminiscence concerning the dead friend, “Years ago, you told me,” darkens, with the increasing pain of his absence, into that well-known reactive resurrective move, a direct address to the lost one. In the past, the living Lowell came to North Haven and then left, summer after summer. But those temporary departures are over, and Bishop’s words must alter from the first temporary preterite—“You left”—to a permanent present-perfect parting—“you’ve left / for good”:

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue. . . . And now—you’ve left
for good.

Every elegy must contain at least one moment in which the actual death of the lost person “happens over again,” is enacted rather than merely reported. Bishop’s first way of enacting the crushing loss of her closest friend has been, as we’ve seen, to obliterate Lowell entirely from the once-shared scene, showing her speaker attempting to fix herself in a state of pure timeless aesthetic perception. In effect, the poet almost obliterates the speaker as well, as she reduces her at first to pure eye (no other senses are permitted entrance to the first stanza). By introducing the passage of time in the first-stanza phrase “last summer”; by giving a hint of another person in the second-stanza adjective “our”; by allowing hearing, in the bird stanza, to join sight; and finally by her fourth-stanza admission of tears and the human self-correction of revision, Bishop prepares her speaker to acknowledge the ever-present absence of Lowell. He is at last permitted actual entrance to the poem as a “living person” when the speaker recalls his mention (in the past tense) of their island. The speaker herself, musing in recollection (“‘Fun’—it always seemed to leave you at a loss . . . ),” quietly restores herself too to full emotional personhood. She had begun as an Emersonian “transparent eyeball”; now she is a mourner ending her Lowell stanza with the human word “loss.”

Bishop has enacted Lowell’s death by summoning his past living presence and then making him disappear: “You left . . . you’ve left for good.” Yet even after this final erasure of Lowell the person, Bishop presses on to ask which quality of the living Lowell would, by its absence, make her feel his death most keenly. She realizes she will miss his restless revising of his poems. “I have treated published work as manuscript,” he said of his full-scale revision of Notebook 1967–68 into an enlarged and changed volume called simply Notebook. And even then, he could not rest content, going on to revise and reorder the contents of Notebook into two separate volumes, called For Lizzie and Harriet and History. Repudiating the eighteenth-century idea of a “watchmaker God,” Lowell said (in his sonnet by that name) that God could not create and then stand apart: “he loved to tinker.” Lowell kept his poetic spirit alive by “tinkering” with his verse, by finding revision as exhilarating as creation. As Bishop closes her poem, she re-creates Lowell’s death in her elegy not by deliberately obliterating him, as in stanza 1, not by a denial of his absence that resurrects him in speech, as in stanza 5, not by sealing his departure “for good” as in stanza 6, but rather by grieving the impossibility, in death, of his revising—for the worse or for the better—his poems:

You can’t derange, or re-arrange,
Your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot
    change.

The fade-out from the second-person “you can’t” to the third-person “the words won’t” dissolves the author into his unchanging page. The final sentence of the poem is Bishop’s ultimate farewell to her friend and fellow poet. In the closing lines, as I have said, Bishop as speaker is no longer merely an eye or an ear; she is a reconstituted whole person. But what are the sparrows doing in Bishop’s closing stanza? They have been rearranged, in italics, from symbols of repetition—repeat, repeat, repeat—to symbols of revision—revise, revise, revise. The poet’s earlier concessive “or’s”—“The Goldfinches are back, or others like them”; “Nature repeats herself, or almost does”—had weakened the concept of Nature as an unchanging ritual. The “or’s” now exert new power in the presence of death, Nature’s greatest change. It is not only Lowell who has gone; gone as well, the poet finally admits, are the flowers and birdsongs of the past summer. We now understand better the relation of the second italicized passage of the poem to the first one, Bishop’s opening stanza: the speaker’s effort to obscure death by remaining in the fixed single moment of aesthetic perception gradually became the effort to deny loss by affirming Nature’s repetitions. Unable to maintain the deceptive comfort of repetition, Bishop makes her italicized birdsong “evolve” from repeat to revise—although that insight about Nature’s own revisions is not elaborated until Bishop concedes at the end of the poem that the living sparrows, unlike the dead Lowell, can change their song.

“North Haven” attempts for some time—by its successive tactics of willed obliteration of time, self-reduction to pure eye or ear, the illusion of rehearing the lost voice, and a resurrective address to the dead—to refuse the binocular vision that holds death and life in some active relation within a single sensibility. Such strategies of denial tell us how hard it is for a poet of ecstatic sight and musical response, such as Bishop, to keep in a view of life entwined with death not only the cessation of beautiful sights but also the cessation of poetic voice. She has badly wanted (as she reveals in her gradual construction of her speaker) to confine perception to the ever-beautiful skies, waters, flowers, and birds of reliable Nature. By at last bringing together under the single overarching word “change” Lowell’s death, Nature’s birdsong, and the revising of poems, Bishop can put Lowell to rest: “Sad friend, you cannot change.” By admitting change and revision into her much-loved landscape of North Haven, Bishop could at last balance life (seen with the aesthetic eye as joyous, recursive, and beautiful) against death (seen as disappearance, poetic silence, and the eventual immobility of a poem after its creator’s disappearance).

A more somber effort to sustain a binocular vision is visible in Bishop’s famous villanelle “One Art.” Here, the poet cannot fall back on the delighted perception of natural beauty. The villanelle grimly describes a life punctuated by a series of losses from the trivial to the tragic, a life devoid (as we at first think) of any compensating gain. In the fiercely compressed and darkly flippant autobiography of “One Art,” Bishop loses, in succession, her only souvenir of her mother (permanently hospitalized for insanity when Bishop was five); her Brazilian houses in Persepolis, Río de Janeiro, and Ouro Preto; and her partner Lota to suicide (a death symbolized in “One Art” by the loss of realms—Brazil—and a continent—South America). But Bishop has steadily refused, she tells us, to qualify any of these severe losses as “disaster.” She means to invoke the etymological meaning of the word “disaster,” representing the moment when the stars themselves turn irreversibly hostile. (The word is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as “an unforeseen mischance bringing with it destruction of life or property or the ruin of projects, careers, etc.”) For Bishop, using the word “disaster” is conclusive, and she has so far disdained to apply this hyperbolic noun to her life’s losses. Now, however, she is going to undergo, it appears, a terrible catastrophe—the loss of her young lover, the one of the joking voice and the beloved gesture. Bishop prophesies here the cessation, in old age, of the erotic life and sees erotic cessation as a symbol for the body’s death, the ultimate disaster:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Any villanelle, by its recursive form, imitates an unrelenting process. The classic villanelle exhibits two recurrent lines, but Bishop repeats merely one line in its entirety and uses for the second repeating unit a single word, “disaster”; the whole poem is, in fact, a duel between the verb “master” and the noun “disaster.” Thirteen variants of the word “lose” come into view, to intensify the glare of the formal repetitions of stoic line and menacing word. (Even lost’s phonetic sibling last is twice pressed into service.) “Is it hard to master the art of losing?” the poem asks, and throughout (until the last stanza), Bishop answers, sometimes impertinently, sometimes defiantly, “No,” instancing cases where she mastered that art in the past by refusing to resort to the word “disaster.” But when the new threat of the loss of her lover makes the poet ask “Is it now too hard to master the art of losing?” she almost falters into “Yes,” ready to relinquish the struggle, ready in fact to give up on a life that seems already lost. Although Bishop’s emotional fragility has made each life-loss in fact catastrophic, she has, to prove her stoicism, refused so far to capitulate to despair.

Stoicism is usually thought of as a virtue, but not as an art. What turns losing into the art of losing? What turns life into the art of life, writing into the art of writing? This is a question to which Bishop in the course of Geography III gives multiple answers, some benign, some much less so. In her late ars poetica “Poem,” life turns into art when “life, and the memory of it,” are preserved in a recognizable painting of a loved place, even if the painting itself is materially “worthless.” But in another late poem, “Pink Dog,” art is the fantasía, or carnival costume, that will cover up the scabies of a diseased post-partum dog, preventing its being thrown (with the other ill and poor of Río) into the river. Art in Río’s carnival is a mask to overcome social unacceptability. In a disturbing moment in yet another poem from Geography III, “Crusoe in England,” art is a death-dealing experiment in the unnatural; Crusoe on his island dyes a baby goat red, “just to see something a little different.” Bishop reports the outcome obliquely: “And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.” We are left to imagine the baby goat’s dying from the dyeing. Art in Crusoe’s hands is heedless of its effects, a dilettante’s dabbling. What sort of art, by comparison to these, is “the art of losing”? Hard to master, it does not come naturally. It is not spontaneously inventive, like the dyeing of the goat, nor socially deceptive, like the fantasía. It does not come with conventions, as the art of even the bad painting of “Poem” does. Nor can the art of losing be taught; it must be self-learned through trial and stoic determination. The art of losing is, however, a form of constantly increasing mastery (unlike the one-time fantasía, unlike Crusoe’s whimsical fatal experiment, unlike even the amateurish canvas of “Poem”).

From being an apprentice in loss, one grows, with practice, to become a master in the art of losing. What happens if a master such as Bishop refuses the next offered advance in mastery? Her hard-won self-image of capability and power will vanish, and she will once again be the poor frightened creature she was when she first confronted loss. In defending her painfully composed self, constructed over time and against daunting losses (beginning with the death of her father when she was eight months old), Bishop—whose catastrophes have made her define life as a constant denuding—must take the next step of mastery. If she does not, she will experience not only the anticipated erotic loss but, even worse, the inner death characteristic of a failed artist. By bringing “One Art” down to the very moment of present writing, by lifting her pen after she writes “like” and then reinscribing “like” after her tenacious interpolation of self-command “(Write it!),” Bishop turns once again to the one art she has claimed to master: stoicism in the face of what seems certain ruin. Her art, wrung from loss, paradoxically becomes her life principle. It is not, however, a boast of conclusive mastery of loss that closes the poem; it is merely the recognition of imminent dissolution, a potential arrival at the worst. The conscious recognition of threat is the prelude—the necessary prelude—to any act of mastery over loss. Bishop readies herself, with her self-injunction in the actual moment of composition, to take a step toward a continued writing life, even as we feel her undertow of panic. Nowhere in Bishop’s work has the full binocular vision of the coexistence of living and losing been harder to maintain.

An even more desperate, and consequently nearly non-binocular, poem in Geography III is “Night City,” subtitled “From the Plane.”7 As Bishop’s airborne speaker looks down on a lighted city at night, Bishop’s imagination creates, for her gaze, the panorama of a hellish purgatory. The city burns, burns with fires, burns with liquids, and then begins to burn as a “guilt-disposal” station. Blood and lymph spatter out; molten green rivers run through the scene; a pool of bitumen resembles a blackened moon. A skyscraper drips incandescent wires; the air diminishes to a vacuum, the sky is dead. All this is reminiscent of the lake of burning marl on which Milton placed Satan, but here no living beings can, it seems, survive, since the “guilt-disposal” furnace-city generates such intense heat. Bishop offers a quasi-posthumous vision from above of the place in which mortal guilt is punished, futile tears incinerated.

“Night City” is weighted cruelly toward death, until at the last moment the last stanza creates a second view. Can a concept of life persist beside this concept of a hellish purgation? Here are the first nine stanzas of “Night City,” with Bishop’s speaker shrinking, safe in the aircraft above, from what it would be to walk the landscapes of the “night city,” where even tycoons cannot defeat the fires, and where (in a reminiscence of Moore’s “the chasm side is // dead”) we find “the sky is dead”:

No foot could endure it,
shoes are too thin.
Broken glass, broken bottles,
heaps of them burn.

Over those fires
no one could walk:
those flaring acids
and variegated bloods.

The city burns tears.
A gathered lake
of aquamarine
begins to smoke.

The city burns guilt.
—For guilt-disposal
the central heat
must be this intense.

Diaphanous lymph,
bright turgid blood,
spatter outward
in clots of gold

to where run, molten
in the dark environs
green and luminous
silicate rivers.

A pool of bitumen
one tycoon
wept by himself,
a blackened moon.

Another cried
a skyscraper up.
Look! Incandescent,
its wires drip.

The conflagration
fights for air
in a dread vacuum.
The sky is dead.

 

Even grand human effort has expired in uselessness; one tycoon ended by weeping black tears, another’s skyscraper has short-circuited its wiring. Bishop is the protected tour guide above, saying “Look!” as she enumerates the sights of the conflagration below; but she has also been, evidently, the sufferer who in the past has lived in this city, can imagine its shards of glass abrading her feet as she recoils from its broken bottles, its mounting fires, the approaching vacuum in the atmosphere. She has fled the city of guilt and passion and sees from afar its apocalyptic conflagration in a dead sky. She has escaped into a higher realm of the atmosphere, from which her commentary emanates.

Yet, to close the poem, she resumes her former position in the terrible night city, counting on the winged creatures above, the angel aircraft overhead, to set a norm that implicitly judges the deadly sins being purged in the Night City. The guardians above are aware, and obedient, and careful; they know how to follow the necessary laws of stop and go; their steps are regular and measured. The last stanza, imitating the steady stepping of the airplane angels, declares,

(Still, there are creatures,
careful ones, overhead.
They set down their feet, they walk
green, red; green, red.)

 

The careful creatures are the incarnation of a moral order rebuking the guilts of earth, but their passionlessness and carefulness cannot compete in vividness with the incandescent fires of the burning city, its unlimited fuel of tears. The angelic moral order above is a life-serenity posed, in this “posthumous” view, at an interface with a purgatorial punishment below. Yet Bishop cannot finish her poem from her observation post in the heaven overhead; her final look at the planes is taken from the excruciating vantage point of the suffering city. The solution offered in the final stanza is an ingenious one: the poet aspires to, and even admires, the steadiness of a moral order, but remains unable to speak from its privileged position, superior to careless mistake-making life. In its imbalance of death and life, “Night City” is the least “just” of Bishop’s binocular views; nonetheless, in spite of her shame and terror, the poet gives the last word to the providential surveillance of disorderly passionate life by a principle of temperance overhead.

 

Years before Geography III, in “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop made a vow to know what there was to be known, even if it tasted bitter, then briny, then burned the tongue. As her own mortality began to shadow her perpetual delight in her “stereoscopic view”—as she called it in “Cape Breton”—she courageously allowed death to preempt one half of that view. Pressing her style to the extreme, she conveyed authentically the moral stereoscopy of life being lived in the expectation of death. A desolate and convincing binocular picture appears in Bishop’s superb imagining of her own grief-ridden state in “Crusoe in England.” To the aged returned Crusoe, everything that had meaning on his island has in England lost its significance:

 

                 I’m old.

I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
The knife there on the shelf—
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle . . .
Now it won’t look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.

 

In such a passage, we see Bishop’s late binocular capacity at its strongest as she conjoins, in a single comprehensive last look, the living knife on the island, “reek[ing] of meaning,” and the same knife soul-less in England. The emotional death of Crusoe’s own soul is revealed a little later: “—And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles / seventeen years ago come March.” The date on which Friday died in the flesh is the date that Crusoe died in spirit. Nothing in the knife itself has changed, but the atmosphere in Crusoe’s mind has altered beyond repair. In his mind, as in Bishop’s last book, life and death, the island and the shelf, exist side by side, before the eye and within the style.