[In the following essay, Sanger discusses the impact of linguistic patterns in Great Village, Nova Scotia on Bishop's poetry.]

Part of this essay's title comes from an apparently causal, graceful passage in Bishop's memoir of Marianne Moore:

Happily ignorant of the poor Vassar girls before me who hadn't passed muster, I began to feel less nervous and even spoke some myself. I had what may have been an inspiration, I don't know—at any rate, I attribute my great good fortune in having known Marianne as a friend in part to it. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was making its spring visit to New York and I asked Miss Moore (we called each other “Miss” for over two years) if she would care to go to the circus with me the Saturday after next. I didn't know that she always went to the circus, wouldn't have missed it for anything, and when she accepted, I went back to Poughkeepsie in the grimy day coach extremely happy.¹

Many stories are being told there—one is about the personal relationship between Miss Bishop and Miss Moore (… for over two years); another about the archetypal relationship between an apprentice and a master; a third is about the cultural transformation which takes place as an accomplished past finds elision with an accomplishing present; a fourth concerns the analogy of poetry to circus performance—and there are several more. The least obvious is one where the protagonist is the word some in the quotation's first sentence.

Some is one of the many sounds Bishop heard during childhood years (1911-1917) she spent with her maternal grandparents, the Bulmers, in Great Village, Colchester County, Nova Scotia. In Great Village and throughout the central part of the province, people use phrases like: “I read some today”; “I ate some this morning”; or “gardened some”; or “walked some”—not a whole lot, but some, just a bit. Is Bishop's some calculated or spontaneous? Was Colchester County popping out instinctively during the last years of Bishop's life when she was working on the Moore memoir? Or was the some deliberated to show the lack of sophistication Bishop brought to her first meeting with Miss Moore? Not knowing if there is evidence in drafts of the memoir to show whether some had a precursor or precursors, we can speculate and possibly make fools of ourselves.

Arguing for deliberation, I would remember the question Lowell asked Bishop: Do / you still hang your words in air, ten years / unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps / or empties for the unimaginable phrase—/ unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?² There is parallel confirmation in Bishop's description of Moore's clipboard (perhaps a provocation for Bishop's notice board) … with the poem under construction on it, carrying it about the apartment, “even when I'm dusting or washing the dishes, Elizabeth.”³ Arguing against deliberation, on the other hand, I prefer to imagine not so much a spontaneous choice but a choice taking place in a world of free linguistic intuition, an imaginable world, in which Bishop's words exist like the words of any other true poet.

For Bishop, part of this imaginable world of words was Great Village and the language its people used while she was there, both as a child and later during visits throughout her adult life. It was (and is) a complex linguistic world, not entirely one of village pieties and simplicities to which David Kalstone alludes.⁴ For example, listen again to Bishop's some. Whatever she said to Moore was enough to pass muster. It would have been enough in Great Village too. There, the “just a bit” of “some” can also be “quite a bit.” So also can the “not a whole lot” which I used earlier in my first attempt at definition. Latent in the Great Village “some” and in the colloquial phrases synonymous with it used in central Nova Scotia are subtle structures of double-meaning, irony, reservation, humour, reticence and forthrightness. “Some” contains both fact and playing with fact. It is both plain and complicated speech—asserting its own modest accuracy, defining that accuracy by acknowledging there are other acceptable scales of comparison. The personality of the speaker of the Great Village “some” is both offered and withheld, both immediately present and distanced, both kindly and, in an oblique way, aggressive. Chance is given the listener to respond foolishly by interpreting obtusely. But chance is also given to reply in an interestingly complex way, perhaps at the expense of “some's” speaker. The Great Village “some” and its cognate phrases sound in a culture where speaking and attentive listening are used to make and judge character and where character is therefore made communally. Bishop's some, I suggest, works in the description of her first meeting with Marianne Moore very much like a Great Village “some”. Both negotiate difficult passages.

There are other places in Bishop's work where she found the imaginable word and words she needed in the linguistic world of Great Village. One appears in “The Moose,” completed towards the end of her life, though the trip which started it happened in 1946. The word sounds in a passage of overheard conversation among the other passengers as Bishop travels by bus from Great Village to Boston:

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.
“Yes …” that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes …”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life's like that.
We know it (also death).”
Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.(5)

It is a word as simple as some, but speaking equivalent volumes: simply yes. As Bishop spends a whole stanza saying, it is a yes said with indrawn breath, a breath that drags back up against the current of “yes's” denotative affirmation, qualifying it into the connotations of half groan, half acceptance, a sounding ground, the base of life's music (also death), placed by the speaker's breath between impeding, ineluctable brackets.

Yes, spoken as Bishop describes, used like a refrain throughout conversations as her stanzas enact, is another sign that a speaker comes from central Nova Scotia. Unlike “some,” it is not carrying over into other generations. It is now mainly used by country people of at least late middle age. As audibly as the drawling, breath-expelled, universalizing “yeah” of the United States or the bray of condescension and control in the British “yaas,” the central Nova Scotia “yes” implies a whole culture shaping its use, one which is continuous, reflective, patient and realistic. One which perhaps was.

Bishop used this “yes” in another place. David Kalstone found it, without knowing all he had found, in “Roosters”:

Old holy sculpture
could set it all together
in one small scene, past and future:
Christ stands amazed,
Peter, two fingers raised
to surprised lips, both as if dazed.
But in between
a little cock is seen
carved on a dim column in the travertine,
explained by gallus canit;
flet Petrus underneath it.
There is inescapable hope, the pivot;
yes, and there Peter's tears
run down our chanticleer's
sides and gem his spurs.(6)

After quoting most of this passage, Kalstone notes: What is rendered in the poem is sustained participation—even down to the sharp intake of breath at a “yes.” Bishop experiences the power of the self as its conflated capacity for betrayal and remorse.⁷ Perhaps he was unconsciously remembering the sharp, indrawn breath with which “yes” is said in “The Moose,” a poem written some thirty years or so after “Roosters.” I would prefer to think that he responded to Bishop's exquisitely precise placing of yes at the beginning of a stanza, literally on a pivot, where an indrawn breath is natural. Two stanzas later, the triple rhyme of guess, bless, and forgiveness in

… Poor Peter, heart-sick,
still cannot guess
those cock-a-doodles yet might bless,
his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness

confirms the conflation of betrayal and remorse Kalstone hears in that Nova Scotian yes, and adds a note of what, in another writer, could have skewed into mockery, but which Bishop characteristically infuses with an empathy which is both charitable and prudential.

I find such empathy throughout her Nova Scotian work, in particular, and believe it is shaped by the kinds of Nova Scotian cultural and linguistic patterns I am gradually examining. Kalstone's brilliant perception that Alpers' The Art of Describing could be used as a cue to understand Bishop's open-air naturalism⁸ has been useful in distinguishing her work from the egocentrically driven work of contemporaries like Lowell, Sexton, Plath and Berryman. But in addition Bishop used acute rhetorical strategy in her poetry and prose to make them independent of herself and dependent upon reader and listener.

The strategy is partly concealed by our own largely unthinking sensitivity to what we call the “child's view” of things and events—the freshness of apparently disconnected impressions, the flux of apparently random, discontinuous events. But read more carefully, poems like “Manners” and “Sestina” can be heard to be only partly about discrete images and events. They are also about the possibility of a community of language and the consequences of its lapse—the lapse when some and yes are no longer completely understood.

“Manners” is short enough to be quoted in full:

“MANNERS”

For a child of 1918
My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
“Be sure to remember to always
speak to everyone you meet.”
We met a stranger on foot.
My grandfather's whip tapped his hat.
“Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day.”
And I said it and bowed where I sat.
Then we overtook a boy we knew
with his big pet crow on his shoulder.
“Always offer everyone a ride;
don't forget that when you get older,”
my grandfather said. So Willy
climbed up with us, but the crow
gave a “Caw!” and flew off. I was worried.
How would he know where to go?
But he flew a little way at a time
from fence post to fence post, ahead;
and when Willy whistled he answered.
“A fine bird,” my grandfather said,
“and he's well brought up. See, he answers
nicely when he's spoken to.
Man or beast, that's good manners.
Be sure that you both always do.”
When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people's faces,
but we shouted, “Good day! Good day!
Fine day!” at the top of our voices.
When we came to Hustler Hill,
he said that the mare was tired,
so we all got down and walked,
as our good manners required.(9)

There are, of course, childlike, naturalistic pictures (of the Dutch school) in this poem. One follows to another like the connected illustrations in an old primary reader: (1) grandfather and child in the wagon, (2) meeting the stranger and saluting him, (3) overtaking the boy and his crow, (4) automobiles passing, (5) letting the mare rest. But these pictures are placed within rhetorical structures which complicate and ironize them. The first frame is provided by the tide. It is ironized gradually, retrospectively, as the poem proceeds. That process begins with the subtitle, For a Child of 1918, whose elegiac drift distances Bishop, in effect, from herself, and the reader from Bishop, while at the same time, like all epitaphs, proferring communion, eliciting empathy. The date itself is curious. Bishop, we know, left Great Village, where Hustler Hill is located, in September, 1917. In 1918, Bishop was in Massachusetts. Knowing nothing of the biographical circumstances involved, most of us thinking about the gist of “Manners” would connect 1918 with the end of World War One, a connection I believe Bishop expected our making, for it properly compromises any attempt to read the poem either nostalgically or as a fragment of self-solacing autobiography.

Grandfather Bulmer's manners are a language of accuracy and delicacy, a language in which self-respect and respect for others are balanced. Be sure to remember to always / speak to everyone you meet, he tells the child, and his speak falls not only with the emphasis of an accented syllable at the beginning of a line, it is also emphasized by and emphasizes the defining assonance of meet at the line's end. The stranger on foot in the next stanza is accommodated within the same community of sound and culture. So also are Willy and his crow, Willy in the wagon with the child and her grandfather, and the crow flying free, but not lost as the child fears because it answers when Willy whistles.

The poem, until this point, narrates a coherent, gathering procession, a community of words and sounds carried together along the road, young and old, family and acquaintances, humans and animals. Then disruption occurs: … automobiles went by, / the dust hid the people's faces, and manners are made at the top of our voices without answer, without conversation. The voices of those in the automobiles are as hidden as their faces.

“Manners,” for all that it seems to narrate the conditions of a child's security, might, according to my account so far, seem to be a tragic poem. That is part of its drift, but not wholly. The last stanza takes a slightly different course. Admittedly, it balances on the edge of farce, like other passages in Bishop's Nova Scotia work, as has already been noted in this essay. One can easily imagine the reaction of some of those in the passing automobiles seeing child, grandfather and Willy (with attendant crow) disembarking to help the mare up Hustler Hill (in reality, a very mild hill). Nowadays, such people yell, “Get a horse!”, when they see similar situations, or something less civil. Apparent farce is one of the traps Bishop sets for them. What is really happening in the last stanza is that the courtesy, resilience and commonsense involved reconfirm the truth of grandfather Bulmer's manners. It is he who says the mare is tired. The others listen, so we all got down, and the severance which occurred in the preceding stanza, the unresponsiveness of those in automobiles, is placed exactly where it belongs—outside the true community of speech where words are spoken, listened to and replied to. “Manners” concerns what used to be called “deportment,” the way we carry ourselves through the world in the vehicle of self. At another level, one which Bishop encountered in her relationship with Marianne Moore, “Manners” is about practising poetry and hearing and reading poetry. All of us are in “Manners,” either riding in grandfather Bulmer's wagon or travelling with hidden faces, unresponsive in automobiles.

The limits of this essay prevent my considering many more of Bishop's poems in the way I have considered “Manners”—literally as a poem about conversation, about connected speech, about saying, hearing and responding within a linguistic world, Great Village's world, where the listener speaks and the speaker listens. In “Manners” that world is created, dissolved and re-created while the poem travels on its way. In other poems, the same sequence is duplicated, or thwarted, or it may even be completed by the poem itself, as if the poet herself becomes the necessary listener. An example of thwarting is the horror of “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” the structure of which enacts the obsessive, monomanical rant of the talkative man, Ezra Pound, who by 1950 had reached a point where he could not listen, could not hold a conversation. “Sandpiper” describes a similar monomania:

… The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.

Perhaps it is significant that in Questions of Travel, the collection where the St. Elizabeths poem and “Sandpiper” appear, the two poems are separated from each other by “From Trollope's Journal,” a cento in which Bishop voices conversation for that most conversable, pragmatic figure. It is a poem both of manners and of the consequences when manners are denied. Explicitly, conversation takes place between Trollope and us and between Trollope and a young surgeon lancing a boil on Trollope's forehead. Implicitly it occurs as Bishop listens to Trollope's words, arranges and re-defines them, shapes their implications into acute ethical analysis not only of Washington in the winter of 1861, but also of a later Washington infected by the feverish, totalitarian obsessions of mid-twentieth-century militarism.

Much more could be said similarly about other poems and passages in the prose. Think, for example of the stuffed loon in “First Death in Nova Scotia”: Since Uncle Arthur fired / a bullet into him, / he hadn't said a word. / He kept his own counsel. As for little cousin Arthur he cannot reply to goodbye. There are the rows of oil cans in “Filling Station” which end the poem softly saying Esso-so-so-so in mocking echolalia of an implicit, unvoiced “therefore” which evaporates without concluding anything, leaving it up to the poet to assert and deny, equally without proof, Somebody loves us all. There is the high vox / humana, both organ reed and human voice, wailing a nightmarish, disconnected riddle of nursery song and remembered conversation in “Sunday, 4 A.M.” There is the strange elocutionary end of “The Armadillo,” in which the italicized stanza puts the speaker up on a stage (like those doubles of life and art, the boy on the burning deck and the reciter of The Boy stood on / the burning deck in “Casabianca”):

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak marked fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!(10)

There, the illusions of art and control are offered to the audience nakedly, without the twentieth-century concealment of common speech and unclichéd diction. Bishop trusts the audience to hear the truer diction implied, to understand her equivalents for “some,” and “yes.”

The last stanza of “The Armadillo” may evoke the figure of a small child standing on a school platform reciting “Excelsior” somewhat desperately, but so far as I know no one has ever gathered the poem into the category of Bishop poems written from a “child's point of view.” I wonder how secure that category really is. Does the child's “point of view” not run counter to the community of language Bishop's poems work so often, I believe, to establish? Bishop's finest critic, David Kalstone, wrote … such poems as “Sestina” and “First Death in Nova Scotia” are told resolutely from the child's point of view.¹¹ I question that resolutely, in particular and speculate whether it does not obscure Bishop's meticulous attention to rhetorical structure and the connotations of words, whether it does not intercept her continual reach for a fluent linguistic collaboration with readers and listeners.

Look at “Sestina” irresolutely.¹² One reason for thinking the poem is written from a child's point of view is our knowing its biographical occasion. Its setting is September 1917 in Great Village. During the summer Bishop's mother had suffered a complete mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where she would die in 1934. Bishop would never see her again. The grandmother in the poem, grandmother Bulmer, is thinking of her daughter's illness and absence. She is also thinking of Elizabeth Bishop's impending journey, in a few days or perhaps even a few hours, with her Bishop grandparents to live in Worchester, Massachusetts. The child, Elizabeth, is watching and drawing. They both sit in the kitchen. An iron kettle sings on the wood stove. It is dusk and it is raining.

There are times when one wishes we knew less about Bishop's life. Perhaps we should have stopped searching further than her work chooses to say. The danger of knowing too much biography is that it can force us to read in ways which serve only to confirm the facts of Bishop's life. Can we re-imagine “Sestina” simply as it was when Bishop published it as pattern of imaginable words? If we can, do we not hear a conversation of many sounds and several voices in the poem and understand more than a child's point of view? There are sounds of rain on the roof, of a singing kettle, of the spatter of water droplets on the stove top. There is the voice of the grandmother saying It's time for tea now. There are words the child hears the Marvel Stove say (It was to be) and the hovering hawk of a half-open, hung-up almanac (I know what I know). Behind the words of the stove and the almanac lurk the overheard fragmentary conversations of adults discussing the unnameable event which led to the poem's burden. And closer than any of these voices, sounding more clearly in our ears than any of them, is the voice of the poet. That voice is a traditional one. It sounds like the voice of Jane Austen or Thackery or Dickens or Tolstoy. It controls “Sestina”'s rigid, obsessive form with a fluency which implies things will go on, yes. It knows that the grandmother thinks she is successfully hiding her house's sorrow. It knows that the child knows well enough the cause of sorrow. It knows that the child is proposing a language parallel in its dissimulations to those of the grandmother by offering the drawing of a rigid house / and a winding pathway and a man with buttons like tears. And the voice of the poet knows that all the languages of dissimulation, displacement, distraction and projected participation mystique are helpless to conceal the truth and are also the substance out of which poetry is made if we can only hear clearly enough.

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. The words of course, are from The Wasteland. Many voices in Elizabeth Bishop's poems, on the other hand, help us speak with them. Think of the concluding stanzas of “The Moose.” A moose has wandered out of the impenetrable wood (where Shakespeare's lovers and Ariosto's Orlando still go to find themselves). The bus stops and the voices start up again. A man's voice assures us / “Perfectly harmless …”, and we are back in the world of “Manners,” no longer travelling in an anachronistic wagon listening to grandfather Bulmer, but learning the same lessons from people who speak very much as he spoke. “Sure are big creatures” / “It's awful plain” / “Look! It's a she!” Simple voices. Simple enough.

“Curious creatures,”
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
“Look at that, would you.”

This is no interrogation. Look and look your infant sight away. The moose looks too. Yes. It's best to listen some.

Notes

1. E. Bishop: The Collected Prose (Ed. & Intro. by R. Giroux): Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York: 1984: pp. 124-125.

2. Ibid.: Giroux' Introduction: p. XIX.

3. Ibid: p. 138.

4. D. Kalstone: Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (Ed. by R. Hemenway): Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York: 1991: p. 68.

5. E. Bishop: The Complete Poems: 1927-1979: Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York: 1983: p. 172.

6. Ibid: pp. 37-38.

7. Kalstone: op. cit.: p. 84.

8. Kalstone: op. cit.: in Afterward by J. Merrill: p. 258.

9. Bishop: Complete Poems: pp. 121-122.

10. Ibid: p. 104.

11. Kalstone: op. cit.: p. 218.

12. Bishop: Complete Poems: pp. 123-124.