[In the following essay, Carlson-Bradley asserts that Robert Lowell's poem “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” served as an inspiration for Bishop's “First Death in Nova Scotia.”]

In her “Statement for the English Memorial Service for Robert Lowell,” Elizabeth Bishop commented on her long-standing friendship with Lowell. Mentioning how they “took to each other immediately and were good friends for over thirty years,” Bishop also reveals that this relationship was “often kept alive through years of separation only through letters …”¹ Besides letters, the poets also sent each other manuscripts and commentary on their poetry; they made clear to one another what they discussed publically in interviews—the respect of each for the other's discipline, style, and opinions.² Though Lowell and Bishop recognized how dissimilar their poetry basically is, they nevertheless found themselves under the influence of each other's work. One clear-cut example of this influence is the relationship of Lowell's “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” written in 1957, and Bishop's “First Death in Nova Scotia,” written four years later.

Though the draft of “First Death in Nova Scotia” did not survive with the letter Bishop sent with it, Bishop mentions the poem in a letter dated September 25, 1961: “This [enclosed poem] is just to be going on with—and undoubtedly shows your influence, I think—I'll probably make some more changes—.” She says no more about it in the text of the letter, except for a brief comment after her signature that identifies the poem by explicating one of its more distinctive allusions: “As you may not know, ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’ is the un-official Canadian anthem—sung in school constantly.”³ “First Death in Nova Scotia” describes a child's first encounter with death, set in Bishop's childhood Nova Scotia. (Years later, Bishop mentions in a letter how she found the grave of the cousin whose wake she describes in the poem.⁴) In occasion and imagery, the poem is strikingly similar to Lowell's “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” the poem Bishop told him was her favorite of the family poems he sent her with “Skunk Hour.”⁵

Bishop's poem is much shorter than Lowell's, but both poems use a similar combination of nostalgia for the past and an awareness of death. Further, Bishop's poem resembles Lowell's in describing a child's sense not only of mortality but of premature death:

In the cold, cold parlor
my mother laid out Arthur
beneath the chromographs:
Edward, Prince of Wales,
with Princess Alexandra,
and King George with Queen Mary.
Below them on the table
stood a stuffed loon
shot and killed by Uncle
Arthur, Arthur's father.
Since Uncle Arthur fired
a bullet into him,
he hadn't said a word.
He kept his own counsel
on his white, frozen lake,
the marble-topped table.
His breast was deep and white,
cold and caressable;
his eyes were red glass,
much to be desired.
“Come,” said my mother,
“Come and say good-bye
to your little cousin Arthur.”
I was lifted up and given
one lily of the valley
to put in Arthur's hand.
Arthur's coffin was
a little frosted cake,
and the red-eyed loon eyed it
from his white, frozen lake.
Arthur was very small.
He was all white, like a doll
that hadn't been painted yet.
Jack Frost had started to paint him
the way he always painted
the Maple Leaf (Forever).
He had just begun on his hair,
a few red strokes, and then
Jack Frost had dropped the brush
and left him white, forever.
The gracious royal couples
were warm in red and ermine;
their feet were well wrapped up
in the ladies' ermine trains.
They invited Arthur to be
the smallest page at court.
But how could Arthur go,
clutching his tiny lily,
with his eyes shut up so tight
and the roads deep in snow?(6)

Bishop first suggests a sense of place here, the Nova Scotia of her grandparents, a culture proud of its British ancestry. The old-fashioned “chromographs” of “Edward, Prince of Wales” reinforce this British heritage and place the poem in time. Lowell uses similar devices in “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” to create a sense of nostalgia; the “Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock” in his own grandparents' Edwardian summer home is one example.⁷ Others are the war posters and uniforms mentioned in the poem. Uncle Devereux still wears, four years after the war of his own youth, the “war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer” (63). His war posters describe an era even earlier than World War I; one that hangs in his hunting camp portrays “La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga / … accepting the arm of her ‘protector’ / the ingenu and porcine Edward VII” (63).

In creating the era of his grandparents, then, Lowell refers specifically to the Boer War. His uncle's “finest poster” emphasizes the violence of the conflict, showing “two or three young men in khaki kilts / being bushwacked on the veldt—” (63). Bishop's poem, conversely, alludes to war only indirectly, mentioning the English royalty living during World War I. Though avoiding violent imagery, Bishop does, however, use hunting and bird images to suggest death in a way reminiscent of Lowell's poem.

First, she describes the victim of her uncle's hunting, a loon with a “caressable” white breast and “much to be desired” red glass eyes. In addition to the child observer's fascination with the details of the bird, the loon also combines the colors of warmth and cold, blood and snow, that run throughout the poem. Like death, the bird seems rapacious, looking at the “little frosted cake” of a coffin: “the red-eyed loon eyed it / from his white, frozen lake.” Like Lowell, Bishop also suggests the irony of a hunter being hunted by death. The loon, victim of Uncle Arthur, witnesses the death of the uncle's son.

Lowell uses bird imagery to suggest death in his poem, also. Uncle Devereux himself resembles a bird: “His coat was a blue jay's tail” (64). The speaker also calls his own five-year-old reflection in the mirror “a stuffed toucan / with a bibulous, multicolored beak” (61). Like Agrippina, who foresaw her own death,⁸ the boy senses his own mortality here; he compares himself to a killed bird, even before seeing his uncle as a blue jay. Although Bishop uses bird imagery in less varied ways than Lowell does, the loon makes up a major part of the scene she describes, associating hunting and untimely death with her uncle and his family.

Both poets also use contrasting colors and temperatures to suggest the separation of the living and the dead. In the opening and closing sections of the poem, Lowell's child narrator plays with earth and lime, eventually sensing death in the contrast:

My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles
of earth and lime,
a black and white pile. …
Come winter,
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.

As Vereen Bell has noted, similar imagery earlier in the poem reverses our normal associations—the “corrosive element,” lime, feeling “warm” and the life-supporting earth feeling “cool”:⁹ “One of my hands was cool on a pile / of black earth, the other warm / on a pile of lime” (60). Appropriately, the images are juxtaposed, confused, as the child senses both life and approaching death in his uncle.

Bishop's use of contrasting color and temperature is even more pervasive; each stanza after the first has at least one image of red and white. The color images include the loon's white feathers and red eyes; the white coffin and lilies for the red-haired baby; the “red and ermine” dress of the royalty in the chromographs. As in Lowell's poem, the imagery does not fulfill usual expectations. Despite the “warm,” red objects throughout the room, the scene is almost entirely cold. The wake takes place in the “cold, cold parlor”; the dead bird looks on from his “frozen lake,” eyeing the “frosted” coffin. Cousin Arthur is a baby painted by Jack Frost. Only the “gracious royal couples” feel “warm in red and ermine,” the child interpreting the royal dress as an attempt to ward off the cold: “their feet were well wrapped up / in the ladies' ermine trains.” At this point, the child senses the inability of the dead to rejoin the living. Despite the soothing idea, probably told the child by her adult relatives, that Arthur will be leaving his family “to [be] the smallest page at court,” the child senses that Arthur can no longer be part of the warm, the living. The final lines of the poem return to white and frozen images: “But how could Arthur go, / clutching his tiny lily, / with his eyes shut up so tight / and the roads deep in snow?”

The sense of uneasiness in Bishop's poem is more oblique than in Lowell's. Rather than tell us that she “cowed in terror” like Lowell's narrator (63), Bishop's speaker merely doubts the adults' explanation of her cousin's fate. The perspective of Bishop's narrator is also more consistently that of a child, who is more likely than an adult to identify with and fear the premature death of another child. Certain phrases may not seem childlike; a five- or seven-year-old is not likely to say “caressable” or “much to be desired.” Unlike Lowell, however, Bishop omits any information or insights about her family or the death of her cousin than a young child would be able to give. The closest Bishop comes to adult perspective is the intimation that Arthur's state is permanent: Jack Frost has painted the child and “left him white, forever.” Except for this comment, the passage is an example of the imaginative literal-mindedness of young children; the child imagines Jack Frost painting her cousin the way he is supposed to “paint” the landscape with foliage. She then associates fall foliage with a song sung “constantly” in Canadian schools during Bishop's childhood, “The Maple Leaf Forever.” If not the intrusion of adult commentary, the idea that Arthur is left white “forever” seems to be the same kind of associative insight made by the children in Bishop's short stories.

In presenting the scene from a child's perspective, Bishop departs most from Lowell's technique in “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow.” Like Bishop, Lowell juxtaposes adult and childlike diction but presents his observations mostly in the voice of a remembering adult. As Steven Gould Axelrod has noted, for example, Lowell describes the grove of poplars in front of his grandfather's farm as both “Norman” and “scarey.” Though a five-year-old is likely to use the second adjective, he probably would not think of the first.¹⁰ In the same way, a young child would probably not describe a toucan's beak as “bibulous” and “multicolored.” Lowell's point of view allows him, however, to comment on his own motives and behavior. “What in the world was I wishing?” he asks at one point (62). He also can comment on the people around him: “Like my grandfather, the décor / was manly, comfortable, / overbearing, disproportioned (60).” Lowell later described the impulse behind the Life Studies poems as that of memory: “much of Life Studies is recollection. … I caught real memories in a fairly gentle style.”¹¹ Appropriately, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” opens the “Life Studies” section of the book with an overview of the narrator's awareness of his family and its failures: the overbearing grandfather, the boy's stilted “perfection,” Aunt Sarah's sterile talent and loss of nerve before her debut piano recital, and Uncle Devereux's death. This death also signals the end of the family line, Uncle Devereux being the only male child of Lowell's maternal grandfather. The speaker's terror, his awareness of death and failure resurface in subsequent “Life Studies” poems, perhaps most strikingly in “Skunk Hour.”

Conversely, Bishop's poem is more narrow in focus and works best as she uses it in Questions of Travel—as the culmination of a series of pieces on childhood and family rather than as an introduction to them. In her own series of poems on childhood, Bishop maintains more distance from the role of frankly autobiographical poet than Lowell does. First published in 1955, her “Manners” indirectly expresses doubt in childhood by exploiting, ironically, the rhyme and “moral” typical of nursery rhymes; “Sestina,” published a year later, presents a domestic tragedy but in third-person narrative and traditional form, again, with fairy tale elements typical of children's literature. In keeping with these poems, “First Death in Nova Scotia” follows the advice she had given Lowell about his own poem. She wanted him to drop the “My” from his title, to make it “match” the more impersonal titles of “Grandparents” and “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms.”¹² Her own title matches the general titles of “Manners” and “Sestina.” Though she retains this distance, Bishop nevertheless combines the relative looseness of her structure here with a greater openness about the autobiographical nature of the poem's content. The first-person narrator, for example, not only mentions relatives, but, for the first time in Bishop's childhood poetry, provides the first name of one of her relatives; Bishop's uncle was indeed named Arthur. Of the three childhood poems, the emphasis in “First Death” is less on form than on the narrator's immediate perceptions.

“First Death in Nova Scotia” thus breaks ground for Bishop's childhood poems. Bishop balances structure with looseness more obviously here, dropping intricate quatrain and sestina forms in favor of predominantly unrhymed, ten-line stanzas. As they often do in her free verse, her rhythms fall primarily into lines of two or three stresses: “In the cold, cold parlor / my mother laid out Arthur / beneath the chromographs.” Though most of the poem does not rhyme, Bishop occasionally rhymes end-words: “Arthur was very small. / He was like a doll …” Another important rhyme occurs in the seventh and tenth lines of the last stanza, joining the ideas of winter and Arthur's inability to feel warmth: “But how could Arthur go, / … / and the roads deep in snow?” More often, Bishop uses slant rhymes—with “Arthur,” “mother,” and “parlor,” for example. She also repeats “Arthur” at least once a stanza, ten times in all in a fifty-line poem, three times in the first stanza. Structured in these ways, the poem avoids the obvious, traditional forms of “Manners” and “Sestina.” Combined with first-person narration, this looser style helps the poem seem a more spontaneous, “prosaic” expression of memory than Bishop's earlier poems on childhood.

Lowell's poem could act as Bishop's model for “First Death in Nova Scotia,” then, not only in subject matter and imagery but also in style—a first-person narrative combined with loose structure. Besides breaking out of strict form in an autobiographical poem, however, “First Death” is typically Bishop's own in emphasis. Rather than family history and relationships, for example, Bishop focuses more exclusively than Lowell does on the child's process of perception at the time. In doing so, she anticipates here perhaps her most powerful poem on childhood experience, her Geography III piece, “In the Waiting Room.” This later poem, first published in 1971, is a free verse piece centering on a child's moment of discovering “the human condition.” Like Lowell's “My Last Afternoon,” “In the Waiting Room” juxtaposes childhood and adult awareness. An adult narrator recalls the moment she acquired an adult understanding of her relationship to other people: “What similarities—/ … / held us all together / or made us all just one?”¹³ Taken together, Bishop's childhood poems progress toward recording a child's immediate perception of what it means to be human—and toward a speaker who combines adult memory and childhood observations. Lowell's “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” seems to have helped Bishop recognize the possibilities of her own childhood experience and the power that first-person narrative and free verse have in creating a “spontaneous” expression of memory.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Bishop, “Statement for the English Memorial Service for Robert Lowell,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 311.

2. I have read the poets' entire correspondence at the Houghton Library, Harvard; the Vassar College Library; and the Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

3. Bishop to Lowell, September 25, 1961. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

4. Bishop to James Merrill, October 13, 1972 (Vassar).

5. Bishop to Lowell, December 14, 1957 (Houghton); printed in Robert Lowell: A Biography, by Ian Hamilton (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 236.

6. “First Death in Nova Scotia” from Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Copyright © 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Copyright © 1962 by Elizabeth Bishop. All quotations from the poem are from this edition.

7. Robert Lowell, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959), p. 59. All subsequent quotations from the poem are from this edition; page references appear parenthetically.

8. Richard J. Calhoun, “Lowell's ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow, IV, 40-43’,” Explicator, 23 (January, 1965), item 38.

9. Vereen Bell, Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 57-58.

10. Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 115-16.

11. Robert Lowell in “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” Ian Hamilton, interviewer, Review, no. 26 (Summer 1971), pp. 12, 26.

12. Bishop to Lowell, December 14, 1957 (Houghton); printed in Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, p. 236.

13. Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room,” Geography III (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 6-7.