“Elizabeth Bishop and Revision: A Spiritual Act,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April, 1996, pp. 43-50.

I have always been rather fond of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. Bishop's work, like Robert Frost's best, has an apparent simplicity that belies a greater depth beneath. It was my need to understand this greater depth and how she managed it that led me to Bishop's papers and drafts in Vassar College Library's special collection.

To understand Bishop's approach to revision, one must first understand her poetics and what influences formed her attitudes concerning poetry. Unlike other poets whose work changed dramatically over the course of their lives, changes that came as their beliefs and understanding of poetry changed, Bishop's beliefs remained essentially the same; it was her application of these beliefs to her poetry that changed. What Bishop believed poetry should be and how it should operate was established very early for her, and she spent the rest of her life refining these beliefs. In a recorded talk given by Bishop in 1977, she said one of her earliest influences was George Herbert, the seventeenth-century English poet whom she discovered on a camp trip to Provincetown—“There was a little book shop that had secondhand books … I read some of his things and liked them so much I bought the book. Herbert has always been one of my favorite poets, if not my favorite.”

Bishop loved Herbert's poetry for many reasons. In speaking of his poem, “Love Unknown,” she said:

If you imagine seeing it, or painting a picture of it, it would be fantastic, sort of like a Goya painting … and yet the narrator speaks as if it were something that happened yesterday—this is one thing I like. I like the purity of the language, which manages to express a deep emotion without ever [straining].

Fantastic subject in natural language: this combination applies to much of the poetry in Bishop's first book, particularly “The Weed,” which Bishop said was modeled on Herbert's “Love Unknown.” In subsequent books her poetry became less surreal and her subjects quite ordinary, though her operating principles remained the same, owing much to her early reading of Herbert.

But her grasp of poetic method, and her fascination about technique wasn't simply due to Herbert. In an essay printed in the February 1934 issue of the Vassar Review, Bishop had this to say concerning her early understanding of poetry:

… poetry considered in a very simple way is motion … the releasing, checking, timing, and repeating of the movement of the mind … an idea of timing in poetry [that] helps to explain many of those aspects of poetry which are inadequately expressed by most critics.

In the same essay she also said this concerning the proper use of “timing” in a poem:

… the correct manipulation of time, the little duration each phase of the action must take in order that the whole may be perfect. And the time taken for each part of an action is decided by both the time of the whole, and of the parts before and after.

She later wrote in her notebook:

It's a question of using the poet's proper material with which he's equipped by nature, i.e., immediate intense physical reactions, a sense of metaphor and decoration in everything—to express something not of them—something I suppose, spiritual. But it proceeds from the material, the material eaten out with acid, pulled down from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in its place. Sometimes it cannot be made to indicate its spiritual goal clearly (some of Hopkins, say, where the point seems to be missing), but even then the spiritual must be felt.

Bishop blended these two influences into her own approach to poetry—an expression that took its form less from the direct appropriation of Herbert's or Hopkins's style than from a basic realization that in a poem language need not be excited or dramatic in itself to convey the feeling of drama and of compelling immediacy, but that tone and verisimilitude mattered more.

How did Bishop revise her poems? In reading through Bishop's drafts, I've begun to see a pattern to her revision (something that she does in all of her poems), a move from the poem being merely a series of intelligent, often prose-like observations, to one that conveys these observations as sensually experienced presences. Her first drafts of the poems I have studied are always bursts of ideas, almost like a list of ingredients—it is Bishop getting her raw material out on paper where she can begin molding it according to her writing principles.

What are these principles? Using Bishop's own words, her goal in revision was to take this list of ingredients (usually objects, things and events) and write about them as “a moving, changing idea or series of ideas” that seemed “as if it were something that happened yesterday” and in a “purity of language, which manages to express a deep emotion without ever [straining].” And all done in a way that “the spiritual must be felt.” It's this spirituality, as much as anything, that Bishop owes to the influence of Herbert and Hopkins, both, of course, clergymen. I might add that Bishop's spiritual was not of the same order—she once said (and I believe her), “I'm not the slightest bit religious.”

In practical terms, this means that Bishop's goal was to take the objects, things and events that are actually spiritually neutral, and give them this spiritual quality. Her specific way of accomplishing this varied according to the situation, but it was primarily a function of her carefully chosen diction and syntax—both of which she used to create a feeling of the extraordinary meaning somehow embodied and contained within the ordinary object or event. This feeling is transmitted as tone. And from this tone, this stance, a lifetime of poems developed.

Many readers and critics consider “At the Fishhouses” her finest poem. I have chosen it to demonstrate her principles of revision.

The earliest remaining draft of “At the Fishhouses,” four pages from a small loose-leaf binder, is essentially a list of details Bishop wanted to include in her poem. An example from the first notebook page:

I sang him “A Mighty Fortress Is My God”
[Line crossed out]
& he [crossed out] stood up in the water &
                                                            regarded me
steadily with big eyes, turning his head a little
                                                            from time to time.
[A solid line]
They have a capstan there
the thin bright grass [something?] sprinkle
the smell of [fish crossed out] codfish
that makes the nose run it is so strong
the little “fish houses”—

For all of its lack of form, the important aspects that appear in the finished poem are on these notebook pages. Eventually, through many revisions (seven exist in the Bishop papers at Vassar), this is what finally became the published opening:

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea.

The first line, from the second draft onward, because it begins with the word “Although” (a subordinate conjunction), gives one the feeling of picking up the thread of a story already half-told or at least already in motion. It also rings like an apology, as if the poet is saying she shouldn't really be here and by further implication, neither should the reader—“but since we are, I'll tell you about an old man”—who it seems is also here in spite of the cold. One gets the sense of overhearing, or in this case, noticing by miraculous accident a scene we perhaps should feel privileged or honored to see. I liken it to the same hushed, mysterious, religious presence one feels when entering a cathedral for the first time. Isn't this nearly a perfect way to prime the reader for the poem's developing devotional tone, and an active first step toward forming the poem's dramatic shape?

Since “At the Fishhouses” is one of the first published poems in which Bishop attempts to deal in some way with her Nova Scotian childhood, it seems only right for the poem to begin “Although”—as if dealing for the first time with feelings and subjects that have been alive and moving, largely unexpressed within the poet for years. The way the title works and interacts in combination with the first sentence, provides the poem's basic imagistic scene and locates it in time and place. A short six lines cover the weather, the poem's single figure (an old man) and what he is doing (netting) and even the light in which he is doing it. That's quite a stretch for just six lines, but they go even farther than that; they do it in a way that feels reflective and present at the same time. This goes back to Bishop's essay on Hopkins, where she indicated that timing in a poem was essential. This duality of feeling, of the present somehow mixed up with the past, gets its original impetus from two little words in the poem's very first line: “Although it is a cold evening,” “… it is …”: they insist on now, while everything emotional the poem imparts is “historical, flowing.”

The meaning of the words (the first level of perception) in the first stanza says one thing, while the feeling and resonance (the second and subsequent levels) say another. This combination creates a tone, quiet yet evocative; a devotional tone that grows out of Bishop's diction, and certain key words that emphasize this tone, one of timelessness, continuity, and mystery. This devotional tone was something Bishop worked on throughout her various drafts. Here is the section of the first draft that corresponds with her eventually chosen opening:

Although it is a cold evening—
                                        an old man [unintelligible]
                                                  sits netting [unintelligible]
[solid line]
Down by one of the little “fish-houses”
an old man sits netting
who knew my grandfather.
His nets are fine & dark brown
almost purple & his bobbin is polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
that it makes your nose run, and your eyes water—
The five little houses have very peaked roofs
& little cleated gangplanks running up to
                                                                                the second story
for wheelbarrows.
                                                            grass on the shore side
They are silver; mossy on the leeward
and large tubs completely lined
                    with codfish scales plastered stuck
& a wheelbarrow equally plastered with
                                                                                them
a thick creamy iridescent coat of mail
                                                            with flies crawling on it—

The first faint gleamings of Bishop's devotional tone are here in phrases and lines like, “His nets are fine and dark brown / almost purple & his bin is polished,” “They are silver,” and “a thick creamy iridescent coat of mail.” They are as yet unconvincing and lack the power they will have in the final version where, fully developed, they radiate a sense of light against the darkness. In the next draft, the second, Bishop quickly drops the line “who knew my grandfather” only to re-insert it later in the same draft. This line, more than any other, works against the tone Bishop seeks to set; it particularizes the scene in a way that detracts from its mystery. With it removed, the scene begins to feel both specific and universal at the same time, balancing qualities necessary to the dramatic success of Bishop's devotional tone. More important is the deletion of the personal pronouns “my” and “your.” This, like the moving of “grandfather,” diminishes the possibility that the reader will misinterpret the tone and identify strongly with the scene in a too personal way—something that might disallow the tone Bishop is working toward. Her possessive “one's” also has a much more formal ring, a resonance more in sync with Bishop's stretch for the devotional. The removal of these pronouns is crucial; it not only helps to establish the devotional tone, but will be used later by Bishop to contrast and emphasize the pronouns she does employ (pronouns become very important in the last stanza). Following the change of “They are silver” to “All is a heavy silver,” Bishop adds what ultimately becomes the trope for “knowledge” and carries most of the spiritual weight in the poem, the “sea”—“the surface of the sea.” “Bobbin” is changed to “shuttle” and the color of the net becomes “a dark plum-brown, / almost purple.” The second draft:

Although it is a cold evening
down at one of the little fish-houses
an old man sits netting.
His net is a fine brown, a dark plum-brown,
almost purple; his shuttle is polished.
The air is so strong of codfish
that at first it makes one's nose run & one's
                                                                                                    eyes water.
The five fish-houses have high peaked roofs
and narrow cleated gangplanks run up to
                                                                                                    the second stories
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is a heavy silver, the surface of the
                                                                                                    sea,
& the small old buildings, and the random
benches & poles & lobster pots
and the small old buildings, an emerald moss
grows on their shoreward walls.
Here are the big codfish tubs completely
                                                                                                    lined
with layers of beautiful cod-fish scales
and the wheelbarrow as equally plastered
                                                                                                    with them,
thick creamy iridescent coats of mail
with small iridescent flies crawling
                                                                                                    on them.

There is often a cumulative effect in Bishop's revision, especially when it comes to certain key words and phrases. Following them through the various drafts of this poem, one can see how Bishop layers them, almost like coats of paint, until her desired effect of a devotional tone is achieved—“cold” and “old man” in the first draft—“gloaming” in the third and the change of “his net is fine brown, a dark plum-brown, / almost purple” in the first draft, to “almost invisibly fine, / a dark purple-brown,” in the third, and finally to “almost invisible, / a dark purple-brown” in the fifth. Not only has the syntax been tightened, making them read more smoothly, but even what the phrases do has changed. In its original form “invisible” modified the “net” alone; in its later form it modifies both the net and the old man. There are no hard and fast edges or easily encapsulated meanings in Bishop's descriptions—to be understood, they have to be felt as well as intellectually discerned. How appropriate it seems that Bishop would begin this poem with a strategy that emphasizes a tone of continuity and timelessness. This is surely a case of Bishop's opening strategy matching the subject's need. And can the music in her lines be overlooked? Hardly.

So much music fills Bishop's work that one comes to expect it and even forget how much it contributes to the effectiveness of her language and the resulting resonance. Bishop, in the opening lines of “At the Fishhouses” (as Keats once advised Shelley), has “load[ed] every rift with ore.” Alliteration and rhyming sounds buried within the line instead of at its end are two of her favorite techniques. There's the rhyming long “o” sound of “although” and “gloaming,” of “cold” and “old”—the string of “o” and “n” sounds in lines five through eight, “brown,” “worn,” “strong,” and “run”—the ringing of “sits” and “nets,” “purple” and “polished,” “five” and “fishhouses”—the “steeply peaked roofs” and “cleated gang-planks” and “gables.” Her language and word choice is almost always conversational, yet there's a musical quality to it that heightens her language's effect. Often trochees or spondees, these words mimic the insistance (through stress) heard in much of Hopkins's verse.

The devotional tone is one that holds sway over the poem until almost the end of the first stanza, where Bishop, highlighting one of her greatest assets—her expert use and understanding of the “… releasing, checking, timing, and repeating of the movement of the mind …”—slightly changes the tone to one of matter-of-fact, conversational observation. “The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. / He was a friend of my grandfather. / We talk of the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring / while he waits for a herring boat to come in.” These lines needed little revision after their introduction in the second draft; the only change was the reverse of the third and fourth lines.

Dramatically, this section tends to pull the reader up and out of the devotional frame of mind, a feat Bishop accomplishes in both the personal content of the lines and by their length—short and functional to reflect their utilitarian purpose, and by their opposition to her longer and more musical lines. Throughout the poem there is an interplay between the various tonalities and a tension that helps to create the poem's dramatic effect. Following the lines where the speaker and the old man have their exchange, the tone is again serious and devotional as Bishop returns to reverent description—“There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. / He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away.”

Bishop now makes what I think is a dramatically daring move in the third stanza: She sings hymns to a seal, changing the tone from devotional and serious to comic. And, more important, she introduces the first personal pronoun “I.” “… He was interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.” Bishop revels in this comic tone for seven more lines, seven through thirteen:

I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgement.

This is a critical moment in the poem; at this point Bishop is more overtly involved than anywhere else. It's a personal move (a digression?) she can afford when considering how solidly she has built and reinforced the poem's primary devotional tone. The first version of this scene bears small resemblance to the finished version:

I sang him “A Mighty Fortress Is My God”
                                        [Crossed out]
& he [Crossed out] stood up in the water &
                                                            regarded me
                                                  steadily with big eyes, turning his head
a little
                                                            from time to time.

One has a feeling that this first version is literally what happened on that night many years before in Nova Scotia. Still it isn't poetry, and poetry is what Elizabeth Bishop's life was about. I see her rejecting this bare-bones outline in favor of what she writes next; a version that begins to catch and embody the spiritual as well as the factual. The second draft:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
only to fish and to seals—One seal
particularly I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me; he was interested in music.
I want to sing him all the Baptist hymns.
I sung him “A Mighty Fortress Is My God”
and he stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, with round eyes, moving his head a little.

For some reason this section does not appear in the third draft. I suspect that Bishop wasn't discarding it (it seems too central), but merely working on other sections of the poem. In evidence, it reappears in the fourth draft with these changes—an ellipsis following “to fish and to seals …,” (which signals a shift of thought—the mind-in-motion Bishop is so famous for); the syntactic moving of “particularly” up one line, changing “One seal” to “One seal particularly” (the enjambment broke the phrase to no advantage); the dropping of the period after “music” which allows the line to flow more actively into the next (which is also changed from “I want to sing” to “so I used to sing”); and the changing of “round eyes” to “dark eyes.” These small changes do enhance this section, but the really major change comes at the bottom of the draft, where Bishop has handwritten this:

Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge again
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgement.

These changes seem to be written excitedly: an arrow is drawn from the changes to where Bishop wants them inserted into the text. The writing itself might well reflect the suddenness of Bishop's illumination, and since these lines are not hinted at elsewhere in the previous drafts, I believe they came to Bishop almost at once, something like a revelation springing whole and in consequence of her total immersion in the material. Which leads me to the next draft, the fifth:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals … One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I sung him “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgement.

This revision is virtually the same as the fourth except for the period inserted after “me,” the semi-colon after “music” and the all important addition of this line, “like me a believer in total immersion.” I get the feeling that the rest of this section, on one level at least, was merely a matrix on which to justify the creation of this marvelous line; not that Bishop did it knowingly—it seems more a case of serendipitous circumstance. This line is pivotal and ties the first half of the poem's metaphorical stance to the second. The final version:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals … One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgement.

Again returning to the devotional tone, Bishop next slips in a crucial pronoun—“us” … “the clear gray icy water … Back behind us.” In context, of course, she seems to mean the seal, the old man and herself, but I suspect that this means much more. Isn't this the first hint of Bishop's linking of us, the reader, with herself? Certainly this is the purpose of Bishop's carefully holding off the important pronouns until now in the poem, where they come fast and furious and appear to change almost every few lines. This pronoun didn't show up until the fifth draft where it is handwritten at the bottom. In the sixth it occupies the place it will in the finished version—“the clear gray icy water … Back behind us.” Isn't it significant that it follows an ellipsis, the first use of “I,” and that Bishop has half-stopped the line with a comma, thereby separating it slightly from its connection to the following line? I think so.

Bishop for the last time reinforces the devotional's dramatic effect before she switches to the tone on which she ends the poem—chillingly authoritative—“I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, / slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, / icily free above the stones, / above the stones and then the world.” But most significant of all is the use of the personal pronoun “I” in a devotional section of the poem. Bishop has subtly begun the process of turning the poem from an inward private reflection to an outward public stance.

The closure begins in the twenty-fifth line of the third stanza—“If you should dip your hand in.” The crucial thing that happens here is the change of pronoun, the first time she uses “you” instead of “I,” and the once appearing “us.” Immediately, the whole focus of the poem moves from the poet viewing it, to one where the reader is involved in the physical action as well. This is a subtle shift by Bishop from a totally inward voice to one whose intent shifts slightly outward. It is also the first time in the poem that the sense of touch is fully suggested. Her reason for doing so, I believe, is to pull the reader in close, within touching distance, for the closure. This seems important to me, because as Bishop moves outward and into abstractions, the reader is actually invited closer, more inward, almost as if the poet and the reader are changing roles. The reader's involvement rises directly out of both the change in pronoun and in the connection the physical sense of her image demands. One additional pronoun change comes in the thirty-second line of the stanza—“It is like what we imagine knowledge to be.” The “we” moves the poem's message from the specific “I” or “you” into the universal; it is no longer the poet giving us details, or the reader alone who experiences as the “you,” but “we,” all of us who now exist, all who have gone before and all who will come after. This is a final blending of the poet and the reader into some kind of historical metaphor for everyone who has ever lived. Bishop is moving into grand philosophical statement; she's determined to carry the reader into it as well. Having accepted this line, we are prepared to accept everything that follows as basic and universal statement:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

The closure did not always develop so strongly or inevitably. It took Bishop seven drafts before she was able to produce this masterpiece's end. Her first draft reads:

If you put your hand in it
your wrist begins to ache immediately
                                                            the same sea
I have seen it before
the same
slightly, indifferently swinging
                                                            (free)
icily seeming fire                    above the [crossed out] stones
this is what                                        above the world
                    derived
                              half-drawn, half-flowing (history)
drawn from the cold hard mouth
          ''                    ''          the rocky breasts
beautiful [unintelligible]
                    forever—
                                                            drawn flowing flown.

Certainly this does not do justice to the final version, but it does show that Bishop was trying from the beginning to give memorabale impact and drama to the descriptive scenes. Most of the elements of the final version are here, even if embryonic. And I can see Bishop's principle of the mind-in-motion behind the words themselves.

When I think of Bishop's “mind-in-motion,” I usually think of—“Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it” from “Poem” or “(Write it!)” from “One Art.” Both are in the poet's voice and arise from her reflection upon something, but what happens to the “… releasing, checking, timing and repeating of the movement of the mind …” when the tone, attitude, or point-of-view are other than abruptly reflective? How does Bishop use this principle in the closure of “At the Fishhouses”—three sentences whose tone I characterize as authoritative?

I believe it has something to do with the way the mind works, the cognitive process itself. I see Bishop's strategy in this revision as one where she desired to have the closure both say (unusual for her) and embody (typical of her) the emotion generated by the previous descriptive material in the poem. How better to do this than by appealing to the process by which we best learn and remember—rhythm and repetition; a process as old as poetry and memory itself.

Simply put, the mind's need for rhythmic repetition is satisfied in the final version in ways that it isn't in the earlier drafts—an idea that first occurred to me as I stood in the synagogue for my stepson's Bar Mitzvah, half-singing, half-chanting from a four-thousand-year-old biblical text. Robert Hass, in his essay “Listening and Making” puts it this way—“We are pattern discerning animals … [and] attend to rhythm almost instinctively … it calls us to an intense, attentive consciousness.”

Of course, it's more than just rhythm and repetition—there's also an improved sound and a loosely arranged (natural?) pattern of rhyme, but most of the focus is on establishing a “timing,” the “… releasing, checking … and repeating [of] the movement of the mind …” that most becomes the act of thought and memory. This “timing” is a function mostly of syntax, linebreaks (a part of syntax) and grammar.

By the third draft Bishop had clearly improved the “timing”:

If you should dip your hand in it
immediately your wrist would begin to ache & your
                                                                                hand would burn
as if the water were a form of fire
feeding on rocks & burning with a clear gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter
and then burn your tongue.
This is what we imagine knowledge to be;
beautiful, clear, dark, utterly free,
derived burning
drawn from the cold hard mouth
drawn from the [crossed out] rocky breasts
forever flowing, drawn, flowing, flown.

In this version Bishop has begun to establish the kinds of repetitions, linebreaks, phrases and necessary pauses to mirror not the poet's mind-in-motion, as she does in the more reflective part of the poem, but her intent to turn outward with the argument she has established earlier concerning knowledge and its cost.

This change can be seen in its early stages by the repetition of “If you …” and by Bishop's addition of “should” in the closure's third draft. “Should” implies that the act of dipping one's hand requires a certain volition, or choice in the matter—“If you should dip your hand in it.” The exchange of “dip” for “put” is a change that improves the reading rhythm of the line and imposes the slightest pause between the pronunciation of “dip” and “your”—a pause that divides the line and sets a reading rhythm that will eventually depend heavily upon these pauses for its effect. These pauses impart—turn each bit of information into a small bullet of meaning.

The second line of the closure's first draft, “your wrist begins to ache immediately,” is changed to “immediately your wrist would begin to ache & your / hand would burn,” a change that lengthens the line. But more than that, it is a change that foretells the repetition (“hand” and “wrist,” “ache” and “burn”) which, along with grammatic and syntactic pauses, ultimately becomes the closure's distinguishing characteristic. The next few lines of the first version (three through six) appear again in the third version (elsewhere in the text), but the lines that follow them, are, in fact, not lines at all but scanty suggestions for lines more fully developed in the third draft. The last few lines are also sketchy, yet contain almost all of Bishop's important material for the closure, even if in a raw form—“derived” standing by itself, “Half-drawn, half-flowing (history), drawn from the cold hard mouth / drawn from the rocky breasts,” “forever,” “drawn flowing flown.”

“History,” a noun circled in the first draft, I find to be very revealing. It is one of the few times where Bishop allows an unabashed look into her intentions for and in a poem. I also suspect that Bishop, by circling it, knew it was more a note to herself than a word necessary to the poem's success. The fact that it disappears from the next three drafts, until it resurfaces handwritten in the fourth as an adjective (“historical”), suggests the validity of this to me. In fact, the drafts themselves build upon this movement from Bishop's private/family world, to the authoritative voice of her historical/philosophical closure.

In the third draft we begin to see more of what Bishop has done in a sketchy way in the first, the accumulating weight and resonance one feels building in the repetition of these nouns and verbs, of which there are two groups, the first I'll call body parts: “hand,” “wrist,” “hand,” “tongue,” “mouth,” “breast”; the second I'll call pain: “ache,” “burn,” “fire,” “burning,” “flame,” “burn” and “burning.” Can a reader not be subliminally influenced by this accumulation? This in itself is a typical mnemonic device, the repetition of something until it finally becomes not only a thing, but an integral part of memory itself. Bishop's reading rhythm now emphasizes certain words and phrases, often short phrases set against longer ones and separated by the all important pauses, each bit of information given in a fashion designed to make it memorable—the poet's “… releasing, checking, timing and repeating the movement of the mind …” in service to her closing philosophical argument, which reaches its summit in the final version:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

All of Bishop's painstaking revision is now in place: The repeated “what if,” the pause or checking of the movement in the first line, the five syllables of “immediately” which slow the second line down and drive home the effect of the powerful verb “ache,” the repeated “your” that opens both lines two and three, the addition of “bones” to the list of body parts, a move which sinks the “ache” even deeper. There is the added phrase, “Then briny,” which now opens the seventh line and supplies another pause as well as another element of tangible physicality to the poem. It is all here—Bishop, with her sense of spontaneity and “the correct manipulation of time” has changed the tense of “feeding” and “burning” to “feeds” and “burns”; and “knowledge” now appears twice for emphasis. But the pausing and checking, repeating, and releasing of the mind takes on its full effect in the last six lines, where the poem, following the fluid, lightly stressed reading of the line “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be,” becomes a series of short, musically packed words and phrases, each separated by the checking effect of a pause. (Slashes have been added by me to mark these pauses in the lines below.) She ends in a way that serves to honor the “timing” and “movement of the mind” she absorbed so well from Hopkins:

dark, / salt, / clear, / moving, / utterly free, /
drawn / from the cold / hard / mouth /
of the world, / derived / from the rocky breasts /
forever, / flowing and drawn, / and since /
our knowledge is historical, / flowing, and flown

Having immersed myself at length in Bishop's poems and drafts, I have come to several conclusions. Bishop, it seems to me, generally did not revise for discovery, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Her poems were emotionally whole even before she put pen to paper; rarely did she change the order of her stanzas (as so many poets do in revision), or feel her way through a poem for subject matter or content. Indeed, her search was for the best way to express and say what she already felt—for the perfect sound, or series of sounds, the right word or phrase to make a subject palpable, alive and more present. And her way of doing this was always modified by and filtered through the poetic beliefs she learned so well (and continued over the years to perfect) from George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins—the move toward a quiet, unexcited, natural, conversational language and a duplication of the mind caught in the act and motion of thought, all applied to create a spiritual resonance that seems embodied within and emanates from the objects and events of the poem. In her search for this balance, Bishop managed in her best poems to walk an almost perfect line between content and language, sound and sense. The large number of unfinished and unpublished poems among her papers at Vassar attest to the difficulty of this task.

When Bishop spoke of timing, in her essay on Hopkins, she had a specific notion of the importance of pacing in poetry. This notion suggests something more to me—the importance of time to Bishop's poetry, both in its writing and in our reading. It took Bishop twenty years to complete “The Moose.” Other poems took many years and many revisions for Bishop to give them their quiet surface and apparent simplicity; a simplicity belied by the emotion they invoke. As John Ashbery said of Bishop's poem “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”: “After twenty years … I am unable to exhaust the meaning of its concluding line: ‘And looked and looked our infant sight away,’ and I suspect that its secret has very much to do with the secret of Miss Bishop's poetry.” The secret, Mr. Ashbery, was painstaking revision.