Some of the enchanted mystery which permeates Elizabeth Bishop's poetry arises from her preoccupation with dreams, sleep, and the borders between sleeping and waking. Her poems contain much of the magic, uncanniness and displacement associated with the works of the surrealists, for she too explores the workings of the unconscious and the interplay between conscious perception and dream. Although she draws very little from the surrealists' extreme experiments in technique, she does inherit the liberating bequest of their imaginative breakthroughs, and in an original and unobtrusive manner, she assimilates various surrealist aspirations into her poetic practice. (p. 63)

Although Bishop shares the surrealists' interest in the unconscious, her methods for incorporating oneiric qualities into her poetry differ fundamentally from their approach. She does not seek to subvert logical control, and she refuses to accept the "split" between the roles of conscious and unconscious forces in our perception of the world. Unlike the surrealists, she does not endow the unconscious with a revolutionary power to remake experience. Instead, within her poems the realm of dreams, like our waking perceptions, remains problematical. (pp. 63-4)

Another link between Bishop's poetry and the surrealists' discoveries is her delineation of the "otherness" of objects. Within her poems, one finds an awareness that, somehow, whatever seems recognizable to her calm, eclectic consciousness is only part of what is there. However, her techniques for evoking the enigmatic qualities of things differ from the surrealist process of dissociation. To discredit conventional perception, the surrealists deliberately placed the object in an unexpected surrounding and obtained a new source of aesthetic energy. This procedure, whether verbal or plastic, was essentially dissociative. Unlike the surrealists, Bishop rejects the shapeless poetics accompanying the derangement of consciousness, and she enhances the mysterious oddity of things by her unique prowess for ingenious association.

Many of her poems can be explicitly identified as verbal recreations of a dream; for example, "The Weed," "A Summer's Dream," "Sleeping Standing Up," "The Riverman," and "Some Dreams They Forgot." However, in other poems, such as "Chemin de Fer," "Cape Breton," "Squatter's Children," "First Death in Nova Scotia," and "The Bight," the reliance on visual detail is so dominant that the created settings also seem oddly dream-like because they radiate with a disturbing ambiguity similar to the manifest content of dreams. From one perspective, the visual imagery in her poetry is grounded in exact and precise observation of natural detail, yet the uninterrupted accumulation of those details often forms settings which seem to emerge from a dream as well as to encompass the external world. (pp. 64-5)

Bishop was intrigued by the frottage technique [used by Max Ernst with the surrealist aim of breaking "loose from the laws of identity" by advocating uncontrolled association and by ascribing greater importance to the imaginative apprehension of an object rather than the object itself]…. Although this interest in Ernst's techniques for composition should not be over-amplified, it does indicate her sympathy for the surrealist sensibility and provides a means for comprehending the complex way in which this awareness is implemented in "The Monument."

The poem is eighty lines of free verse marked by occasional approximate rhymes. An objective and detached description of the visual qualities of the monument begins the poem and continues throughout, interrupted by four quotations from a second unidentified person (II. 31-34, 40-45, 47-49, 54-58) and various speculations about the purpose, origin and nature of the object by the original speaker. The description of the box's visible features concentrates on the geometric properties of contiguous details. Its shape, angles, texture, slant and perspective are mentioned, much as one might describe the formal abstract elements of some twentieth-century sculpture. Indeed, the monument does resemble a piece of so-called junk sculpture in both its haphazard construction and mundane material, as described by the unappreciative second speaker…. It also resembles some Cubist sculpture because its intersecting geometric planes create a multifaceted surface which eleminates front, back and center. The monument is described following the line of sight—first bottom to top. (II. I-ii) and then vice versa (II. 11-17). The emphasis on surface description in this first part of the … [poem] plays against the later speculations about its purpose. This thematic distinction is emphasized grammatically—the visual description is written in the indicative mood while the speculation is placed in the subjunctive. "It is an artifact / of wood" which "may be solid," "may" contain the bones of its creator, and "may" have been painted.

Twice in the poem the first speaker interrupts the account to correct the description…. Bishop uses this rhetorical device of correcting herself within the poem (epanorthosis) quite frequently. By halting and rebeginning in this way, she colors the tone of the poem with some of the rambling and discursive qualities of natural conversation. The device also gives the impression of accidental or spontaneous composition, an effect which indicates a feature of her surrealist awareness. Like so many twentieth-century poets who desired to bring the colloquial and spontaneous into their language, Bishop recognizes the power which such expansive informality can add to a poem. However, it is typical of her controlled sensibility that this rambling openness is presented through the sheath of a classical rhetorical device. It is also indicative of her poetic talent that she is able to utilize rhetorical forms so artfully that her naturalness does not seem stilted even though it does not issue from the exposure of her personal feelings. Nor does the seeming spontaneity arise from the derangement of consciousness so exalted by the surrealists.

This colloquial and matter-of-fact description of the monument's surface contrasts with the curiously dream-like perspective of the poem…. (pp. 67-9)

The ambiguous blending of subject and object and foreground and background within the poem enhances the dreaminess of the scene. As in many other poems, Bishop uses "and" to subvert causal connection: "there is no 'far away,' / and we are far away within the view." This illogical displacement of perspective applies not only to the observer but also the "sea" which is simultaneously too far away to hear, yet so close it can be described, along with the sky and sunlight, in terms of its fibres, grains and splinters—as if one were examining it under a magnifying glass. This dream-like condensation of distance employed while describing the setting of the monument also owes something to surrealist painting techniques; specifically, to the use of a background foreign to the objects presented. (pp. 69-70)

The setting may be surrealistically-oriented; however, the poem itself is not. Although it contains many pictorial elements, it is, like all poems, made of words. And within Bishop's poetry, despite the specific surrealist parallels here, there is never the attack on the Word itself which underlies all surrealist verse. (p. 70)

Bishop rejects the surrealists' attack on the conventions of language. Accordingly, she never employs the radical juxtaposition of verbal elements which permeates so much surrealist poetry. She does not break clauses, phrases or words into fragments; rather she stays within the confines of accepted linguistic and poetic conventions. In short, she uses syntax and grammar for her own needs rather than eliminating them as useless anachronisms.

As a poem, "The Monument" exhibits some of the methods which Bishop uses to capture the enigmatic qualities of objects. The monument is a pile of boxes; it might contain various secrets which are not apparent to our eyes. The dream-like rearrangement of the setting charges the poem with surrealist possibilities, yet the impulse of the poem, expressed through the dialogue, attempts to reconstruct the conscious associative elements of the monument. Although it owes something to the surrealist tradition of the poetic picture with its radiant metaphorical potential, it does not rely exclusively on dissociative techniques. The poem is set up as an argument, and this argument is resolved in the final lines by a declaration of the monument's aesthetic value….

The second work to be examined in relation to its surrealist features is "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics," a series of three interlinking prose poems which display some resemblance to the writing of Francis Ponge. Like Bishop's poetry, his work captures the "thingness of things" in poems which tilt, magnify and upset rational perspectives through the delineation of particular natural detail. (p. 71)

Recognizable thematic concerns of her poetry—the confrontation between human desires and natural impenetrability, the need for self-protection, painful isolation within a homeless environment, and the bordering worlds of land and water—are carried over into the three meditations through the first person narration of the assorted creatures, all chosen from the older and lower orders of the animal kingdom. Such personification is rarely effective in twentieth-century poetry, yet Bishop successfully recreates the oddities of our experience within the ironic, incisive monologues. One of the richest qualities of her writing is her unfaltering ability to fuse description and narration into an alloy which accentuates the strengths of each contributing element. (pp. 72-3)

With the exception of "12 O'Clock News," these three monologues are the only prose poems Elizabeth Bishop published, and although they constitute only a small part of her entire corpus, they contrast with the other poetic forms she employs in The Complete Poems [1969] and Geography III which rely heavily on strict rhymes and stanzaic patterns. A question thus arises about the choice of form: what is gained by writing in a mode which eliminates end rhyme, stanzas and the poetic line? (p. 73)

Trying to express the "undulations of the psyche" through a means unfettered by the formal structures of verse composition, Baudelaire initiated the attempt, which the surrealists later heralded, of exploring the creative possibilities of the unconscious through a mode which de-emphasized the artificial imposition of conscious controls.

By writing "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" as a group of prose poems, Bishop has attempted to draw on the special powers of this form. Yet within these three poems, the daylight clarity of consciousness dominates through the use of declarative language and crystalline imagery. Certainly, the rhythmic elusiveness of these poems uncannily exposes the "prickings of consciousness," but the language in the monologues releases its power through an admirable simplicity. In this series, as well as throughout her writing, Bishop's use of language imbues her poems with this unmistakable sense of everyday reality. The concreteness of the sensory detail, permeating both dreams and waking, is anchored within a grammar which reinforces this simplicity. Here, as elsewhere in her poetry, short simple sentences are dominant. An elementary vocabulary also adds to the uncomplicated texture of the language, as does the straightforward, colloquial syntax.

This simplicity of language belies the oddity and mystery of the monologues. The intense paranoia of the speakers and the wry pungency of their observations coalesce through the rhythmic pacing of the poems—a rhythm as persuasively effective as any formal metrical measure. (pp. 73-4)

By eliminating the artificiality of the poetic line, Bishop increases the chilling immediacy of the speakers' meditational flow as they muse on the eerie conditions of their primeval struggles. As in "The Monument," a fusion of description, narration and setting blurs the common distinctions between conscious and unconscious. These strange voices speak with such controlled eloquence and the foreground details of the setting stand out in such minute clarity that one forgets the background behind the scene is a dank, impenetrable forest. (p. 74)

In her poems, Bishop utilizes her own idiosyncratic kind of artistic displacement, and it is much less radical than that of the surrealist writers. Often, as in "The Monument," "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" or "The Weed," this displacement appears in a traditional manner in the isolation and unease experienced by a subject within a narrative setting. In her poetry one does not find the grotesque oneiric distortion which may occur, for example, in painting by Dali or Magritte or poems by Breton or Aragon. Instead, she prefers to investigate natural displacement, the "always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life," by describing the oddities of events or incongruities of detail which appear before her questioning gaze and which hint at some displaced meaning. This predilection for scrutinizing natural displacement permeates her poems.

Her use of titled, shifting perspectives is one way she draws attention to the quirkiness of our limited visions. (pp. 77-8)

Sometimes it is proportion which seems somehow out of balance. In "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" both the toad and snail ask pity because they are "too big." In "Questions of Travel" "there are too many waterfalls here." In "Chemin de Fer" the railroad ties are described as "too close together / or maybe too far apart."…

Sometimes the oddity of contiguous details is emphasized, creating the impression that displacement occurs in routine ways throughout the scenes she observes. It can appear in the countryside of Cape Breton or the exotically foreign jungles of Brazil…. (p. 78)

All of these examples indicate a specific use of displacement; namely, to accentuate the odd confrontation of internal and external worlds. Bishop's poetry delineates not only the confluent forces and ambiguities of interior conflicts expressed in dreams (as in "The Weed"), but also the elements of our waking struggle with external realities. Her landscapes may well possess qualities of dreamscapes, but simultaneously they are marked by an unusually rich appreciation of the natural world. Breton wrote that for the surrealists, there were no objects, only subjects. They had no interest in the natural world per se. Throughout Bishop's poetry, this strangeness of our subjective selves, the queer struggle between conscious and unconscious, is projected outward into a world where the "thingness of things" dominates. She often relies on accumulated visual images in order to blur the distinction between subject and object within a dream-like atmosphere which pushes beyond the "split" between conscious and unconscious. Yet at the same time she emphasizes a sense of displaced meaning in order to contradict this fusion by accenting the discrepancy between the inner and outer realms. (pp. 79-80)

Richard Mullen, "Elizabeth Bishop's Surrealist Inheritance," in American Literature, Vol. 54, No. 1, March, 1982, pp. 63-80.