SOURCE: Dickie, Margaret. “Elizabeth Bishop: Text and Subtext.” South Atlantic Review 59, no. 4 (November 1994): 1-19.

[In the following essay, Dickie examines Bishop's choice of poetic form in relation to her subject matter.]

“Elizabeth Bishop is spectacular in being unspectacular,” Marianne Moore claims in her review of North & South (Complete Prose 406) where she notes Bishop's “mechanics of presentation,” not just the rhymes, but the accuracy and modesty of the poetry. Yet Bishop could also be spectacular in being spectacular, relinquishing her art's modesty to elaborate, even archaic form, in poems, strangely enough, of current social and political concern. It may not be an entirely unknown combination for a poet (one thinks of Auden, for example); but, for Bishop, who did indeed perfect the minimalist style for which Moore praises her, it is especially puzzling.¹ Still she did write a sestina on the Depression, a double sonnet on alcoholism, a poem in triple rhymed tercets on social conditions in contemporary Brazil, and a ballad on the social and political dislocations of Brazil's poor.

Such a choice was not dictated by the subject since Bishop also wrote in free verse on social and political issues in poems such as “Manuelzinho” or “Brazil, 1 January 1502.” Nor is her use of elaborately rhymed form the choice of a particular stage in her development. She wrote sestinas early and late, and her interest in archaic or conventional form spans the full length of her career. These poems belong to no particular political program nor do they concentrate on a single poetic form as do Robert Lowell's sonnets or Marianne Moore's syllabic verse.

Nor can it be said that Bishop's use of these forms finds her responding directly to the temper of the times. Although the poems pose the question of the connection between Bishop's style and her politics, between her interest in art and her social concerns, questions very much in the air in the 1930s when she first began to publish and current, too, in the 1960s when she returned to the United States, they provide no easy answers. The particular poems that she wrote do not fit easily into the social awareness of either period, and, in fact, most of these poems were written in the interim between these two decades. Indeed, the sestinas, rhymed tercets, villanelles that she wrote set her entirely outside the politically committed poetry written in either the 1930s or the 1960s.

Although each of these elaborately structured poems on political or social issues has its own particular and curious source and history, the poems' artifice is in general so insistent that it draws attention to its artificiality and strains the subjects that might have otherwise pulled in the opposite direction toward simple sincerity of statement. In some poems, the disparity between form and content appears to be deliberate, as if something of the poem's meaning resided there, as, for example, in the double sonnet on an alcoholic. In others, the possibility of a meaning encoded in the form is suggested by the particular forms Bishop chose. For example, the sestina, with its roots in the tradition of courtly love, seems an odd form for Bishop's Depression poem and may indicate a subtext far removed from the apparent subject. And Bishop's penchant for triple rhymed tercets indicates an interest not just in the difficulty of the rhyme scheme but in the particular triangles it calls up, as in “Pink Dog,” which has a subtext of sexual fury underneath its political commentary. In her choice of highly structured form, Bishop was certainly influenced by her early reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, and, as she developed, by W. H. Auden. But she seems also to be interested in complicated form as a means of layering varied meanings.

If the traditional forms came out of her reading, the social and political subjects Bishop chose are easily traced to her experience. Yet here, too, the distance between the acknowledged source and the poem is often great, and so is the variety of sources. Bishop's letters and interviews are quite direct in identifying the events that started the poems—an actual gift of bread, an early morning offer of a drink, witnessing the capture of an escaped prisoner. What turned these events into political or social commentary is never made clear, however. Rather, so specific are her explanations of the poems' sources that they seem contrived to hide any explanation of how or why the event was worked up into the particular poem it produced. For example, Bishop's notebook entry about how she had no bread for breakfast one morning when a stranger appeared at her door giving out bread samples may have been the source of her “social conscious” Depression poem, “A Miracle for Breakfast,” but it does not indicate any commitment to a social consciousness or to the Depression as a necessary subject for the artist. What Bishop's explanations of her poems lack is, in fact, any apparent continuous commitment to social or political issues. Each poem has its isolated source.

Bishop seems to have appropriated both traditional and elaborate poetic forms and political or social subjects as double masks behind which she could express her own conflicted experience. Although she became more willing to write about her own life as she developed, even in her late poems she could require both the distance of a public subject and an elaborate form in order to write about her intimate experience. And the success of this creative tour de force is remarkable. She encoded her meanings so successfully that the code itself has been acclaimed and the surface brilliance of her poetry considered her chief accomplishment. She has been admired as a superb craftsman, acknowledged for the accomplishment of her minimalist art, noted for her personal restraint—all the results of the careful encoding of her experience—but she could also be willfully obscure, indulgent in her use of archaic form, and subversively confessional.

Her interests in social misfits and political victims may not have been grounded in a social consciousness at all; rather it may have come out of her experience as a person marginalized by her own sexual preference, her alcoholism, and her anomalous social position both in the aristocratic circles of Brazil and among the very rich companions of her early years. Like Gertrude Stein, who projected her early unhappy lesbian love affair onto the black heterosexual characters of “Melanctha,” and Hart Crane, who associated the artist with the outcast black in “Black Tambourine” or the tramp in “Chaplinesque,” Bishop used one form of alienation (the social alienation of the poor, for example) to express another (the alienation caused by her sexual orientation or her alcoholism).

Bishop's interest in self-consciously elaborate poetic forms—an interest that also aligns her with Stein and Crane, who wrote in highly stylized forms (if not in traditional verse)—indicates the importance of style for the lesbian or homosexual writer. Homosexuals are inscribed through their style, as Harold Beaver argues in “Homosexual Signs.” Style itself becomes a means of expressing an identity where positive identity with the dominant heterosexual culture is denied. Although Bishop could assume the identity of an ordinary woman in her day-to-day life, when she came to write and to forge an identity in words, she could go to the opposite extreme, using the most extraordinary, elaborate, indirect, and highly stylized means to express herself. This was as true when she was writing about something remote from her experience such as war as it was when she was writing about something intensely personal such as her alcoholism. And indeed, it is often difficult to tell the remote from the intimate in her poetry. Where, for example, Willa Cather felt required not to name “the thing not named”² when she wrote love stories, Bishop made the intimate remote through the indirection of elaborate forms.

In her early years as a young writer coming of age in the 1930s, being important meant writing about social and political issues of the day. Yet Bishop did not approach these issues directly. She remained quite tentative about her allegiances, admitting that she was a “‘Radical,’ of course,” but without much idea of what that would mean (Millier 138). In fact, her biographer Brett Millier claims that a lunch upon her return from Europe in 1938 with Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, and Philip Rahv, a group associated with the Partisan Review, fueled her anxiety about writing and gave her nightmares. But years later she seemed to want to identify with this group's social consciousness, claiming of the Depression that “some of my family were much affected by it. After all, anybody who went to New York and rode the Elevated could see that things were wrong. But I had lived with poor people and knew something of poverty at firsthand” (Bishop, “Interview” 293-94). Although this experience turned her into neither a clearly identified political activist nor a political writer, she did identify “A Miracle for Breakfast” as “my Depression poem” in this late interview: “It was written shortly after the time of souplines and men selling apples, around 1936 or so. It was my ‘social conscious’ poem, a poem about hunger” (297). But in the same interview she claimed, “I was always opposed to political thinking as such for writers. What good writing came out of that period really?” (293). Thus, even late in life, her political thinking appeared tentative, if not mixed.

By contrast, when she was writing her “Depression poem,” she seemed to be engrossed in questions of poetic form. In a letter to Moore about this Depression poem, she wrote:

It seems to me that there are two ways possible for a sestina—one is to use unusual words as terminations, in which case they would have to be used differently as often as possible—as you say, “change of scale.” That would make a very highly seasoned kind of poem. And the other way is to use as colorless words as possible—like Sydney, so that it becomes less of a trick and more of a natural theme and variations. I guess I have tried to do both at once. It is probably just an excuse, but sometimes I think about certain things that without one particular fault they would be without the means of existence.

(“Two Letters” 276)

This so-called social conscious poem is a mixture of modes. It is a surrealistic sestina with echoes of the biblical miracle of the loaves. The plurality of references here would seem to cancel out meaning entirely, and Bishop's concentration on word choice does little to suggest that it was anything more than “just a sort of a stunt,” as she commented to Moore (“Two Letters” 276).

Such a concern with poetry as an aesthetic stunt might have had many sources: the young poet's desire to appeal to the older poet's interests, Bishop's characteristic modesty, even a wish to shut out the important public critical debate over the connection between poetry and politics that raged around the poets in magazines like the New Masses, at the First American Writers' Congress in 1935, and among critics like Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson.³ But her insistence on the formalist issues in “A Miracle for Breakfast” might also be an effort to distract Moore from pursuing the insights she had about two other early poems, “The Weed” and “Paris, 7 a.m.” Of them, Moore wrote, “This exteriorizing of the interior, and the aliveness all through, it seems to me are the essential sincerity that unsatisfactory realism struggles toward” (letter to Bishop of 20 Sept. 1936). Here Moore enters an area from which Bishop certainly veered in her comments on the poem. If Bishop were “exteriorizing the interior” in “A Miracle for Breakfast,” she did not move toward an “essential sincerity”; rather she seemed to be setting up the double masks of a public subject and an extremely elaborate form for some other purpose.

“A Miracle for Breakfast” celebrates that time of day that was to appear again and again in Bishop's work, from the surrealistic early “Love Lies Sleeping” and “Sleeping on the Ceiling” to “Roosters,” with its embedded aubade, and “It is marvellous to wake up together,” another aubade written in the 1940s but only recently discovered by Lorrie Goldensohn.⁴ Bishop uses that time of day to reflect on any number of public issues—the ugliness of the industrial world or the treacheries of war—but often with a peculiar sexual twist as in “Love Lies Sleeping,” for example, with its turn toward “queer cupids” and strangely “inverted and distorted” eyes at the end (17). And even in the love poem “It is marvellous to wake up together,” the ending turns from the marvel to a warning that “The world might change to something quite different” “as our kisses are changing without our thinking” (qtd. in Goldensohn 28).

Like these other early morning poems, “A Miracle for Breakfast” also turns its apparent subject of feeding the hungry into something else, here a surrealistic vision of plenty, transforming the “crumb” doled out into a “mansion, made for me by a miracle.” The speaker sits “in the sun,” “licked” the “crumb,” but also sees a window across the river that “caught the sun / as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony” (19). “The sun,” “the crumb,” “a miracle,” are three of the end words in the sestina, and they seem to contain so many meanings beyond the social that they prove to be odd choices for this Depression poem. In fact, they became the source of an argument with Moore who objected to the choice of “sun” and “crumb” on which Bishop insisted.

But these were the very words that were important for Bishop's subtext because they were so general and so opposite that in the course of the sestina she could rework their meanings entirely. In the poem, the “sun” is defined as aloof, unwarming, hidden “in the clouds,” and “on the wrong balcony,” while the “crumb” is “charitable,” “My crumb, / my mansion,” “licked up.” Here, Bishop reverses the traditional associations of “sun” with plenty and “crumb” with dearth by using the variations that the sestina allows. Inverting these values, Bishop celebrates a private world in much the same way that Emily Dickinson did in such poems as “Deprived of other Banquet” (773) or “A little bread—a crust—a crumb—” (159), where she writes of her emotional life, insisting that the crumb is a feast.⁵ And, for Bishop, such a private and inverted world had its erotic significance as well, as she was to hint again in poems such as “The Gentleman of Shalott,” “Insomnia,” or “Crusoe in England.”

The poem ends, then, with two quite different miracles: the miracle of her private feast of the crumb and the sun's public miracle working on the wrong balcony, from which, without regrets, the speaker and her companion are excluded. “My crumb / my mansion” identifies this private feast not just with plenty but with home, the body, the imagination, even physical companionship. As Bishop responds to the strict demands of the sestina to reuse the same six end words, she includes such a complexity of references that she seems to be willfully obscure. The artistic “stunt” is to keep all possible meanings available without fixing on any one perhaps because she wants to retain the final miracle of the mysterious “we” at the end who seem to be apart from the crowd and feasting on their morning together. Hints of the poem's subtext of private pleasure come and go and, at the end, do no more than disturb the tranquillity of the sestina's resolution.

This fascination with the traditional forms of high art and her choice of the dispossessed and outcast as subjects for any number of poems complicate the surface of the text. It may have had less to do with her meticulous craftsmanship and social conscience than with her psychological needs. Bishop's use of complicated verse forms indicates something about how she would go about, in Moore's phrase, the “exteriorizing of the interior.” It would never be a simple matter of vehicle and tenor, but rather of elaborations of vehicle for an always suppressed tenor.⁶ The elaborate surface of her verse is a highly complicated exterior that draws attention to itself as it distracts attention from simple referential meaning because there was no such meaning on which Bishop was willing to settle.⁷ When, as in a draft of a poem entitled “The Drunkard,” she gave herself too explicitly to narrative explanation of private experience that she usually repressed (in this case, her alcoholism), she left the poem unfinished (Kalstone, Becoming a Poet 211).

The more formal the poem, the more Bishop had in mind to express and the more conflicted the meanings could be. One of Bishop's most well known poems, “Roosters”—written in the unusual stanzaic pattern of triple rhymes with one line of two stresses, one of three, and one of four—is a case in point.⁸ It has been read as a war poem that splits between an opening indictment of masculine militarism and a final statement of Christian reconciliation. But, as Susan Schweik has shown, even this split (and the many reversals of meaning within it) does not account for the dislocation of meaning that comes when we realize that the opening “We hear the first crow” suggests at least two people present at this dawn and presumably in the same bed (231).

The embedded aubade, in Schweik's view, “might provide a redemptive counterplot, an antipatriarchal alternative, to the war poem (not least because it unsettles both the absolute rooster-hen-sexual dualism of the barnyard and the henless rooster culture of the Vatican)”; but the development of this aubade suggests some kind of “private pain which underlines and coincides with the more traditionally ‘political’ topics of the poem” (231). The speaker asks of the roosters, “[W]hat right have you to” “wake us here where are / unwanted love, conceit and war?” (36), and then of herself, “[H]ow could the night have come to grief?” The ending, where the sun climbs in “‘to see the end,’ / faithful as enemy, or friend” (39), twists the poem once more toward war, and Schweik concludes, “[I]t is not that ‘Roosters’ is ostensibly a war poem but actually a love poem; it is that the two here are impossible to tell apart” (233).

It is interesting to note that again Moore had serious objections to this poem. She found the singsong quality of the tercets as objectionable as the unladylike language. But once more, Bishop defended the form for its violence of tone, claiming that it suggested something of the baseness of militarism. Although the argument here like the one over “A Miracle for Breakfast” stayed on the choice of form and of words, Moore seems to have had particular difficulty with Bishop's elaborately structured poems that had both an apparently public subject and a slightly concealed private one. If, as Betsy Erkkila surmises, “Roosters” is a kind of veiled coming out poem in which Bishop protests against marriage and heterosexuality, Moore may have detected more than she claims, and certainly she brought out all of Bishop's defenses (126).

As she developed, Bishop was to continue to use complex form to encode complexities of social and autobiographical experience that she appeared both to want to acknowledge and to deny, although her strategies changed somewhat when she moved away from the influence of Moore and toward that of Robert Lowell, whom she met in 1947. She found in Lowell's work subjects, like alcoholism, that she wanted to try out. “The Prodigal,” a double sonnet written shortly after she met Lowell, owes a debt to him, although it evinces again Bishop's unwillingness to tell it all directly, even when she was trying to tap subjects that might have allowed her to tell more.⁹

If “A Miracle for Breakfast” expresses behind the elaborate exterior of the sestina Bishop's erotic feelings, the double sonnet of “The Prodigal” treats another extremely private experience—her alcoholism. It takes as its subject both the economically depressed and the socially deprived alcoholic, a person sufficiently distant from herself to dispel any idea of personal revelation. And yet, the subject was drawn from her life, as she admitted in a letter to Joseph Summers some years later; she wrote that the poem was suggested to her when she was visiting Nova Scotia and one of her aunt's stepsons offered her a drink of rum in the pigsties at about nine o'clock in the morning.

At the time she wrote the poem, she was reading a selection of poems by Tristan Corbière that Lowell had sent her; she commented to him, “I can see in them the kind of thing one should try to / could do, but half-consciously shie [sic] away from” (letter to Lowell, late January 1948). What Bishop saw in Corbière was the cheerless consolation that, “For want of knowing how to live, he kept alive—/ For want of knowing how to die, he wrote” (qtd. in Kalstone, Becoming a Poet 126). Such lines could call up for the alcoholic Bishop the relentlessness of addiction, which is her subject in “The Prodigal” (71). If Corbière might have suggested the theme, Bishop herself chose the double sonnet in which she could explore the double compulsion and revulsion the alcoholic feels toward addiction as well as the doubled alcoholic—the one in the pigsty and herself.

The barnyard drunk, concluding in the first sonnet that “he almost might endure / his exile yet another year or more” and in the second taking “a long time / finally to make his mind up to go home,” is a comic, perhaps even inappropriate, choice of subject for the sonnet form; but the disparity between the highly structured form and the dissipated life it depicts expresses the disparity in the life of the alcoholic himself between what he does and what he knows he should do. Additional divisions in the form raggedly separate a description of the barnyard squalor in the octet and of the human squalor in the sestet of the first sonnet; and in the second sonnet, a beatific barnyard in the first nine lines is set against a reluctant decision to reform in the last five lines. The rhyme scheme, although irregular, exerts its force in the endings with the three-line off-rhyme of the first sonnet:

[T]he burning puddles seemd to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

The effect is similar in the two-line off-rhyme of the second:

                                                                                          But it took him a long time
finally to make his mind up to go home.

This formal doubling repeats itself in doubled images: “[T]he sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red” and “The lantern—like the sun, going away—/ laid on the mud a pacing aureole.” Words double up as if to intensify rather than forward meaning, as in “with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light.”¹⁰ There is a certain prodigality of language here in the double vision of the drunkard (and the double subject of the barnyard drunkard and Bishop's own alcoholism). The incongruity of this lavish language and imagery in a poem about a miserable human life among degraded circumstances points to the narrative's subtext. Despite its title, this poem is not about the lost son forgiven but about the addict's reluctant, if necessary, realization that she must forgive herself. The stylized language is a judgment on the subject that would appear to be unmotivated if it were not self-directed.

Bishop's habit of jotting down schemes for end-rhymes in her manuscripts suggests how fascinated she was with form itself; but here the sonnet's turn from octet to sestet and then its conclusively rhymed ending provide a form perfectly adjusted to the addict's turn of mind toward and away from liquor, alternately oblivious and hypersensitive, and always drawing doubts into conclusions, even alternating conclusions.

Although Kalstone notes that the frightening part of the poem is its air of sanity (Becoming a Poet 128), the poem can terrify, too, by its illogic. In the first sonnet, the prodigal decides to endure another year only after a drinking bout blots out the degradation of his pigsty existence that has been described in the octet. By contrast, he makes up his mind to go home in the second sonnet after the barn has been detailed as “safe and companionable as in the Ark” (71). The reversals here, so central to the perversity of the alcoholic's “shuddering insights, beyond his control,” are highlighted by the repetitions and divisions of the sonnet form.

The social message of this double sonnet is itself doubled. At one level, the speaker of the poem sets at face value the connection between the pigs and the drunkard. In this conventional wisdom, drinking is a human flaw that must be corrected by an exercise of will. Embedded in the poem is, however, a quite different estimate of the drunkard's plight as irremediable, “beyond his control,” as unsafe as “forked lightnings.” His mind will not be easily made up against his addiction; the safety of home is nowhere available in the poem.

If the elaborate form of the double sonnet made it possible for Bishop to write about her own intensely painful experience as an alcoholic, another fixed form, the ballad, was to allow her to write about another subject that caused her extreme uneasiness, her own sense of alienation as an American living in Brazil. Unlike the sonnet, the ballad form of “The Burglar of Babylon” has roots in a folk culture that make it suitable for the story of Micuçú's capture. Its rhythm and structure provide a predictable form for the predetermined fate of “The Burglar of Babylon.” Nonetheless, despite Bishop's claims that she “sat down and wrote it straight off with a few additions and changes” and that “[i]t naturally seemed to present itself as a ballad” (Bishop, “Interview” 301), the poem appears to express more than the simple story of a captured prisoner. Bishop said that she watched the soldiers' whole chase after the escaped murderer Micuçú through binoculars like the rest of the tourists; but she was not entirely a tourist in a scene she knew well enough to diagnose its social ills, opening and closing the ballad with the same scene, as if nothing has changed with Micuçú's capture:

On the fair green hills of Rio
          There grows a fearful stain:
The poor who come to Rio
          And can't go home again.

(112)

The ballad form tidies up a chaotic life, fitting in every detail from the accidental shooting of the soldier's commanding officer to the aunt's grieving admission that Micuçú was always mean. Bishop works to suggest by her particular attention to the ballad's requirements of rhyme that fate has its intricacies too. Such rhymes as “Skeleton” and “Babylon,” “society” and “penitentiary,” “Heaven” and “eleven,” “many” and “antennae,” indicate how skillfully she could manipulate language to fit the form. The heavy trochaic stress and pause at the end of each line provides the sing-song melody that controls, if it does not actually trivialize, the account of Micuçú's fate.¹¹

But the social commentary is not so tidy. Micuçú is “[a]n enemy of society,” yet everywhere at home in it. In telling his story, she depended, as Kalstone notes, on “a lifelong devotion to narrative.” But here as elsewhere the real problem for her was, as Kalstone admits, “[h]ow to turn the descriptive poem into a narrative” (Becoming a Poet 252). In this poem, she did not try; rather, she relished the descriptions, lingering over the details. Her view of Micuçú's escape allows her to present a community of people like the “mulata / Carrying water on her head” (113) and the officer in command, accidentally shot, who “committed his soul to God / And his sons to the Governor” (115), as well as the “peanut vendor” who goes “peep-peep on his whistle, / And the man that sells umbrellas” (116). A whole society blossoms around Micuçú, its notorious son, undercutting the ballad's opening judgment that the poor of Rio are a “fearful stain” on its “fair green hills.”

In fact, Bishop's use of the ballad form allows her a double purpose. In the ballad, she can appear to write simply a folk story about one of Brazil's most notorious criminals while, at the same time, she is writing a highly politicized song of sympathy for the Brazilian poor who have suffered at the hands of a corrupt government. One indication of this double purpose is the deflection of the narrative into a sympathetic account of the rich communal life of the poor. Micuçú's story seems almost beside the point. Unlike “The Prodigal,” where the double sonnet distanced personal experience, the ballad form in “The Burglar of Babylon” allows Bishop to express her views of Brazil's social and political dilemmas as well as her attachment to its underlife more fully than she might have had she been writing simply political commentary.

She uses the ballad in its traditional purpose in American poetry as an outlaw's song. Thus, the ballad form allowed Bishop to write political poetry in a highly charged political atmosphere without directly acknowledging either her bias, her anomalous position as an alien resident, or her intimate knowledge of the political situation in Brazil through her life with her partner Lota de Macedo Soares. The control of the literary ballad held at a distance even those events far distant from her own life, such as this most gruesome manhunt, that attracted her attention. Living in a household closely connected to political activity, Bishop was acutely aware of the treacheries and corruption of Brazilian politics. But, as an American, commenting on these politics, she was best served by poetic form that attracted attention away from its immediate politically relevant subject.¹²

Quite a different attitude toward Brazilian society is evident in “Pink Dog,” which has an equally stylized form, triple rhymed tercets. Probably written in 1964 at the same time as “The Burglar of Babylon,” “Pink Dog” is its opposite in tone.¹³ In the ballad, the speaker seemed to relish the street life of Rio in all its poverty and confusion. In “Pink Dog,” by contrast, the speaker assumes a tone that is variously sardonic, pitying, and bitter. She sounds like the Sylvia Plath of “The Applicant” as she attacks in mocked concern: “Didn't you know? It's been in all the papers, / to solve this problem, how they deal with beggars?” (190).

Addressing a diseased dog without any hair in an elaborate triple rhyme scheme, Bishop plays up the distance between social reality and artifice, and yet she moves toward the political end of castigating the corruption of Brazilian society with its bobbing and ebbing sewage, its “idiots, paralytics, parasites” and beggars “drugged, drunk, or sober.” The speaker's advice to the diseased dog to disguise herself in “máscara” mimics the society's own means of treating its social disease. “Dress up!” for Carnival is the rallying cry of a society in which everything is topsy-turvy, and the inverted world of the Carnival is only too clear a reflection of the empty show of everyday life.

If an interest in social themes was also an interest in her own place in society, “Pink Dog” may be read as both the most severe indictment of that situation and the bleakest revelation of its trap. Here is a society that casts off its misfits. Neither an American nor any other foreigner is going to find her place there. “Carnival's degenerating,” the speaker claims, “Americans, or something, / have ruined it completely” (191). As one such American, the poet might have felt as outcast as the dog.¹⁴

Moreover, “Pink Dog” may use its politics to encode a private fury. Its insistence on nakedness in all its ugliness (“scabies,” “hanging teats,” “with or without legs,” “depilated dog”) suggests that the fury is physical, even sexual, in nature. Disguising this ugliness by dressing up or putting on mascara is a manifestation of the age-old exploitation of women degraded by a misogynist society that the poet decries, but she seems also to express here a sense of personal violation and anger deeper than the cultural one as she denigrates her own female sexuality.

Even the artifice of the triple rhymes, the dressing up of poetic language, another adornment of form, may be seen as a collaboration with the oppressor. The triple rhymes, contorted here in their feminine rhymes (“able,” “dog-paddle,” “sensible,” for example) or the wrenched rhymes (“a- / n eyesore,” and “see a”), suggest how art itself can be debauched. In “Pink Dog,” the speaker projects onto the animal world the hysteria of a woman who has been sexually insulted. She finds company in the diseased dog and makes that dog stand for her own sense of misuse, as well as for all the outrageous violations against womankind, in such lines as

(A nursing mother, by those hanging teats.)
In what slum have you hidden them, poor bitch,
while you go begging, living by your wits?

(190)

The connection between art and life is the subject of the late “Poem” about two artists, herself and her great-uncle George, who had figured earlier in her work in “Large Bad Picture.” Looking at one of George's paintings, she describes it in terms that might, in a depressed moment, describe her own art:

[T]his little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)
has never earned any money in its life.
Useless and free, it has spent seventy years
as a minor family relic
handed along collaterally to owners
who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to.

(176)

But the poem rallies from this opening. Art is only apparently “useless.” The speaker looks at the painting again, recognizes the place this sketch records, and exclaims, “[H]ow live, how touching in detail /—the little that we get for free, / the little of our earthly trust” (177). The speaker and her uncle are drawn together in the trust they share in the earth—“Not much. / About the size of our abidance”—and yet of course this trust is all that abides.

Bishop provides her ironic judgment of George's art, by enclosing his devotion to realism in quotation marks (“‘copying from life’”) that indicate its vacuous self-consciousness. The title of her earlier poem about uncle George (“Large Bad Picture”) indicates something about her attitude toward his art, which she calls “comprehensive, consoling” (11). Only the older Bishop could see that the distinction between “art ‘copying from life’ and life itself” was not so “consoling,” and make the further distinction about “life and the memory of it so compressed / they've turned into each other” and ask: “Which is which?” (177).

Art “‘copying from life’” in Great-Uncle George's realistic sketch may seem counterfeit; but it has the power to stir a memory and revive a life long past. A poem about art would seem to be little connected with either politics or society, and yet it is probably not accidental that, living in the middle of social and political unrest in America, Bishop would seek a place to put her “earthly trust” and find it not only in art but in that life of early childhood that she, along with great-uncle George, had removed to art. From her vantage point in a California society promulgating free love and free speech, the poet turns toward art, “this little picture” of her great-uncle, the minor artist, as a significant gesture, finding and valuing in art “the little that we get for free.” Not free love, not free speech, but art was her “abidance.”

Along with her minimalist style, Bishop's highly contrived and archaic forms made much of this “little that we get for free.” James Merrill has commented on her villanelle, “One Art”: “Take the villanelle, which didn't really change from ‘Your eyen two wol slay me sodenly’ until, say, 1950. … In any case, ‘sodenly’ Elizabeth's ravishing ‘One Art’ came along, where the key lines seem merely to approximate themselves, and the form, awakened by a kiss, simply toddles off to a new stage in its life, under the proud eye of Mother, or the Muse” (qtd. in Bloom 157).

Bishop's was not a schoolgirl's interest in patterns, but rather a requirement of expression for her. From the very beginning of her career, Bishop found in formal patterns a way to “exteriorize” the interior, to write about the exterior social world as a place where interior conflicts could be aired. That she needed such a strategy is evident in her lifelong decision to impersonate an ordinary woman, as Merrill describes it (“Elizabeth Bishop” 259). That choice was forced upon her not only by her upbringing but by a culture as well as a character that made it difficult for her to write directly about her lesbianism, her alcoholism, even her sense of exile and isolation. She may have lived openly with a female lover in Brazil, but it was an openness that also could disguise the nature of their relationship. So, too, her alcoholism may have been known to her intimate friends; but it remained more hidden than the public drunkenness of other poets of her time, Lowell's and John Berryman's, for example. And while she could set her poems in Brazil, as a guest of a politically active native, she was not free to tell all that she knew about the corruption of Brazilian life.

That Bishop's texts about current social or political situations include a subtext of private and personal concern is unremarkable; but that she should have written on such topics in elaborately structured form indicates not only how much was at stake in even this masked expression of her feelings but also, even within the structure, how seriously the repressed meanings could disrupt and at times distort the apparent meanings. The rigidity of the tercets in “Roosters,” for example, tuck the confession of “unwanted love” into a formal pattern that is not disturbed even when these brief revelations work to destabilize the ideal of Christian reconciliation with which the poem seems to end. Earlier, in “A Miracle for Breakfast,” the multiple diverging meanings of “miracle” and “crumb,” allowed by the development of the sestina, unhinge the referentiality of the poem so that at least two “miracles,” a private and a public one, appear to occur, although the sestina form itself would tend to work toward a unified ending.

Traditional form, then, had nothing to do with Bishop's politics, which were random, tentative, varied. Unlike Auden's, Bishop's poetry displays no conscious or consistent social or political commitment. She lived in interesting times; but, as with her Berkeley experience, she witnessed them, as she admits in a 1969 letter to James Merrill, out of “curiosity and friendship for a few of the people involved.” Where politics affected her most seriously was in the alienation she was forced to feel as a lesbian and an alcoholic and an exile. Retreating into art for a means of expressing her self, she sometimes chose art's most spectacular display in which to hide.

Notes

1. Most critics have noted her minimalist style. For an excellent discussion, see David Kalstone's treatment in “Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel.”

2. See Sharon O'Brien's discussion of this tendency in Cather.

3. Marianne Moore, on the other hand, was neither oblivious to this debate nor absent from it. See, for example, the reprint of “Who Has Rescued Whom,” her 1944 review of Ada Jackson's Behold the Jew (Complete Prose 402-03).

4. For a discussion of “It is marvellous to wake up together,” see Goldensohn, 27-52. See Schweik for an examination of the embedded aubade in “Roosters” (214-34).

5. For a discussion of this tendency in Dickinson, see Vivian Pollak 103-19 and Heather Kirk Thomas 191-211. Although neither author identifies this tendency in Dickinson with the erotic, each identifies it with the emotional life of the poet. See also Naomi Schor for the identification of details with femininity and decadence (11-22).

6. In this, Bishop resembles Hart Crane. John Irwin claims that his short, compact lyrics “hinge on the reader's discovery, through his knowledge of connotations, of the one tenor to which all the vehicles can possibly refer” (212).

7. In a chapter entitled “Bishop's Sexual Politics,” Joanne Feit Diehl places Bishop in that “alternative tradition of women poets whose redefinition of the Sublime centers upon the interrelation of the imagination and sexual identity”; but she denies that Bishop establishes the lesbian as an overt erotic position from which to write, suggesting rather that Bishop distinguishes between eroticism and sexual identity so that she can deflect sexual identity while sustaining a powerful erotic presence (91, 92). Although Diehl is aware of “an ominous quality to Bishop's restraint” (97) and provides superb close readings of several poems, she misses an opportunity here to investigate the sexual connotations of that ominous quality.

8. Charles Sanders traces this form to Richard Crashaw's love poem, “Wishes: To his (supposed) Mistresse,” a poem Bishop certainly knew.

9. Kalstone points out the debt to Lowell in an extremely sensitive reading of the poem. See Becoming a Poet 126-29. He claims that Lowell had given Bishop a way of talking about her own instability. Lorrie Goldensohn elaborates on Kalstone's reading to suggest that in “The Prodigal” she makes “traffic with images of the unacceptable self” and that “she seizes on her current sense of her life as in drifting and aimless exile from a homelier past” (170). See her entire reading (170-74). By contrast, Travisano calls it “Bishop's least personal poem about love” (112).

10. See Goldensohn's discussion of drafts of a poem she found in journals in Brazil that overlaps “The Prodigal” and is much more clearly autobiographical, drawing on imagery from Bishop's childhood (170-73).

11. In a late interview, Bishop notes that Moore liked these rhymes, claiming, “She liked a ballad of mine because it rhymed so well. She admired the rhyme ‘many antennae’” (“The Work!” 327). Bishop also comments on “The Burglar of Babylon” in the introduction to The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (rpt. in Schwartz and Estess 305).

12. Victoria Harrison comments on the doubled “ethnographer's position” here: Bishop is connected with both the wealthy Brazilians (and I might add, tourists) who look down at Micuçú and with the poor whom she knew in Macedo Soares's household (162-63).

13. This poem, not published until 1979, exists in early drafts from 1959, although it was probably written in the main in 1964. See early drafts of “Naked Dog, the Dog” in box 41, folder 631 in the Vassar College Collection.

14. Like any number of Bishop's poems, “Pink Dog” has elicited the widest variety of readings. Joanne Feit Diehl links the woman and dog by their gender and vulnerability and relates the isolated, exiled self to Bishop's sense of herself as woman poet in relation to a male literary tradition (Bloom 186). Goldensohn also links the woman and the dog, claiming that Bishop struggled throughout her career “to find the right place for the female body in her writing” (279). Costello, wrongly identifying the poem as a late one, sees it as a successful use of the grotesque and part of Bishop's turn toward “the untamable body, its needs, desires, processes in time, and the culture's wish to control, disguise, or suppress it” (89). I would argue that the poem has a political and social force as well as a personal one.

Works Cited

Beaver, Harold. “Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes).” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 91-119.

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, 1983.

———. “From Two Letters to Marianne Moore about ‘A Miracle for Breakfast.’” Schwartz and Estess 276.

———. “An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop.” By Ashley Brown. Schwartz and Estess 289-301.

———. Introduction. The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon. New York: Farrar, 1968. Rpt. as “On ‘The Burglar of Babylon.’” Schwartz and Estess 305.

———. Letter to Robert Lowell. Late January 1948. Houghton Library.

———. Letter to James Merrill. 27 February 1969. Vassar College Collection, box 20, folder 279.

———. “Naked Dog, the Dog.” Drafts in Vassar College Collection, box 41, folder 631.

———. Uncataloged letter to Joseph Summers. 19 October 1967. Vassar College Collection.

———. “The Work! A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop.” Schwartz and Estess 312-30.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1985.

Cady, Edwin H., and Louis Budd, eds. On Dickinson: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1990.

Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. “At Home with Loss: Elizabeth Bishop and the American Sublime.” Bloom 175-88.

———. Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Erkkila, Betsy. The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History and Discord. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Irwin, John. “Hart Crane's ‘Logic of Metaphor.’” Critical Essays on Hart Crane. Ed. David Clark. Boston: Hall, 1982. 207-20.

Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, 1989.

———. “Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel.” Schwartz and Estess 3-31.

Merrill, James. “Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979.” Schwartz and Estess 259-62.

Millier, Brett. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Moore, Marianne, The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Ed. Patricia C. Willis. New York: Viking, 1986.

———. Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, 20 September 1936. Vassar College Collection, box 10, folder 128.

———. “A Modest Expert.” Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth Bishop. Nation 28 September 1946: 354. Rpt. in Moore, Complete Prose 406-08.

———. “Who Has Rescued Whom.” Rev. of Behold the Jew, by Ada Jackson. New Republic 16 October 1944: 499-500. Rpt. in Moore, Complete Prose 402-03.

O'Brien, Sharon. “‘The Thing Not Named’: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer.” The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs. Ed. Estelle B. Freedman et al. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 67-90.

Pollak, Vivian. “Thirst and Starvation in Emily Dickinson's Poetry.” American Literature 51 (1979): 33-49. Rpt. in Cady and Budd 103-19.

Sanders, Charles. “Elizabeth Bishop's ‘Roosters.’” Explicator 40.4 (1982): 55-57.

Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil B. Estess, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983.

Schweik, Susan. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

Thomas, Heather Kirk. “Emily Dickinson's ‘Renunciation’ and Anorexia Nervosa.” American Literature 60 (1988): 205-25. Rpt. in Cady and Budd 191-211.

Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1988.