“The Closet of Breath: Elizabeth Bishop, Her Body and Her Art,” in Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 152-75.

[In the following essay, Lombardi examines the effect of Bishop's numerous illnesses on her poetry.]

In 1937, when Elizabeth Bishop was twenty-six, she discovered the wilds of Florida on a fishing expedition and fell in love with the swamps and palm forests of a state that was still a North American wilderness. When she and her friend Louise Crane came to live in Key West the following year, however, their response to the tropical Cayo Hueso, known as the Bone Key, was severely colored by the tragic six-month stay in Europe that intervened between Bishop's first ecstatic visit to Florida and her return.¹ Bishop and her close friends, Crane and Margaret Miller, had been traveling from Burgundy back to Paris when their car was forced off the road and flipped over. Miller, a painter, was the only one seriously injured. Her arm, partially cut from her body when she was thrown clear of the car, eventually had to be amputated to the elbow.

If we look at Bishop's life and work during her time in Florida, we find that her imagination is haunted by the maiming of her intimate friend and fellow artist. The tragedy brought into terrible focus preoccupations already troubling the young poet—chief among them the artist's relationship to her own body, to its passions and its vulnerabilities. In one of a series of notebooks that she kept during her years in Key West, Bishop describes the automobile accident: “the arm lay outstretched in the soft brown grass at the side of the road and spoke quietly to itself, ‘Oh my poor body! Oh my poor body! I cannot bear to give you up,’” but the detached limb's desire to be quickly reunited with its body soon gives way to other thoughts, “so this is what it means to be really ‘alone in the world!’”² Bishop clearly identifies with the lonely arm—the analytic arm of the artist detached from the woman and from the sensual memories that a woman's body retains. Like the acutely conscious arm speaking to itself by the side of the road, Bishop is terribly drawn to and yet alienated from the unconscious life of her own body, which she comes to view with a mixture of fascination, embarrassment, and pity (KW 2:12).

During the years in Florida, Bishop suffers from almost nightly attacks of debilitating asthma, and records her dreams and anxieties in the small notebooks that have only recently been made available to scholars. In the seclusion of these private journals, she turns with uncharacteristic forthrightness to the subject of flesh, its pleasures and its torments. She jots down plans to develop plays and poems about the bodily afflictions of Job, Jonah, St. Teresa, and St. Anthony, and appears especially preoccupied, for very personal reasons, with the fate of St. Sebastian. Repeatedly referred to in the Key West journals, he figures prominently again in an unfinished essay entitled A Little About Brazil, where the poet explains her fascination with him: “St Sebastian protects Rio de Janeiro and perhaps that is the reason why the people are all crazy about hypodermic injections.” Bishop, an asthmatic forced to inject herself with cortisone, sees Sebastian's martyrdom as a reminder of her own intimate relationship with the hypodermic needle.

The poet's asthma and allergic inflammations—her most chronic physical ailments—are the primary focus of her lengthy letters to her New York doctor during the years in Key West. Bishop's personal physician, Dr. Anny Baumann, a friend as well as medical advisor, helps the poet trace the tangled relations that exist in her life between psychosomatic illness and early maternal deprivation. Bishop's private correspondence and notebook entries reveal that the poet's early, ambivalent experience of mother love continued to haunt her adult sexual relationships—and influence her view of the ambiguous bond between poet and reader.

Bishop's published work rarely speaks about her illness directly. In her poetry she refuses to allow herself, her body, and her experience to be contained within any culturally prescribed notion of gender or sexual orientation. She chooses, instead, to cloak and re-cloak her own flesh, to cross-dress, displace, or otherwise project her most intense feelings into a variety of poetic protagonists in order to escape stifling categorization and conventional definitions of identity. Still, Bishop's imagination continually pursues the implications of her private battle for breath. As a poet she transmutes the symptoms of her asthmatic condition into a rich cache of metaphors that help enact her sense of the world: for Bishop, human interaction takes place within a set of smothering categories (a series of waiting rooms, if you will) that enforce a kind of artificial intimacy among their occupants—an intimacy that often fails to respect the uniqueness and the privacy of each human soul.³ While asthma is not the central subject of poems like “In the Waiting Room,” “O Breath,” and “The Riverman,” knowledge of Bishop's condition opens up new ways for the reader to approach crucial images of respiration, suffocation, and constriction in each work—images that draw attention to the equivocal reality of human relationships.

For much of Bishop's life her body registered emotional distress in painful ways. The poet's disabling allergic inflammations were largely responsible for perhaps the most important personal and professional decision of her life—to remain as a permanent resident in Brazil. While visiting friends in Rio de Janeiro, Bishop ate the fruit of the cashew and experienced a violent allergic reaction that left her head and ears swollen. After she recovered, she decided to stay in Brazil. In a series of letters to Baumann from her new home, near Petrópolis, she describes the onset of her affliction and her distended body: “That night my eyes starting stinging, and the next day I started to swell—and swell and swell, I didn't know one could swell so much” (January 8, 1952).

Taking 15 ccs of calcium and 7 or 8 ccs of adrenalin in the vein each day to bring her swelling down, Bishop was suffering simultaneously from a “very bad” recurrence of her childhood eczema, an inflammatory condition of the skin characterized by oozing lesions which become scaly, crusted, or hardened: “Before this started,” she writes her doctor, “I had noticed my mouth got sore from eating, I thought, too much pineapple.” With the worse case of eczema since childhood, her “ears [swollen] like large red hot mushrooms,” and her asthma as bad as ever, Bishop writes to Baumann with frustration and a hint of justifiable self-pity: “I finally got sick of being stuck with so many things [to reduce the swelling, and felt] like St. Sebastian” (January 8, 1952). She proved allergic to the new “wonder drug,” penicillin, and her infected skin glands formed localized inflammations, or “boils.” Writing about the episode to her favorite relative, Aunt Grace, she remarks, “when someone is allergic like me, you never know what may happen, apparently” (July 16, 1956). Even when she was singing the praises of cortisone, an anti-inflammatory drug that left her in a state of “euphoria” and heightened creativity, she worried about still another form of swelling: “It's amazing how energetic it makes one feel although also I'm afraid it has a tendency to make one get even fatter” (letter to Baumann from Samambaia, December 28, 1952). Weight gain had been a worry for many years; she had been taking two grains a day of thyroid pills to control her weight while in Washington, D.C., in 1949: “If I don't, I just keep getting fat no matter what I eat” (letter to Baumann, December 12). Like a latter-day St. Teresa, whose Way of Perfection became a permanent part of Bishop's private library, she tests her own strength by a “fastidious” disciplining of her wayward, expanding flesh (KW 2:23).

Of all her inflammatory reactions, however, bronchial asthma was the most chronic. Asthma is an allergic response to foreign substances that generally enter the body by way of the air breathed or the food eaten. In response to these substances the mucous membranes of the respiratory system secrete excessive amounts of mucus, and the smaller bronchial muscles go into spasms. This narrows the passageways, making it difficult to expel air. Bishop's wheezing lungs prevented her from taking up a comfortable and lasting residence in the places she loved, contributing to an already intense feeling of homelessness. To Baumann she confides that asthma has become the single most frustrating impediment to her happiness—“as soon as I get to a place I like best of all it starts again,” she writes from Key West on December 30, 1948. Earlier that year (August 5), she writes to Baumann from Stonington, Maine, where her asthma and a variety of other acute allergic reactions make it impossible for her to sleep, and the almost hourly injections of adrenalin she takes to regulate her breathing leave her nauseated and dizzy: “For the past eight or nine years I have had asthma about every day and night.” Awarded the first Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Bishop finds by February of 1952 that the “bounty [from the fellowship] has gone mostly for adrenalin.”

The period covered by the Key West Notebooks became a time of psychological investigation for Bishop, who desperately needed to know the cause of her physical misery. Her remarks to Baumann make it clear that she had come to regard her doctor as a psychiatric advisor. From Stonington she writes Baumann that she is concerned with the state of her mind and its impact on her physical condition: “Every magazine or paper I pick up has an article proving that asthma is psychosomatic, everyone now thinks it is almost entirely, if not entirely mental” (August 5, 1948). In a letter to Baumann from Yaddo dated January 17, 1951, she describes bouts with asthma that leave her emotionally as well as physically exhausted, and she traces her “discouragement, panic, sleeplessness, nightmares” to the realization that she is “exactly the age now at which [her] father died.” Her body's seemingly uncontrollable inflammations accorded somehow with what Bishop calls, in another letter to Baumann, her “morbid swellings of the conscience”—painful anxieties rooted in childhood sadness that rise up unpredictably to overwhelm her, like bad dreams. In her notebook she records these “dreams that overpowered [her] / (“mugging”) from behind” (KW 2:141). Just above these observations she scribbles three phrases in quick succession: “the fierce odors,” “family mortality,” “families of mortalities.”

The central conditions of Bishop's childhood, her early orphaning and sense of maternal deprivation, left her with an acute sensitivity to the ways in which personal anguish and shame may be hidden from view. Her family corseted their emotions in a futile attempt to tame the brute world of pain and raise themselves out of lassitude. The effort drove them into a den of artificial innocence. Early on she was initiated into strategies of evasion and indirection and a “Puritan outlook” with respect to the body and its “embarrassing” weaknesses that accompanied her on her travels and became the burdensome “inheritance” she carried with her to Brazil—an inheritance that set her apart from that country's more “tolerant” natives (letter to Baumann from Rio de Janiero, July 7, 1954).⁴ Bishop considers herself physically allergic to the atmosphere in which she was raised, the “hypocrisy [that was] so common then, so unrecognized, that it fooled everyone, including” the hypocrite himself (“Memories of Uncle Neddy,” CProse 230⁵). Hypocrisy reminds her of the molds and mildews that made her life so miserable; like the hypocrite, the “gray-green dust” is double in nature, suggesting blooming life and its sooty shadow, “morbidity”—“or perhaps mortality is a better word.” In her private notebooks she would call this hypocrisy the “fierce odors” of “family mortality” that surrounded her earliest years.⁶

Though she suffered from bronchitis in the first years of her life in her maternal grandparents' home in Nova Scotia, the condition became much worse when her mother succumbed to insanity and was permanently hospitalized. Bishop was only five years old. Her paternal grandparents took the girl (“unconsulted and against my wishes,” as she later put it) to Worcester, Massachusetts. Bishop was given the impression that her New England relatives were “saving” her from a life of poverty and provincialism in Canada. She was brought to a “gloomy house” where even the pet Boston terrier had a “peculiar Bostonian sense of guilt” (CProse 21). Feeling like a “guest” in this airless atmosphere, expected to somehow intuit an “unknown past” that no one ever directly explained to her, and held to the strict discipline of behaving as a “little girl” should, Bishop's body rebelled. The combination of severe illnesses that struck her in Worcester—acute asthma, eczema, and even symptoms of St. Vitus' dance—almost killed her in that first winter, where she was bedridden and spent most of her time “lying in bed wheezing and reading” (Stevenson 34, Kalstone 27).

Her wheezing seemed to worsen as she felt herself being steadily drawn into a conspiracy of evasion concerning her father's death and mother's insanity. The female voices around her—grandmothers and aunts—formed a “skein” in which she was “caught.” “In the Village,” Bishop's autobiographical account of her mother's final breakdown, describes the inscrutable adult world into which the six-year-old Elizabeth felt herself being pulled “against her will”—a world in which speech is always elliptical and secret shames are guarded even from the child that is most affected by them. Bishop's female relations, refusing to speak about her mother's “embarrassing” mental illness in anything but oblique terms “in front of the child,” became associated in her mind with the equivocal: their speech was always subject to two or more interpretations, always generating misleading and confusing double meanings and puns. “Elizabeth” has difficulty with the word “mourning” which she hears as “morning,” a confusion that unsettles her: “Why, in the morning, did one put on black” (CProse 254). Apparently death—and, in particular, her father's death—has never been explained to the child.

Years later Bishop looks back on the period in her childhood as her initiation into the duplicity of speech and the suffocating constraints that propriety imposes on free expression. In her short memoir, “The Country Mouse,” she remembers the hard lessons learned that winter with her Worcester grandparents. First among these was the revelation that she was “becoming one of them”: rather than tell a playmate the shameful truth about her mother she lies, saying that her mother has died—a lie born out of a “hideous craving for sympathy.” The moment the lie leaves her lips she is gripped by her own capacity to be as “false” as any of her relations, to lie, that is, in the “family voice.” In the “family voice”—strongly associated with the garrulousness and duplicity culturally ascribed to women—Bishop finds the tendency toward “morbidity” that she would later attribute to confessional poets (especially women writers like Elizabeth Bowen). The social obligation imposed on the woman to speak in well-modulated tones and to corset unseemly emotions exacted a terrible price on Bishop's own family—especially on her mother, whose “real thrilling beautiful voice,” stifled by grief and social convention, became, in the end, a terrifying scream.⁷

Long into adulthood Bishop is haunted by nightmare images of dark, shrouded, caterwauling women whose grating voices threaten to invade and animate her own body, and whose intrusive presence she attempts to expel:

In a black sedan with high windows, a tall woman, Aunt Florence, only I knew it wasn't really Aunt Florence, stood outside, wanting to get in talking, talking. I screwed up the window, hurriedly and caught the tips of her gloved fingers in the crack at the top. She kept on talking, talking, begging me to let her in the car, and I felt nauseated. She was dressed all in black, with a large black hat, the gloves were soiled.

(KW 1:38)

Any reader of the late poem “In the Waiting Room” will recognize in this Key West nightmare both Aunt Florence (concealed behind the name “Aunt Consuelo” in the poem) and the powerful sensations and images that this vision describes. In both dream and poem Aunt Florence's cries of pain induce nausea in her niece and threaten to invade the sanctuary Bishop has provided for herself. The “armored car of dreams,” to borrow a phrase from “Sleeping Standing Up” (CP 30),⁸ has a window-like “mouth” and seems an extension of the dreamer's own body. Breathing in the fierce odor of her aunt's frantic desperation “to be let in,” Bishop responds by closing this one avenue of access and figuratively “biting” the hand that reaches out to her. Significantly, Bishop's single most vivid memory of her mother, which she recounts in a 1978 interview with Elizabeth Spires, eerily parallels the narrative of her nightmare. Her mother, dressed incongruously in the mourning clothes required of a widow “in those days,” sat with the three-year-old Elizabeth in a swan boat in Boston. A real swan came up to the boat. Her mother “fed it and it bit her finger,” splitting the black kid glove and the skin beneath (74). The mother's gloved hands suggest the extent to which her illness became a barrier to intimacy; the child of such a mother might well harbor an unacknowledgable desire to bite the hand that failed to feed her.⁹

“In the Waiting Room” shows that the peculiar tension between Bishop and her Aunt Florence has a long history, precisely as long a history as Bishop's asthmatic condition. Whether or not a poem like “In the Waiting Room” is intended as a serious attempt to describe the psychogenesis of Bishop's asthma, it does link a traumatic childhood confrontation with a woman to the onset of intense physical distress: in the poem, as in the dream, Bishop chokes on the “cruel conundrums” of shared female experience (CP 73).

It seems right to suggest, as Alicia Ostriker does, that “In the Waiting Room” is a poem Bishop “waited a lifetime to write” and that, “in some sense, [the poet] has never left the room it describes” (72). But if this is the case we had better not sanitize the meaning of what takes place there. The child-protagonist of the poem, just shy of seven years old, does not simply become alive for the first time to her identity with others of her gender in the waiting room of a dentist's office—rather the reality of “womanhood” is rammed down her throat and she chokes on it. The central moment of the poem occurs when “Elizabeth” hears a cry of pain that disorients her because it seems to come from two places at once—literally from two throats, her Aunt Florence's and her own. In the instant when her “timid and foolish” aunt screams, “Elizabeth” is invaded and possessed from within by what she describes as “the family voice.” She feels herself caught in an enmeshed community, a whole “skein,” of female voices—voices that seem to rise up out of the pages of the National Geographic and shoot straight through her own body. Feeling her own singular sense of herself crowded out by the presence of the collective, “Elizabeth” drowns under wave after black wave as she falls into “cold, blue-black space”; in other words, she experiences the dizziness that always accompanied one of Bishop's asthmatic attacks.

We have become accustomed of late to certain metaphors drawn from the processes of breathing and speech that are used to celebrate the bond between mother and child and the unconstrained female voice. When Helene Cixous speaks to us of the woman artist who opens herself up to her maternal muse, never defending herself against possession by other “unknown women” but welcoming all the multiple “streams of song” that issue from her ecstatically crowded throat, it is, perhaps, a disappointment to enter the claustrophobic atmosphere of Bishop's “waiting room.” When the aunt's cry of pain makes what Helene Cixous might call a “vertiginous crossing” into the body of her young niece, Elizabeth derives no pleasure from the “identificatory embrace” that results. The effect is indeed “vertiginous” but only in the worst possible sense; the ground gives way beneath the young girl as her old sense of herself collapses. She is not empowered but emotionally and ontologically battered by the initiation rite. In “The Country Mouse” Bishop is far more explicit about the “great truth” she learned waiting for her aunt to emerge from the dentist's office. “Elizabeth” feels the full force of being “tricked into a false position” (CProse 33). Not only is she trapped forever within her “scabby body and wheezing lungs,” but she will grow to resemble the woman who sat opposite her in the dark room, the woman “who smiled at [her] so falsely every once in a while,” a disturbingly willing slave to social etiquette and a censorious world.

It is no accident that the child's disorienting experience is triggered by grotesque images that focus her attention on the cruel conundrums of mother love.¹⁰ The multiple and contradictory meanings that seem to attach to the maternal body and the conflicting emotions that the maternal presence evokes in “Elizabeth” push against each other in the child's throat, swelling up behind her voice, and pitching her into a new world without clear dimensions or comforting boundaries. Like the volcanoes that the child finds pictured in her magazine, Bishop's own mother threatened to erupt in unpredictable ways; emotionally numb one moment, she would spill over in rivulets of fiery, hysterical emotion the next. “Elizabeth,” who we know is feeling the loss of her own mother, studies the pages of the National Geographic; her attention is understandably drawn to the photographs of mothers and children as she turns the pages of the magazine: black, naked women, their necks strangled, “wound round and round with wire,” hold babies whose malleable heads have been “wound round and round with string.” A mother's “awful hanging breasts”—so “horrifying” in their power to excite longing and betray trust—are pictured in unbearable proximity to her infant's distorted head.

The black woman captured by the western photographer's shutter and trapped in the grip of her own culture passes a legacy of submission on to her infant. By manipulating her infant's skull she reinforces the very codes of beauty and sexual attractiveness that have delimited her own life, and we begin to wonder how fully the mother is implicated in her culture's campaign to mute individuality and enforce conformity. This compression of the baby's head also reminds the reader of a scene from “In the Village.” Elizabeth sits in her grandmother's kitchen in Great Village, Nova Scotia, being force-fed a bowl of porridge by her mother, who struggles to maintain her mental balance by repeating mechanically the primal gestures of maternal love. Then, seeing how tall her child has grown in her absence, the mother impulsively lays her hands on her daughter's head, pushing her down—hoping to bring back the paradisiacal time of her daughter's infancy and bring the shrill tone of their relationship back down to a safer pitch. The child of “In the Village” quickly “slides out from under” the mother's oppressive hands, but she grows up to be the “Elizabeth” who cannot escape the lessons of the waiting room—the heavy emotional legacy that may be passed from mother to daughter through the laying on of hands (CProse 261). “Sliding beneath a big black wave,” the walls of the waiting room seem to dissolve around the child who undergoes the kind of a disillusionment Bishop describes in “Hannibal and Napoleon,” an unpublished poem: “the delightful kindergarten, the garden of the world, is shown growing on the hollow soil of a volcano.” The “acute” question of “In the Waiting Room” proliferates helplessly across every Bishop poem concerned, however obliquely, with the dynamics of female connection. But the question is stated most explicitly in “Faustina, Or Rock Roses.” There, the “sinister kind face” of the black servant tending her white mistress evokes the “cruel black / coincident conundrum” of mother love and female bonding darkened even further by the history of relations between the races: does woman love offer “a dream of protection and rest” or the “very worst, / the unimaginable nightmare” (CP 73-74)?

Whatever happiness Bishop found with other women grew on the hollow soil of a volcano—since, inevitably, she carried her childhood experience of love's instabilities and betrayals into the world of adult relationships. Bishop's mature poetic style, known for its rich ambiguities and oblique approach to love and sexuality, stresses the emotional dislocation and instability in all efforts of affection. Oscillating between self-exposure and concealment, her poetry captures the approaches and withdrawals that mark any human relationship in which an individual's privacy is necessarily placed at risk. Settling on a poetic style that seems to give and take away meaning in the same motion, Bishop captures the quality of circumlocution that, as we have seen, she first found in the conversation of her grandmother and aunts. Irritated with her family's “hypocrisy,” she nevertheless recognizes that such duplicity is a part of the dynamics of human relation—and part of the very language we use as culturally circumscribed human beings.

Bishop's guarded style is attuned to the way parents and their children, poets and their readers, actually appear to one another: the way, that is, that they alternate emotionally between accessibility and obscurity. With the tenacity of the water spider that stays on the surface of the pool, Bishop holds to a poetry of ripples and verbal feints. But in generally refusing to speak directly about her personal tragedies, she would find herself struggling upstream against the currents of a new post-fifties generation of poets—writers like Anne Sexton, who follow the example of Bishop's own dear friend Robert Lowell and plunge headlong into the river of self-reference, making rich use of the sorrow to be found there.

In significant ways, Bishop's responses to trends in the poetry of her contemporaries are moored to somatic issues—dependent, that is, on what Bishop considers to be a crisis in the size and scale of personal ambition. Her notebooks show just how closely she tended to relate poetic control and a stoical and disciplined approach to physical discomfort. Indeed, once we fully appreciate the impact of the poet's allergic inflammations on her life—and her private struggle to bring her swollen body back down to the scale of human life—we gain a better understanding of why Bishop published only ninety-five poems in her lifetime, each one a model of leanness and restraint.

Bishop's personal code of ethics demanded such discipline, in art as well as in life. For this reason her criticism of what she regarded as self-dramatizing confession and easy vulgarity in the work of certain younger poets is far more than the prudish response of a woman raised in an older decorum. The outpourings of Anne Sexton and W. D. Snodgrass raised grave suspicions in Bishop's mind because they struck her as “egocentric—simply that” (Kalstone 209). She considered the general weakening of standards, and the failure to discriminate between good poetry and mere self-promotion, a peculiarly “American sickness” (letter to Lowell, March 5, 1963, qtd. in Millier 48). Both the art and the culture that produced it had grown bloated, flaccid, infected with unoriginality—and needed a good lancing. Essentially she objected to the confessional poetry of her peers because its authors “boasted” about their private catastrophes so shamelessly, and congratulated themselves so continually on their candor. To speak as though one were always in the throes of some intolerable crisis, Bishop wrote in 1967, is

really something new in the world. There have been diaries that were frank—and generally intended to be read after the poet's death. Now the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world. … The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves.”

(“Second Chance,” Time, June 2, 1967, p. 69)

The key to Bishop's poetic style, its minimalism, deflection, and hard-won moral vision, lies in her battle to rid her work of the excessive “morbidity” she recognized in the world around her. Morbidity, the body's susceptibility to disease and corruption, becomes Bishop's trope for moral as well as physical “weakness and acquiescence” spreading over the younger generation of poets like the sly growth of mildew. The molds and mildews that make her choke, swell, and violently shake were “just enough to serve as a hint of morbidity” (CProse 228), and reminded her of the “great American sickness” she diagnosed in a March 1961 letter to Lowell: “Too much of everything—too much painting, too much poetry, too many novels—and much too much money. … And no one really feeling anything much” (Millier 47). Bishop believed that her ethical aversion to fatty degeneration distinguished her in an age that seemed to have lost its discrimination and restraint. A deeply reserved and subtle poet, Bishop would apply a cool compress to her poems at the first sign of inflated self-regard or swollen ego.

Objecting to the way confessional art transformed the poet into a diarist and the reader into a confidante or confessor, Bishop insisted that the actual bond between writer and reader was marked, not by genuine intimacy, but by distance and impersonality. Adrienne Rich has suggested the intimacy was altogether absent in Bishop's later work, where the poet seems to examine, instead, the way people are distanced from one another by differences of class and race (16). But the effect of distance that Rich observes may just as easily be seen as the poet's way of expressing her own experience of intimacy: the unyielding reality of loss, separation, even betrayal, that makes erotic and emotional connection “a billion times told lovelier,” and “more dangerous”—to borrow from Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of Bishop's poetic masters.

Finally Bishop shows us that writer and reader are linked to one another not by imagined intimacy but by the bonds of a common language—a language that is never straightforward in its effects. “In the Village,” as we have already seen, describes the poet's early awakening to the fact that language is irremediably equivocal, open to two or more possibilities, always hiding something in the process of revealing everything. Donald Hall was frustrated by this “equivocal” quality in the poetic language of Marianne Moore, which for him always appeared teasingly inaccessible—“giving as it takes away, folding back on itself the moment one begins to understand so that an exactly opposite meaning begins to seem plausible” (84-85). But it would seem that Bishop came to accept an ambiguity that once troubled her, transforming equivocation into a treasured artistic effect. The moments of apparent personal connection between the poet and her reader are immeasurably enriched by the understanding they share that each must finally remain an irresolvable mystery to the other.

The mystery remains despite the efforts of literary interpreters to, as Bishop put it, “pretty up” the poet's work. “Poetry should have more of the unconscious spots left in,” she writes as she distinguishes her own poetry from that of Wallace Stevens: “What I tire of quickly in Wallace Stevens is the self-consciousness—poetry so aware lacks depth” (KW 2:89). It seems a mild irony that the richly ambiguous Bishop, by contrast, seems to make a model of clarity out of a poet famous for his own brand of obscurity. Once again her criticism of the postmodern poet is directed at the way he dissects his own psyche and deprives his reader of a distinct pleasure—the delight of speculation. In a fragment from the same notebook Bishop reminds herself that “art is never altogether pleasing unless one can suspect it of ulterior motive … of a ‘secret confidence’” that the poet has reserved to herself. A fundamentally shy person, Bishop nevertheless accepts that the reader's pleasure lies in pursuing her maddeningly elusive presence in the poem. She does all she can to enhance the thrill of the chase through subtle indirection.

Bishop obscured the shape of her personal life, of course, for other reasons as well, reasons having to do with the social and aesthetic conventions of her day.¹¹ Love and sexuality were threatening subjects for a woman with poetic ambitions, and doubly so for a woman of Bishop's sexual proclivity. Even in her late poems, when she is no longer cloaking her own sexuality under the guise of animal courtship, her verse still dances around the subject of homosexuality. Bishop's strategies of concealment resemble those of the female lizard she describes on a scrap of paper folded into the back cover of one of her notebooks: the lizard “hides … all her tail, all her tiny horny sides” while the males around her “blow out [their] beautiful rose balloon [for all] to see.” The poet's imagination during her thirties is distinguished by a desire to protect herself from everything that threatened either the borders of her own body or her uniqueness as a person and an artist, and her poems seem to expand outward in an intimate embrace of the world only to fold back on themselves and on the haven of the sole self.

Bishop's “O Breath” is one of her few published poems about the eroticized female body. At the same time it is also one of the few poems in which she consciously and conspicuously turns her attention to the “equivocal” nature of her own poetic style. Moreover, here she uses asthma to describe the stifling pressures that impinge on her life as a poet. “O Breath” is a captivatingly ambiguous love poem that plays with the narrow passageway for authorized speech permitted a woman of her class and education in 1955. Beneath the poem's surface reticence, we sense something moving invisibly: a faint image of erotic coupling, or its aftermath. All we do see clearly is the broken contours of this poem as it appears on the page—as though it were determined to speak though under enormous pressure to hold back. The poem's gasping, halting rhythms and labored caesuras mimic the wheezing lungs of a restless asthmatic trying to expel the suffocating air. In the struggle to bathe, each hard-won phrase wrested from silence arches over the negative troughs, the breaks, the white space left on the page. The poem's structure enables Bishop to “catch her breath” and give the agonies of asthma visible shape—the cradling and containing rib cage of words:

Beneath that loved                    and celebrated breast,
silent, bored really                    blindly veined,
grieves, maybe                    lives and lets
live, passes                    bets,
something moving                    but invisibly,
and with what clamor                    why restrained
I cannot fathom                    even a ripple.
(See the thin flying                    of nine black hairs
four around one                    five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably                    on your own breath.)
Equivocal, but what we have in common's                    bound
to be there,
whatever we must own                    equivalents for,
something that maybe I                    could bargain with
and make a separate place                    beneath
within                    if never with.

We seem to have entered that ambiguous realm of address where two people have become one, yet remain irremediably distant from one another. One lover speaks fitfully between gasps for air as she watches the woman lying beside her “silent bored really.” The difficulty and “restraint” associated with breathing and speaking in the poem suggest the terrible restraints the poet labors under as a woman and a lesbian bound to lead a life of surface conformity and concealed depths.

When the speaker of the poem questions what lies beneath her lover's “celebrated” breast, she does so in a context that extends beyond this single lyric: “O Breath” is the last of Bishop's “Four Poems,” a short cycle that concerns itself with the frustrating puzzle of “uninnocent” conversation between lovers—of exchanges that “engage the senses, / only half meaning to” until “there is no choice” and “no sense,” or until the tension is relieved with an “unexpected kiss” (CP 76, 77). The poetic sequence concentrates on images of the heart's helpless, bewildered imprisonment in miscommunication and its unanticipated release into authentic expression. In “Conversation,” lovers hold to their positions, willfully misunderstanding one another, until the great cage of misconception breaks up in the air around them and they reach a point of understanding when “a name / and all its connotations are the same.” In “Rain Towards Morning” an electrical storm suddenly ceases, its “great light cage” is releasing a million birds from bondage, and the sky brightens like a face surprised by love. With “While Someone Telephones” the cosmic is brought back down to the personal as the poet shifts from electrically charged “wires” of light to the crossed wires of lovers parted by distance and disconnection waiting tensely for contact and “the heart's release.”

Like the protagonists of the other poems, the speaker of “O Breath” regards her lover with tender wariness. She lies awake, watching her lover's breast and the nine thin, black hairs surrounding the nipples—small, flying hairs that stir “almost intolerably” on her lover's “own breath.” Aroused by the sight, she nevertheless seems shaken by her lover's apparent insularity, her self-absorption, the regular rise and fall of her breast. Such shallow breathing is “almost intolerable” to the speaker because she herself is forced to gasp for air. The placid lover remains to the poem's end an enigma whose motivations escape the speaker, though she hopes to find in her lover's heart an “equivalent” for her own tumult, her own anxious desire for the unexpected, releasing kiss.

“O Breath,” like “Conversation” (the first of the “Four Poems”), gives expression to “the tumult in the heart” that “keeps asking questions” only to “stop and undertake to answer” in the same mystified voice. The speaker of “O Breath,” however, seems to talk only with herself, or with the reader. Since the true inner workings of her lover are invisible to her, the speaker can only project her own inner turmoil onto her lover by way of analogy, of correspondence. Hoping that boredom is only a mask for desire, but unable to “fathom even a ripple” of her lover's motivations, the speaker has no recourse but to draw from her own experience of desire in describing what might live and move within the inaccessible woman breathing beside her. She imagines the force of desire within the body lying beside her as “something” moving invisibly—something caged within that body as surely as a clamoring heart, of a pair of wheezing lungs. But when she stops and undertakes an answer to the proliferating question of the heart, the reader cannot tell the difference between inquiry and resolution, and peace is still something to be negotiated once common ground is finally discovered. Like the bond between the lovers, the release obtained at the poem's end is uncertain and “equivocal.”

“O Breath” focuses on the “almost intolerable” proximity of the loved one's body, awakening a longing for still deeper contact that may not be achieved. This is no utopian vision of a lesbian continuum where lovers always feel easy in one another's presence, able to, as Cixous would say, “expire without running out of breath.” For Bishop the urge to penetrate the deepest recesses of another person must be resisted for the sake of both people involved. The tactful poet or lover acknowledges the bounds as well as the bonds of love.

Given her equivocal experience of “home” and the “efforts of affection,” Bishop had to reinvent her life before she could draw strength from the past and translate her body into song. This reinvention is apparent in a series of dreams that link the poet's own pursuit of “quiet breath” to the figure of the mermaid breathing effortlessly in amniotic seas. Ultimately, these dreams prepare the poet for her life in Brazil, where she found, for a time, the happiness that had eluded her since childhood. Cradled by an “atmosphere of uncritical affection” in her adopted country, the poet would be able to navigate the waters of memory—and explore the remarkable powers of healing that lie within.¹²

The mermaid dreams form an extraordinary sequence that explores the yearnings, imprisonings, and problematic releases of the eroticized female body. Each dream centers on the strange hybrid shape of the sea creature. In the first of these visions, a dying mermaid washed ashore and gasping for breath becomes an emblem of Bishop's own anxieties. Her estrangement as an artist and a lesbian finds expression in the foundering ocean-woman exiled from her natural element. In a later celebratory dream, the mermaid is returned to the sea, where her body feels exhilaratingly weightless. The vision of liberation prepares the way for the greater personal happiness and freedom of expression that Bishop would experience during her first years in Brazil. Though the mermaid begins as a tragic figure, she eventually allows Bishop to navigate the dangerous shoals and eddies of a life spent in the body of a woman.¹³

The mermaid first makes her appearance in a fearful dream Bishop had one night in Stonington, Maine. In a letter to Robert Lowell she confesses that the vision left her shaken:

I've been indulging myself in a nightmare of finding a gasping mermaid under one of these exposed docks—you know, trying to tear the mussels off the piles for something to eat—horrors

(Kalstone 180).

Given her asthma, it is little wonder that she identifies so strongly with a mermaid washed ashore, or a fish held half out of the water and forced to breath in “the terrible oxygen.” An odd thing, in fact, about the reference to “terrible oxygen” in her most anthologized poem, “The Fish,” is that Bishop, the accurate observer and brilliant naturalist, has got her facts wrong. Fish find oxygen no more “terrible” than we do, since they live on it as well; their gills, however, are equipped to obtain oxygen from water, and not from air. For Bishop to link terror with oxygen she would have had to first project her own fears onto the sea creature.

What could be worse than to be left “gasping” in an alien atmosphere trying desperately to tear sustenance from a cruelly implacable world? Like the mermaid, the poet feels herself to be unequipped to breathe the same air, to live by the same social strictures, as other beings whose natures are different from her own. The dream suggests that Bishop dreads the “exposure” of her unconventionality—of her body and her homosexuality. Ultimately, in the way it evokes feelings of freakishness and alienation, the nightmare of the dying mermaid recalls the pathos of “The Little Mermaid,” the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that Bishop knew and loved so well. In the Andersen tale, the mermaid destroys herself in her futile attempt to cross over into the world of human (heterosexual) union. Seen in this light, Bishop's dream is a poignant reminder of the border-crossings lesbians were forced to make in the forties and fifties—when so many felt compelled to conceal their nature and publicly embrace the heterosexual erotic ideal.

If we look backward through even the earliest juvenilia, we see Bishop's struggling to avoid the horror of foundering and hear her yearning for a watery haven. In the 1928 poem “Sonnet,” written while Bishop was still a schoolgirl in Massachusetts, she longs for the “subaqueous stillness of the sea,” where she might find “a spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool / Heart” (CP 214). At least fifteen years later Bishop had a dream that returned her to the sea, where she enjoyed a rare moment of physical freedom and release. The beauty of the mermaid as an image of the poet is visible in a Key West notebook account of this utopian vision:

The fish was large, about 3 ft. long, large-scaled, metallic gold only a beautiful rose color. I myself seemed slightly smaller than life-size. We met in water the color of the water of the 3rd—clear, green, light (—more like the cut edge of plate glass, or birch leaves in bright sun, than emerald.) He was very kind and said he would be glad to lead me to the fish, but we'd have to overtake them. He led the way through the water, glancing around at me every now and then with his big eyes to see if I was following. I was swimming easily with scarcely any motion. In his mouth he carried a new, galvanized bucket. … He was taking them a bucket of air—that's how he'd happened to meet me. I looked in—rough water had got in to make the bucket of air a bucket of large bubbles, seething and shining—hissing, I think, too. I had a vague idea they were to be used as decorations, for some sort of celebration (a “coronation”).

(KW 1:15)

Like the Stonington nightmare, this dream is intensely interested in air and the mechanics of breathing underwater. In the “inverted” world of sleep, the mortal dreamer seems to breath effortlessly beneath the waves while fish require live-giving oxygen from the surface. The sea, which Bishop once described as the “dark deep … element bearable to no mortal” but only “to fish and to seals” (CP 65) has become strangely natural to her. In these waters that make mortal bones ache and hands and tongues burn, she is fantastically and utterly free. Like the riverman in a later poem, Bishop communes with speaking underwater spirits, attending a subaqueous “party” where beautiful rose-colored fishes gather to crown one of their number with shining bubbles in “some sort of celebration.” The bubbles hiss like a community of whispering voices free to seethe and shine and rejoice.

It is tempting to see the dream as Bishop's way of imagining a time when she could swim the rough waters of intimacy with an ease that had always eluded her. Like the “clear, gray, icy water” of the northern seas she knew so well, the poet-dreamer is “suspended” between air and land, impervious to suffering, poised indifferently above the rocky breasts and cold hard mouth of the world—and the “cruel conundrums” of love (CP 65, 73). Rough water does not disturb the dream's serene mood; instead it turns the air that has troubled Bishop all her life into large shining bubbles—the poet's lifelong metaphor for the buoyant spirit freed from gravity and all physical laws, and enabled to rise above all crippling circumstance.

In sleep, Bishop could take on the sexual ambiguity and dazzling versatility of the mermaid, a creature of the sea who breathes with miraculous ease. At the end of her life the true nature of the yearnings expressed in the 1928 “Sonnet” are given fuller, franker expression in a poem to which she gave the same name. In the 1979 “Sonnet,” published posthumously, Bishop imagines what it would take to free the bubble-like spirit from the prison of social intolerance, liberate herself from the divided existence: but she cannot conceive of such a possibility, since the very laws of the physical universe would have to be broken. Only in the seclusion of her notebooks and her dreams did she dare to write unguardedly about love and sexuality. As she explains to Anne Stevenson in a letter dated January 8, 1964, Bishop thought of herself as being born into a certain era, situation, decorum, and for that reason she could never truly breath freely—or sing gaily in full-throated ease.

The poet's desire to make a separate peace with her own woman's body by finding some “pure elixir” of amor matris—until her arrival in Brazil, a desire reserved for the world of dreams—takes extraordinary shape in Questions of Travel, the volume of poetry she dedicated to her Brazilian lover. There the poem “The Riverman” seems to resolve or dissolve fear and hope, mother and maid, in the “watery, dazzling dialectic” of art. When Bishop was readying her third volume of poetry for publication, she sent off a worried note to Robert Lowell about “The Riverman.” Lowell calmed her fears by assuring her that this new book would be her very best and reminding her of a dream she once had:

I wouldn't worry about the Amazon poem—it's the best fairy story in verse I know. It brings back an old dream of yours, you said you felt you were a mermaid scraping barnacles off a wharf-pile. That was Maine, not Brazil.

(Kalstone 196)

Astute as always about the psychic origins and ulterior motives of his friend's work, Lowell had made the connection between Bishop's dream and “The Riverman,” the tale of a man who has been “singled out” by the natural spirits of the Amazon, given the power of breathing underwater, and initiated into the rites of the shaman, or spiritual healer. Lowell is not deflected by Bishop's use of a male protagonist, recognizing at once that the apprentice shaman is a mask for the poet herself. He remembers Bishop's dream about the mermaid washed ashore and gasping for breath, a dream of extreme dislocation and deprivation, and sees that “The Riverman” is Bishop's transposition of her nightmare into a different key—into a vision of strength. Recognizing the personal origins of the poem, Lowell sees all that the new poem implies about Bishop's emerging poetic—a poetic of healing. Under the cloak of riverman, Bishop tests the waters of her Brazilian life and the haven of “uncritical affection” she had found there—and her capacity to draw from her own heart the remedy for her distress.

“The Riverman” is one of the few of her pieces that Bishop praises for not being literal or accurate—for being entirely a dream salvaged from her own psychic yearnings. At the time when she wrote the poem about a river that “drains the jungle” and “draws from the very heart / of the earth the remedy / for each of the diseases,” she had never actually seen the Amazon: “When I finally got to the Amazon in February and March [1960] I found I hadn't been too accurate at all, thank goodness.” Her Amazon, the river of her imagination, is not drawn from the immediate world that surrounded her as she wrote.

Her Brazilian home is the heart of her experience there and the source of her understanding of the unseen river. As she describes it in “Songs for the Rainy Season,” the studio her lover built for her away above the main house is bathed in water, cradled by a “private cloud” of vapor, and from this nest the poet can hear the “brook sing loud / from a rib cage / of giant fern” (CP 101). Safe in her aerie, the poet, like the riverman beneath the water's surface, can approach the “family of mortalities” that plagued her life, the choking web of voices she left behind in Great Village and Worcester—a “skein of voices” that she can now unravel; like the riverman traveling beneath the waters of the Amazon she glides “right through the wicker traps” of “Godfathers and cousins” who can “never, never catch” her now.

When the moon burns white
and the river makes that sound
like a primus pumped up high—
that fast, high whispering
like a hundred people at once—
I'll be there below.

The poet who wrote these lines had finally found her element—for as long as she could feel at home in her Brazilian haven. The river she imagines is no more, and no less, than her own studio which she describes in a letter to Baumann as “one large room … away up in the air” containing a “kitchenette with a pump and a primus stove for tea” (December 28, 1952). The stove made the studio resound with the “fast, high whispering” of the hissing kettle. From her aerie she conjures the Amazon from deep within her own interior, and learns to practice the healing art of remembrance. In Questions of Travel Bishop's imagination follows the stream of emotions that link the primus stove beside her as she writes and the “Little Marvel Stove” in her grandmother's kitchen so many years ago. She hears in the Brazilian rain the sound of her grandmother's voice, “talking to hide her tears” (“Sestina,” CP 123). And so Bishop's travels take her back to herself—through the once threatening, but now delightful, equivocality of language: with a brilliant pun on her own family name, she escapes her fear of the vocal skein created by the past. Safe in her Brazilian home, Bishop has become the “primus”—a choirmistress who untangles the aural web. From this time forward, she will conjure her haunting family voices and lead them in song.

Notes

1. Bishop and Louise Crane made Key West their home through 1943 while Bishop completed the poems that would make up her first book, North and South. Bishop continued to winter there in the home of her friend Marjorie Stevens until 1949.

2. Notebook 1:59. Until the journals were recovered only a few years ago, no one had access to them since the day Bishop herself entrusted the papers to a legatee in Brazil, where they stayed in a shoebox for twenty years. They are now housed in the Vassar College Library. Permission has been granted by the Vassar College Library to examine manuscript material in preparation for this article. Excerpts from the unpublished letters and notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop are used with permission of her Estate, copyright 1991 by Alice Helen Methfessel. All excerpts also appear courtesy of Vassar College Library. Subsequent references to the “Key West Notebooks” are cited in the text as KW, with notebook number and page number.

3. Bishop published only a handful of poems that describe erotic pleasure overtly. As Lorrie Goldensohn suggests in her consistently illuminating essay on Bishop's erotic imagination, an unequivocal vision of erotic fulfillment may have been blocked in the “rooted sadness of Bishop's childhood” (46). But however it arose, Bishop's characteristic reticence poses problems for her critics. Just when Bishop is beginning to be given her due as a complex poet, the personal directness of much recent woman's poetry has seduced some commentators into underestimating Bishop's talent once again and returning her to the same niche to which she was relegated during her lifetime. But some readers are beginning to recognize that Bishop, in her subtle way, explores the same issues that preoccupy the current, bolder generation of women writers. Joanne Diehl, for instance, warns us that Bishop's poetry “only apparently evades issues of sexuality and gender.” Diehl senses an “ominous quality to Bishop's restraint more suggestive than confession” (97), and concludes that a highly erotic imagination is fully present in her poetry: “Verbal masking allows Bishop to preserve the erotic while deconstructing heterosexist categories” (93). Similarly, Bonnie Costello points to the way a woman writer may use “female vantage point” as “the concrete from which the universal is projected” so as to “unite readers before the shared mystery of embodiment” (309). Costello concludes that Bishop and many other women poets “have resisted labeling [their artistic vision] as female precisely because they wish to make it available to all readers” (310). I argue that Bishop uses her physical ailments to develop a poetic that confronts cultural labels and their stifling impact on personal and erotic expression.

4. This passage is worth quoting in full: “People's attitude about such things [alcoholism and its treatment] is really quite different from that in the U.S. [The Brazilians] are amazingly tolerant, or indifferent, or ignorant. … I suspect one thing that made it harder for me in N.Y. and other places was the more Puritanical outlook that I have inherited myself.”

5. Reference is to Bishop, The Collected Prose, hereafter cited as CProse.

6. Bishop's father, her grandfather, and three of her uncles succumbed to alcoholism, her own weakness as well. Using a Conradian metaphor, Bishop considers the double lives led by her male relatives, the stealth and guilty secrecy, the lies that gave off an odor of mortality. From her Brazilian studio Bishop remembers her mother's brother and the “icicle [that formed] in the bottom of her stomach” each time he approached her when she was a child: “I realize only now that [Uncle Neddy] represented ‘the devil’ for me, not a violent, active Devil, but a gentle black one, a devil of weakness, acquiescence, tentatively black, like sooty mildew” (CProse 228). Trying to understand her repulsion, Bishop focuses on her uncle's “proud and morbid” voice—the voice he used when he spoke of his gory childhood accidents and boasted about his stoical “feats of endurance.” The disgust she feels with her uncle's weakness and passivity is closely related to her aesthetic and moral aversion to the morbid, self-congratulatory tone of confessional poetry.

7. In a notebook Bishop records a scrap of verse that describes the false “family voice” as a king of mutation, a corruption of reality (KW 2:47):

   speaking
   It is an adaptation                    or
   social obligation of some sort
   the real thrilling beautiful voice
   is off somewhere else singing loudly
   fully
   in clear choir.

   Throughout her life Bishop grew irritated when she heard the tone of social obligation in the poetry of female contemporaries like Elizabeth Bowen. It was the voice of “old silver” and still older class distinction, of taste in clothes, and husbands that she distrusted: “They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first—and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they'd like to say …” (letter to Ilse and Kit Barker, February 28, 1955). Beneath a woman's nervous boasting chatter about being “protected” by her impeccable social standing and taste, Bishop recognizes desperation: “I suppose it is at bottom a flaw in reality that irritates me” because women want to show that they are “nice” and lead beautifully polished lives “even when they aren't” and even when they don't.

8. Reference is to Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979, hereafter cited as CP.

9. Bishop's childhood asthma seems to recur most violently at points in her adult life when she is forced to consider the potentially suffocating nature of maternal love. A short time after Margaret Miller's hospitalization, her mother arrived from America, bringing with her a stifling hothouse atmosphere of maternal attentiveness. Mrs. Miller seemed to place an additional strain on the already distraught Bishop, who began to feel her carefully cultivated independence and emotional control breaking down in the presence of the older woman's devotion and solicitude. Significantly, the surge of vulnerability that she experiences when Margaret's mother arrives in Europe lands Bishop in a hospital herself: the strain of “mother-love” leads to a severe recurrence of Bishop's acute childhood asthma. Writing to Frani Blough, she points to her deep discomfort with disarming flippancy: “Mother-love, isn't it awful. I long for an Arctic climate where no emotions of any sort can possibly grow, always excepting disinterested ‘friendship’ of course” (Kalstone 65). For Bishop “mother-love” would always wear a threatening aspect—and the “imaginary iceberg” of emotional detachment she conjures in her letter to Blough would remain a strongly appealing fantasy throughout her life. That Bishop gradually gravitated away from Arctic climates, choosing instead to make her home in equatorial humidity and cultivate intimate friendships, says much about her intrepid spirit. The tropical life only aggravated her chronic asthma and allergies, those physical signs of emotional distress, and yet when she returned from Europe she moved directly to Florida and embraced all the forms of adventure and hardship that the tropics came to represent for her.

10. As Lee Edelman argues persuasively, what finally “horrifies” the child is the “fundamental affinity” she shares with monstrously disfigured women—with both the deformed mothers who stare back at her from the pages of the National Geographic and the women who “smile falsely” at her from the other side of the waiting room, their body shapes distorted by corsets and whalebone. She too will be imprisoned within the “awful hanging breasts” and the unempowered body of a woman.

11. For a fascinating discussion of Bishop's indirections on homosexuality and erotic fulfillment, see Goldensohn.

12. From her new home in Samambaia, Brazil, Bishop writes her doctor in a letter dated April 21, 1953: “But an atmosphere of uncritical affection is just what suits me, I'm afraid—kisses and hugs, and endearments and diminutives, flying around” (Bishop's italics).

13. The body of the mermaid, a siren with her sexuality muted and concealed, lost in the sleek lines of a fish's tail, became a problematic fantasy image for Bishop in more ways than one. Like the late poem “Crusoe in England,” the mermaid image speaks to the limitations of homoerotic love and single-sex friendship: Bishop's wish to “propagate [her] kind” is achingly expressed through Crusoe's inherently infertile love for Friday and through the mermaid's eternally maiden status. One can only speculate on how terribly mocked Bishop must have felt by a body that often swelled but never grew large with life.

This work was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, 1984.

———. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, 1979.

———. “Key West Notebooks” (unpublished) and correspondence with Dr. Anny Baumann (unpublished). Manuscript material in the “Elizabeth Bishop Collection,” Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Alice Methfessel, literary executor.

Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Repr. in New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981.

Costello, Bonnie. “Writing Like a Woman: A Review of Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language.” Contemporary Literature 29. 2 (1988): 305-10.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Easton, Elizabeth Wynne. The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard. Washington: Smithsonian, 1989.

Edelman, Lee. “The Geography of Gender: Elizabeth Bishop's ‘In the Waiting Room.’” Contemporary Literature 26. 2 (1985): 179-96.

Goldensohn, Lorrie. “Elizabeth Bishop: An Unpublished, Untitled Poem.” The American Poetry Review, January/February 1988: 35-46.

Hall, Donald. Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal. New York: Pegasus, 1970.

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

Millier, Brett Candlish. “Modesty and Morality: George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Elizabeth Bishop.” The Kenyon Review 11.2 (1989): 47-57.

Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Woman's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Rich, Adrienne. “The Eye of the Outsider: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.” Boston Review (April 1983): 15-17.

Spires, Elizabeth. “The Art of Poetry, XXVII: Elizabeth Bishop.” Paris Review 80 (Summer 1981): 56-83.

Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Twayne, 1966.