The Poem and the Path
Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas was the first poet I fell in love with; I was sixteen, from a country background in which books and writing played no significant part, and felt he was speaking to me about things I knew. Hedges, fields, woods, the sky at evening, aspen trees, elm trees, sedge warblers, paths. Paths especially, and paths of all kinds. Little flint-studded tracks, hill roads wet with rain, winding routes into the dark heart of forests, straight foot-beaten ways across the tops of bare downs. Even to someone like my teenage self, who had no confidence as a reader of poems, it was clear that everything Thomas wrote was in one way or another to do with traveling—with being on the move and noticing as he moved, with fleeing the self and tracking the self, with journeying through life. And, moreover, with traveling through a landscape which, however grand and large its symbolic values might be, was always exactly detailed and local. That is why I took to him so strongly: he made me feel I had walked up to the largest and most abstract things in my head, but that when I looked down at my shoes, they were covered in real raindrops, real grass flecks, real dust.
In the forty years since I first read Thomas, my love for his writing has deepened continuously: he is one of the handful of poets I find absolutely necessary. By now, of course, I know a lot more about him than I did back in my A level classroom. I know, among other things, that his path poetry forms part of a great tradition of writing about walking; I also know how it reflects the likings and loyalties of his own life. He was a restless man whose wanderlust was confined largely to the South Country of England (with occasional excursions into Wales, where he felt an ancestral allegiance). And this restlessness was the expression of a paradox which has never lost its power to engross and move me. That is to say, Thomas simultaneously felt himself to be “an old inhabitant of earth”—someone who had the most profound sense of belonging to his country and knew the names and natures of its landscape very intimately—and at the same time someone who felt modern industrialized life had uprooted him: he referred to himself as “a superfluous man.”
For all these reasons, it feels right to look on the paths in Thomas’ poems as things which give very mixed messages. They are places of respite as well as travail, of delight as well as anxiety, of certainty as well as uncertainty, of beginning as well as ending. Because he was writing poetry in the early years of World War I, his paths all lead to France. Because he was writing in the eye of eternity, they all lead to “the unfathomable deep / Forest where all must lose / Their way.” On the other hand, because he was writing as a countryman, his paths also lead to certain consolations: they present us with emblems of human endurance and durability, despite their inevitable destinations.
We will find other poets reaching similar conclusions in all the other poems I am writing about in this series—though admittedly not always in the context of the English countryside. Saying this means confronting something recurrent in human behavior, and also something stable in the way that paths have been treated in poems down the generations. I want to have a quick look at this before coming back to Thomas.
Poetry and paths have been natural partners. We hear the rhythm of human feet in the movement of feet in a line; we see the journey in poetry as abiding proof of human curiosity, adventure, and identity-making. It is there in the track of Homer’s journeys, in the war-treks of Beowulf, in the strange travels of the Green Knight, in the pilgrimage of Chaucer’s society-in-miniature, and in the displacements of Shakespeare’s lovers and soldiers and statesmen. I sketch all this because there is a tendency for us to think of the link between poetry and traveling (and especially of poetry and walking) as a marriage that was made during the Enlightenment. But it is not the brand-new thing that implies. The link between poetry and paths is a very ancient thing, as ancient as the hills. It was not established during the Enlightenment; it was revitalized by the Enlightenment—by Rousseau (who says in his Confessions: “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think, my mind only works with my legs”), and later by Wordsworth. By the time he and the other Romantic poets began to have their say, they were conscious of inheriting a long, complex, and invigorating tradition and of having adapted it to manifest a new kind of certainty. The certainty that the individual mattered, that democracy mattered. To walk was to assert the primacy of the self. Paths were the lifelines the self used to gather and ratify its importance.
Having said that Wordsworth was not the first person to understand this, I immediately need to say he understood it more deeply than most people who had lived before him. It has been estimated that he walked about 180,000 miles in the course of his long life, and the effect, implications, and opportunities of walking feed virtually all the poems he wrote. Walking is, indeed, precisely the means by which he wrote—striding up and down, composing aloud (he called it “bumming”). It gives vital structure and impetus to the language and philosophy of masterpieces like “Tintern Abbey,” “The Leech Gatherer,” and the whole of The Prelude. Everywhere you look in his poems, you see the footprint of a walking man and some sort of tribute to the paths, tracks, and roads he has passed along. “I love a public road,” he says:
I love a public road: few sights there are
That please me more; such object hath had the power
O’er my imagination since the dawn
Of childhood, when its disappearing line,
Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep
Beyond the limits which my feet had trod
Was like a guide into eternity,
At least to things unknown and without bound.
The opening phrase of this passage (“I love a public road”) is one to which Edward Thomas pays homage in his own very beautiful and sinuous lyric “Roads”: “I love roads,” it begins: “The goddesses that dwell / Far along invisible / Are my favourite gods.” This kind of reference is typical Thomas. His poems seem and sound completely natural, completely un-literary, and yet in truth are little echo chambers, containing acts of homage to Romantic poets and other writers whose own enthusiasms confirmed his preoccupation with walking and the means of walking. As well as Wordsworth, we see the footprint of Hazlitt, Coleridge, De Quincey, Thoreau and Emerson, Richard Jefferies, and his contemporary countrymen such as W. H. Hudson. Thomas’ poems, in other words, score their success as hymns to and accounts of walking by allowing themselves to be walked through by sympathetic others. The weight of a welcome ancestry helps press them into shape.1
Part of that ancestry, and in a way that is unique in English poetry, is self-engendered. That is to say, many of the quotations that appear in Thomas’ poems come from the prose books he wrote in the earlier part of his life before turning to poems in the last two-and-a-bit years before he was killed in 1917. This is certainly and valuably the case with the poem I am writing about here—a poem called “Old Man,” which was only the third poem Thomas wrote, on December 6, 1914. I recorded it for the BBC last summer when I went to visit the house in which it was written, in the village of Steep in Hampshire. Afterwards, I walked up the beech hangar behind the house to stand by the memorial stone on the part of the hill known as the Shoulder of Mutton. The July breeze came through the trees like an express train, while cloud shadows blobbed and melted across the fields below.
Old Man
Old Man, or Lad’s-love,—in the name there’s nothing
To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,
The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.
The herb itself I like not, but for certain
I love it, as some day the child will love it
Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
Whenever she goes in or out of the house.
Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling
The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps
Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs
Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still
But half as tall as she, though it is as old;
So well she clips it. Not a word she says;
And I can only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson-trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.
As for myself,
Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember:
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
The first trace of what became the poem “Old Man” appears in a fragment of autobiography, The Childhood of Edward Thomas, in which Thomas writes of an early memory: “As I stood with my back to the house among the tall blossoming bushes I had no sense of any end to the garden between its brown fences: there remains in my mind a greenness, at once lowly and endless.” Subsequently, only a year or so before the poem, Thomas produced another passage, in his topographical book The South Country, in which he speaks about having “much drowsy pleasure in the mere act of memory” and describes the way certain scenes and plants (including Lad’s-love) trigger sensations poised between happiness and unhappiness, and in which the figure of a little girl appears. When we turn to the poem, all these shadowy details are given a shape which is both recognizably clear and appropriately nebulous, by Thomas’ decision to arrange them round a path. Memory may be the subject of the poem—its tantalizations, its elusiveness, its way of combining past, present and future—but the path is the track to the subject. It is so much so, in fact, it becomes a part of the subject and the stimulus for its final great image.
Let us have a closer look and see how this happens. In the opening lines of the poem, we are most definitely introduced to certain kinds of uncertainty. This starts with the names—“Old Man, or Lad’s-love” (the genus of this English plant is Artemisia—the name showing the honor in which it was once held and establishing its association with Diana, the Healer; the bitterness of the herb, to which Thomas soon refers, is registered in another of its names: wormwood). These names of the herb are at once paradoxical and contradictory: they simultaneously fix the plant as a recognizable thing and confuse the speaker of the poem by half decorating and half perplexing “the thing it is.” These doubts immediately deepen: the herb looks both old and young (it is “hoar-green”); it is indeed an herb, but it is “almost a tree.” And so on. Given all this, it is not surprising to find the speaker saying that while he likes the names, he “likes not” the herb—only to confound this by saying across the ambiguity-haunted stretch of a line break, “but for certain / I love it.” You might say that this accumulation of uncertainties points to a wonderful richness of response—an uncanny ability to see all sides of everything—and so in a sense it does. As we read the poem, we feel that we are watching a mind at full stretch as it struggles to make necessary reconciliations and to do justice to experience by calibrating it very finely. But at the same time the many-mindedness suggests the risk of a kind of paralysis. (It is worth remembering here that Thomas’ friend Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” for Thomas.)
This is where the path plays its vital role. We first see it as we glimpse the child, who is waiting outside the door, snipping tips off the bush “and shrivelling / The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps / Thinking, perhaps of nothing.” Even though the uncertainties of the poem are still potent here (everything is still half decorating, half perplexing the speaker’s sense of what is reliable), they are suddenly bolstered by a swift description of actualities—by the scent of the garden rows, and the damson trees topping the hedge—which give the path its local habitation. To put this another way: at this stage in the poem, the path is introduced as a kind of platform, a stretch of steady ground on which the speaker can stand and ask questions about how the mind might be full or empty, about how speech might or might not help in the operation of memory, about what parts of experience might stay with us and what evaporate, and about the relative values of happy and unhappy (“bitter”) memories.
There is no clear answer to any of these questions, but that is the point. Uncertainty and indecision: these are the foundation stones of Thomas’ truthful response to experience. He may be a different sort of formalist than T. S. Eliot, and he may use a very different range of images, but he has a lot in common with J. Alfred Prufrock, who is an altogether more urban kind of pedestrian. And in the next stanza Thomas confirms his doubtfulness by turning his gaze away from path and child to the interior of his own self. That is to say, he gives his own personal evidence of how memories escape, and yet of how he feels that bitterness contributes more to his sense of himself than other memories “more sweet.” What he is describing here is the fundamental Romantic perception—that the self is defined by knowledge of suffering and hardship, and that a degree of bafflement is essential to the acquisition of wisdom.
Up to this point in the poem, Thomas has been placing himself by the door into the cottage, where the bush grows and the path begins or ends—depending on which direction he looks. As the poem enters its very beautiful last verse, his mind moves from doors to keys. “I have mislaid the key,” he says. The transition is from local to symbolic, but the word has a sense of actual weight which allows the experience to stay vivid in our minds as readers. In exactly the same sort of way, the path also becomes transmogrified while yet continuing to be the thing it is. It is changed from being the simple “bent” track that runs to and from the house door and becomes instead an “avenue, dark, nameless, without end.” It is a wonderfully rich idea, which depends on our thinking of the path as a thing which is at once real and figurative, and in either case as the place where the speaker can witness the final show of opposites. He is unable to re-enter the past, yet endlessly waiting to do just that. He is confronting the blankness of memory, yet filled with a sense of its palpable completion. The coloration, the mood, the world of the last line is like the negative of a photograph.
When we spell out the facts of loss and frustration encompassed in the last stanza of “Old Man,” we register a mood of regret—the sense of a very subtle mind being baulked by the hard facts of human limitation. Whichever way we look down the path, we find a bleak prospect. If we look behind us into the past, we see a memory bank that has been eradicated, and if we look forward into the future, we see death—the deathliness of one of Thomas’ last poems, “Lights Out,” where he tells us, “Many a road and track / That, since the dawn’s first crack, / Up to the forest brink, / Deceived the travellers, / Suddenly now blurs, / And in they sink.”
Yet at the same time as we feel the truth of these things, in life and in the poem, we also experience something else—something lighter and more affirmative. The steady walking pace of “Old Man,” its evenly emphatic tone, and the bewitching intimacy of its cadence all pull us towards life. So do the facts of the poem that are set in real time—a real garden, a real child, and a real path. It is, in other words, the final ambiguity of this profoundly ambiguous poem to make us feel a degree of resignation and even acceptance. The path is the place where the speaker of the poem is tested and found to be resilient. As it says on the memorial stone on the Shoulder of Mutton hill, “I rose up, and knew that I was tired, and continued my journey.”
As I stated earlier, the way Wordsworth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed how people thought about walking—making it seem a bolder, more attractive, and more democratic activity—exerted a powerful influence. Although Thomas seldom writes poems in which Wordsworthianly long hikes play much of a role (his semi-symbolic early poem “The Other” is an exception proving the rule), he nevertheless very often writes poems about walking which, like Wordsworth’s, offer a means of encountering other citizens of the highway (retired soldiers, beggars, tramps, etc.). He also very often structures poems around walks which have no specific beginning or termination. Because we as readers are uncertain about their precise length, we are inclined to read them as epitomes of the journey of life itself. Our ignorance about their duration confirms the many other kinds of two-mindedness which give Thomas’ poems their particular mood and subject. He is the master of indecision, and his paths are the stages on which his intimate dramas are played out.
Norman MacCaig
Norman MacCaig was born thirty-two years after Thomas, in Edinburgh, in 1910. Although their styles differ in important respects (MacCaig is more playful with his language, and more open to humor in his tone), they share some important characteristics. They are both comparatively soft- and level-speakers, they both have exceptionally sharp eyes, and they both tend to leave their large ideas embedded in their local observations—preferring not to tell their readers what to think while encouraging them to work it out for themselves. There is an important connection between their abiding themes, too. Even though their culture and geography are very different (Thomas southern English, MacCaig north of the border), they both have a sense of internal division—which manifests itself in many poems as a sense of simultaneous close connection with, and exclusion from, the scene they are passing through.
In the case of Thomas, this conflict is generally set within or against the backcloth of the South Country or on the fringes of London (where he was born); with MacCaig, it takes place in his native Edinburgh, or Assynt, in the Scottish Highlands, where he spent a part of most years of his life (he died in 1996). Even when he was in full-time employment (initially as a teacher in primary schools, then as Fellow in Creative Writing in Edinburgh in the mid-1960s, then as Reader in Poetry at Sterling), he spent his summers in Achmelvich, and Inverkirkaig, near Lochinver.
The poem by MacCaig that I am going to discuss gives no clue as to its precise setting—though it’s reasonable to guess that it remembers one of these summer retreats.
The Shore Road
The sea pursued
Its beastlike amours, rolling in its sweat
And beautiful under the moon; and a leaf was
A lively architecture in the light.
The space between
Was full, to splitting point, of presences
So oilily adjustable a walking man
Pushed through and trailed behind no turbulence.
The walking man
With octaves in his guts was quartertone
In octaves of octaves that climbed up and down
Beyond his hearing, to back parts of the moon.
As though things were
Perpetual chronologies of themselves,
He sounded his small history, to make complete
The interval of leaves and rutting waves.
Or so he thought,
And heard his hard shoes scrunching in the grit,
Smelt salt and iodine in the wind and knew
The door was near, the supper, the small lamplight.
Before I look more closely at the motors and motives of the poem, I want to think for a minute about the context it creates for itself regardless of particular geography. The playful leaps of its language, which moves very freely between different concepts and kinds of perception (blunt one minute, cultured the next), might remind us of the American poet Wallace Stevens—it has something of his clever, compressed, allusive and aesthetic manner. Yet a much more certain light is shed by the walking poets and philosophers I began to mention earlier. By Rousseau—who habitually describes walking as a way to enhance a contemplative mood while assenting to the virtues of simplicity and self-sufficiency; and by Wordsworth, who liberated walkers from parks and gardens and set them along public roads, or over crag and torrent, where they could discover the magnificence of ordinary lives and hear the poetry of ordinary speech.
Even though the freshness of the Wordsworthian vision—its absolutely un-pedestrian view of what it meant to be a pedestrian—altered somewhat during the later nineteenth century, it is fair to say that he pioneered a change in attitudes to walking which has been widely cherished ever since. Victorian walkers may have been prone to stopping en route to moralize or sentimentalize about the value of their activity. The growth of towns, the spread of public transport, and the compromising of the old town/country relationship by the expansion of suburbs: all these things might have affected the Wordsworthian verities. But even before the environmental movement of our own time, there were still powerful voices speaking in their support: John Muir in the United States, Richard Jefferies in England. Like their more recent counterparts, these tramper-writers wanted to assert the democratic rights that walking embodies, to prove their concern for environmental issues, and also to confirm the value of a connection with the ordinary. Or rather, to prove that what has a reputation for being ordinary is in fact extraordinary. Solnit reminds us that Gary Snyder, the American poet, spoke for them all (in his own inimitable way) when he took Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, for an overnight hike to the sea and back across Mount Tamalpais, across the bay from San Francisco, in 1956. En route, he told Kerouac, “The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”
In Norman MacCaig’s poem “The Shore Road,” all sorts of inheritances from the large literature of walking have been digested and absorbed. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that MacCaig is feeding off them, whether his poem admits it or not. Like all pieces of writing, the poem exists in a slipstream of influences, of imaginative opportunities which have been won and handed on down the generations. (The same principle applies to even the most startlingly “original” writers.) MacCaig’s poem is shaped in a particularly decisive way by the influence of walking poetry which sanctions pathways as lines that combine a sense of certainty, purpose, progression, and self-definition with an equally strong and opposite sense of uncertainty, indecision, bafflement, and self-doubt. We saw this drama played out in Edward Thomas’ “Old Man.” In MacCaig’s poem, the tensions affect one another differently and produce a different outcome.
Initially, MacCaig invites us to concentrate on the uncertainty of things. A shore road, after all, is a very uncertain thing because a shore is the place where two elements meet and tussle and compromise one another: sea washes away the land; land has the capacity to re-form elsewhere. A person taking such a road enters an in-between place—one is neither quite here nor there. Given this, it is not surprising to find the “man” of the poem (if it is MacCaig, he has removed himself from himself and become the third person) feeling that he is part of a world where the constituent elements are not on terms with one another. On the one hand there is the creaturely sea—predatory (it is in the act of “pursuing”), sexually untamed (it is engaged in “beastlike amours”), alarming (it is “rolling in its sweat”), and yet still “beautiful.” On the other hand there is a wind-tousled leaf—“a lively architecture in the light.” The difference between the beastly sea and the delicate leaf could hardly be clearer—especially when we consider that the word “architecture” carries connotations of ingenious design, of planned-ness, whereas the sea appears to be an expression of crude instinct.
All this is conveyed in the first four lines—which, like the remaining four verses, partly assonate or half-rhyme in the second and fourth lines, so as to create the sound of meeting and parting, of likeness and unlikeness. Which is the acoustic expression of ideas the poem has already started to explore. It is only at the beginning of the second verse that we see the person who has himself seen all this—the “walking man.” Or rather “a walking man”: the difference is important because the indefinite article makes us realize that it could be anyone—could be you or me. What has been seen turns out to be a set of provocations to think about separations of one kind or another (“the space between”). Separations, that is, between the thing the sea is and the thing a leaf is—and, arising from that, separations between object and perception, between animate and inanimate, between instinct and design, between the word for a thing and the thing itself, between the self and the thing a self observes. The questions are so multiple, we are immediately told this “space” is in fact not really a space at all, certainly not an empty one, but actually “full, to splitting point, of presences.”
This triggers another rush of questions in our mind. What kind of presences does the poem mean? Are they other kinds of natural element? Are they human beings who have walked this way before, pondering the same or similar questions? Are they ideas of cohesion and belonging? We are not told at this stage. We are only advised that they are so “oilily adjustable” that a walking man meets a minimal resistance as he engages with them and leaves no trace of his contact. On the face of it, this seems a good thing, a kind of acceptance. But “oilily” is disgusting—as rank in its own way as “beastlike amours”—and to leave no trace . . . well, that repudiates a fundamental human instinct. If we pass through existence and leave no mark, we are bound to wonder why we exist at all.
The third verse begins by seeming to confirm that “the walking man” (now at least dignified by that definite article) is a part of “the space between” things—one of the adjustable, evanescent presences. He is described as “a quartertone,” which is a space of a kind. But what do we make of the musical reference here and elsewhere in the verse? (The man has “octaves in his guts”; he is “a quartertone / In octaves of octaves that climbed up and down / Beyond his hearing.”) It seems to come out of nowhere, yet belongs with “architecture” in being man-made, and also because like architecture it appeals to our sense of order and ingenuity. In other words, music is a stay against merely empty “space” and a way of organizing it. It is a confirmation of human existence and of how existence may be considered to have a purpose. All the more so because the music within the walking man, even if he is not completely aware of it (he cannot hear it all), is a means of conveying him to the “back parts of the moon”—an evidently extremely remote and inaccessible place.
The heart of the poem is beginning to come clear. Walking the uncertain shore road between instinct and imaginative (even spiritual) achievement, the man doubts his identity and purpose but begins to suspect that his efforts to reconcile divergent things in nature (that is, in his own nature and in the surrounding world) can be the making of him. And the fourth verse seems to corroborate this slight increase of confidence. It is the walking man’s life as some kind of musician, as an artist (someone with “octaves in his guts”) that gives him an imaginative connection with his world. At the same time as it grants this, it also establishes in him a sense of history (“As though things were / Perpetual chronologies of themselves” as distinct from being just “oilily adjustable”) and a way of dealing with the sense of fragmentation (“to make complete / The interval of leaf and rutting waves”).
That is how things stand at the end of the penultimate verse. But the last verse begins with a note of caution: “Or so he thought.” Does that mean everything he has said so far is a delusion? That the consolations of the shore road are shifting sand? The poem refuses to give a definite answer. What it does instead is to move away from the comparatively abstract or symbolic language of the three central verses and return to the physical and actual that we found at the beginning. Here, though, the references are more specifically local and domestic: “hard shoes scrunching on the grit,” “salt and iodine in the wind,” a door “near,” and inside that door “the supper, the small lamplight.” It is difficult not to connect these homely images with the “beastlike amours” of the first verse and wonder whether the final off-page reconciliations of opposites and filling of space is to be a sexual one. Perhaps even a violently sexual one as “beastlike” seems to imply. But the ordinariness of the closing details and the parsimony of “small” seem to check this, just as the reference to “salt and iodine” seems to indicate a process of healing and purifying, though admittedly one that will sting.
I would say that what we have in the final verse, with troubling undertones, is an image of homecoming that is predominantly welcome. It allows us to read the phrase “Or so he thought” as an expression of trust in the power and authority of thought, while also permitting the sense of delusion to linger. But even as I say this, I want to insist that it would be a mistake to settle comfortably for one way of reading the poem, and one way alone. Nothing that “the walking man” decides to think about his experience in “The Shore Road” is in fact sure. The road is an in-between place; his ability to leave a mark is in doubt; the likelihood of him establishing a particular identity is also questionable. But in spite of this, his human imagining and thinking do offer a consolation. They lead him to the far side of the moon, on a self-justifying, self-fulfilling journey of enormous extent and excitement. And at the same time they remind him of the value—and provide a means of connecting with—the marvelous ordinary: the nearby door, “the supper, the small lamplight.”
Elizabeth Bishop
When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, the press in Great Britain paid very little attention. Admittedly the Times was on strike and could not have published her obituary even if it had wanted to—but none of the other broadsheets paid any attention either. It was negligent but hardly surprising. During her lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic, she was the least celebrated of her gifted generation. Robert Lowell, John Berryman (along with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Theodore Roethke, who were also drawn into their glamorous and self-destructive orbit)—these were the poets who got the headlines and the readers. Bishop, by contrast, was too softly spoken, too preoccupied by detail, too reticent to seem important.
This was strange, since soft-spokenness etc. were the very qualities being most praised and prized in England at this time. The famous debate which had been kicked off by A. L. Alvarez in 1963, in his influential anthology The New Poetry, had been intended to favor a modernistic, freeform, red-in-tooth-and-claw poetry that Alvarez associated with Ted Hughes and to criticize and marginalize the more “genteel” poetry associated with Philip Larkin. But from the early sixties until the end of Larkin’s life in 1985, it was Larkin’s style of writing that dominated public interest and admiration—a style which preferred understatement, ironical deflation, modest straight-looking and formal elegance, and deprecated everything histrionic in rhetoric or extravagant in form. A style in which, as I say, Bishop excelled, and which concentrated on subjects that also seemed likely to appeal to the taste of British poetry readers.
Even though Bishop was born and died in America, a good deal of her life was spent traveling—in Europe, and especially in South America (she lived for many years in Brazil). Her poems return again and again to themes associated with this restless way of living. She is, as she says in “The Map,” more interested in the mapmaker’s than the historian’s colors because these describe topographical truths which lie deeper than historical or political truths. To say this means asserting a notion of fundamental cohesion, which one might sensibly call her abiding theme, and from which arises her most arresting stylistic device: her tendency to find similarities between things. She has a genius for seeing what she calls “correspondences”—in “The Map,” for instance, “These peninsulas [which] take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods,” and elsewhere fireflies “exactly like the bubbles in champagne,” or seawater “the color of the gas flame turned down as low as possible.” Certainly, when we come across such images, we experience a delight in exactitude for its own sake and a collector’s relish for oddity and newness. But we also feel an argument being proved on our pulses, an argument about the unity of the phenomenal world and the human world which perceives it. Bishop may be a footloose poet, but her brilliant eye allows her to settle and live wherever she can see. The question that most preoccupies her is how she can see best. What kind of life allows it?
Both Thomas’ “Old Man” and MacCaig’s “The Shore Road” invoke the rich tradition of writing about travel, and the paths and roads on which travelers move, and both—from very different angles—focus on the complex relationship between physical movement and intellectual or emotional stability (or the lack of it). I would hesitate to say this was a peculiarly British theme (its roots, after all, lie in Enlightenment Europe, and its tentacles reach out to great American nature writers like Thoreau and Emerson). But I am confident to say it is a theme that seems to attract British writers especially strongly, and which therefore makes another link between them and Bishop. Like Robert Frost before her, for many philosophical and cultural reasons, as well as reasons to do with formal sympathies and resemblances, there are good reasons for thinking of her as a poet with whom British readers might feel they have a special relationship. Indeed, in the thirty years since her death, her reputation has risen steadily. Far from being the neglected one of her generation, she now is the acknowledged genius—someone whose style and interests are wonderfully tuned to the life of our times.
The poem by Bishop I want to discuss is called “Questions of Travel”:
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians’ speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:
“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”
Unlike other poems in this series, “Questions of Travel” is not a poem which features paths or roads or tracks of any definite kind. It is, as it says, a poem about travel in general—a poem which raises and ventilates the questions for which all paths and roads provide a locus. It was originally collected in a volume of the same name, published in 1965, where it opens the first section entitled “Brazil.” So it is fair to assume the country she is talking about in the poem is indeed Brazil—though the first thing I want to say is that we are never explicitly told that, we are told it is simply “here.” which allows us to think we might in fact be anywhere. But what sort of “here” is it, and what kind of reaction does it provoke? We understand in the first stanza that there are reasons to dislike the place—the waterfalls are “too many,” the streams are “crowded” and hurry “too rapidly to the sea,” the clouds exert a strange dreamy “pressure,” which means they “spill” wastefully over the sides of the mountains.
There are consolations—though admittedly of an implicit rather than an acknowledged kind. The first derives from the sound of the poem. Even though the lines report feelings of dislike or disappointment, they are nevertheless delivered in a mood of something like relaxation. Although we experience a little suspense as we come round the line endings, this anxiety is sublimated by a sense of drowsiness (a falling asleep, which the lines imitate with their own soft conversational fall), a lotus-eating kind of mood (the atmosphere somewhat resembles the atmosphere of Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters”) in which any feelings of vulnerability are held in check. And not just held in check by the music of the poem, but also by the operations of the eye. However un-likeable the “too many waterfalls” and so on might be, the eagerness with which “our very eyes” see them and translate them into human terms, is overwhelming. And nowhere more so than in the last three lines of this opening section, where Bishop says, “But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, / the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled.” The point here, as I understand it, is that even if the water-world teaches a hard lesson about transience and certain sorts of disappointment, and even if the mountains look wrecked (they are “capsized”) and pretty disgusting (“slime-hung and barnacled”), the pleasure derived from converting them into such an ingenious image is still a reward. An overwhelming reward, in fact—almost a colonizing reward—which establishes the supremacy and comfort of being human.
This opening stanza is like a statement of themes in a symphony. In the next section of the poem, its assertions are examined and tested by a set of questions. I do not have space to unpack the implications of each—there are eight of them—but their themes, bolstered and deepened by associated questions about broad human and precisely cultural isolation, funnel towards a cry-like climax: “Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them too?” Or to put it prosaically, can we not trust our imaginations in isolation to do the work of our senses on the ground? Are our invented worlds not damaged by contact with the actual world? It is hard to frame a more fundamental question. In essence, Bishop is asking, what is the point of experience, and what is the difference between imaginary experience and felt experience? Looked at from one point of view, it allows the apparent conclusion to the first part of the poem to remain intact: the inward human life can be a sufficient reward, even without any commitment to or involvement in the wide world. Looked at from another point of view, it implies a weariness with the world and a retreat into the self which can hardly avoid seeming like a diminution of the self. At this point, the poem seems to invoke Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” more than his “Lotos-Eaters.”
In the third long stanza, Bishop alters her tone to admit more of that trademark naturalism which borders on the faux-naïve. It allows her an innocence of expression which encourages an innocence of looking—an unhindered, unprejudiced, childlike wide-eyed-ness. “But surely it would have been a pity,” she says (and then repeats the word “pity” twice in the next twenty lines), “not to have seen” various sites-on-the-ground that the imagination (“dreams”) would not have provided had it been left to its own devices. Importantly, the sites she then gives us are chosen either for their excess (the trees “really exaggerated in their beauty . . . gesturing / like noble pantomimists”) or for their beautiful ordinariness (“the two-noted” tune of the clogs, the oily floor, the “fat brown bird” (which, significantly, she cannot identify), or for their enchanting juxtapositions (the bird and the bamboo church, the clogs and “the whittled fantasies of wooden cages”). She seems to be saying, among other things, that the exaggerated and the ordinary are two ends of a spectrum of perception, and that when left un-stimulated by experience, the imagination is unlikely to see their value. That seems to be a point for traveling and not staying at home.
Although the tone of the poem encourages us to think that these observations are being made artlessly, they are in fact highly organized, as I have just indicated. They are catalogued to back up the argument that Bishop has already made with one part of her mind—that the imagination cannot do everything. That it depends for its future life on the continual collection of material. That things in themselves, even the most easily overlooked things, have a fascination which is proof of life. And that there is a correspondence between things that validate human beings even as they include them. At the end of the stanza, Bishop confirms this by reverting to the language of “The Map.” History, she says, exists not in grand deeds but “in / the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.” And when human pleasure is baulked (as it is by “two hours of unrelenting” rain falling “like politicians’ speeches”), it finds its reward not in public action but in “silence” and the self-communion which permits reflection.
The reflection comes in the final eight lines of the poem, all italicized, and written as quatrains rhyming aaba, aaba. The sudden tightening of form seems to suggest an equally sudden mood of decisiveness—a resolution. In fact, and characteristically, Bishop keeps questioning, not answering:
“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”
The first verse here revisits the earlier question of “must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?” It is more like a recapitulation than a progression and invites us to leave the poem feeling that it has in fact traveled nowhere. But the second verse nudges things on. “[T]he choice [of places to visit] is never wide and never free” it says, with a strange flat authority, before suddenly becoming less certain again. The phrase “And here, or there” seems likely to conclude that there might not be very much essential difference between places, however various they seem to be—but as things turn out, it does not reach that conclusion. Or any conclusion. The phrase peters out into dot dot dot—which is then checked against a stern-looking “No.” What does this “No” mean? That whether we are here or there really does make no difference? Or that being either here or there makes all the difference in the world? One could argue it either way.
The ambiguity of this single word is addressed in the final phrase of the poem, which is where it reaches a conclusion by referring back to the main body of the poem and finding a correspondence with what has gone before. Here it is again: “Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?” This is the second time we have heard the word “home” in six lines, and the third time we have heard it in the poem. The first time was at the beginning of the second stanza—“Think of the long trip home”—where home was posited as a more nearly definite place. Now it is more nearly abstract—an individual mental state, not a political state bounded by history and process. A state which has the rewards of inventiveness, self-definition, and various kinds of security, but which needs the world of experience to engender and bolster those things. Which needs more travel, more paths, more roads, in order to feel the value of questioning their purpose—and in some degree even their reality.
First presented as a series of talks on BBC Radio 3’s The Essay, January 4–8, 2010.
1. I am indebted to Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit (London: Verso, 2006) for much of the historical context provided in these essays.