“From Gender to Genre and Back: Elizabeth Bishop and ‘The Moose,’” in American Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1994.

Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Exchanging Hats”

Elizabeth Bishop's refusal to be anthologized and classified as a woman poet is well known; less well known, perhaps, is her statement “I've always considered myself a strong feminist” (“Art” 80). Taken together, these positions suggest that her being a “feminist”—whatever she may mean by it, she is not evading the political issue—does not entail her perceiving her work as a woman poet's, and she demands to be read from this double perspective. Her work is formally traditional: her lines are usually metrical, her stanzas often have intricate rhyme schemes, and her forms range from blank verse and sonnets to sestinas and villanelles. Her conventional stanzas and meters, together with her grammatical syntax, place her within the symbolic order, and while she challenges its assumptions and hierarchies, her dissensions—including “feminist” revisions—register within this framework. However, given her historical position after modernism, her conventional forms and language themselves serve a critical function: by aligning herself with a patriarchal tradition and observing conventional verse forms, she can critique a different—and, from her position, more dangerous because more naturalized—set of assumptions that underwrite the investment of authority in the person and experience of the poet, who is historically male.

Bishop's work, with its complex negotiation of formal and historical imperatives, forces us to question the idea of a separate women's poetic language or tradition—even a foreshortened version that would align her with Marianne Moore, her primary woman predecessor. Granted, her descriptive strategies owe something to Moore,¹ and both poets play with scale and point of view in order to preclude consistent, totalizing perspectives and to signal the constructedness of the world they describe. A poem like “The Steeple-Jack,” for example, clearly shows what Moore may have taught Bishop. Similarly, both poets question the alignment of women with nature, a dominant metaphor written into the very language they use. “[T]urn to the letter M,” Moore writes, “and you will find / that ‘a wife is a coffin’” (“Marriage” 209-11; her note credits Ezra Pound for this insight). The “letter M” links matter, mother, and mortality—a literal given exploited by others, including H. D. But the initial M also doubles as “Marianne's monogram” (Bishop, Collected Prose 156) and suggests that a woman poet finds herself already written up in a cultural sourcebook or dictionary. The dualisms of letters, woman, nature, and death versus spirit, man, mind, and life are engendered and gendered by idealism, which Moore and Bishop equally resist. Being a “literalist of the imagination” (“Poetry” [1921] 21-22), who skews discourse by arguments based on literal accidents, is one strategy of subverting the symbolic economy of idealism that Moore—among other poets, male and female alike—sometimes follows. Moore tends to rely on a special linguistic, formal, and moral dispensation to attack the assumptions that make for a center, author, or poem.

But this is not Bishop's stylistic strategy; she avoids Moore's formal and syntactic eccentricities and denies herself the privileged perspective of such marginality. Although Bishop admired Moore's “true originality,” she also acknowledged “the sort of alienation it might involve” (Collected Prose 140). She is careful to distinguish her work from Moore's idiosyncratic poetry: “She looked like no one else; she talked like no one else; her poems showed a mind not much like anyone else's; and her notions of meter and rhyme were unlike all the conventional notions—so why not believe that the old English meters that still seem natural to most of us (or seemed to, at any rate) were not natural to her at all?” (Collected Prose 139-40). Bishop's backtracking to stress “seemed” is telling and suggests that she is perfectly aware of what is at stake in employing traditional forms.

From the beginning Bishop never strays too far from “the old English meters,” and her work increasingly addresses all that is involved in this “seeming”—this alignment with a tradition that is common property, with always a more or less loose fit on several counts. As Helen Carr puts it, “The complex of history and flesh that we each are can never be represented accurately in a shared discourse” (141). Yet to wander too far from this shared discourse is not to get nearer one's particular “complex of history and flesh,” whatever that may be; at the risk of simplifying Moore and the historical pressures that shape her work, I would propose her as a case in point. In poetic language not only one's particular history but “flesh” itself must register, if it is to register at all, in historically coded and publicly recognizable conventions of patterning the physical properties of a given language, such as rhythm, rhyme, and meters. In Bishop's words, “the choice is never wide and never free” (“Questions of Travel” 65), for poetry is not a matter of creating one's own subjectivity but of choosing how to reappropriate an already overdetermined subjectivity.

While Bishop stays with meters, her remark that they only “seem” natural seems also to resist the alignment of the physical, bodily, “natural” face of language with such poetic devices as rhythm, meter, and lineation. A version of this alignment informs, for example, Julia Kristeva's argument that rhythm in poetry resists the deadly repression of the physical word by the signifying function. Poetry (by men or women) cultivates the “semiotic” function—gendered female—and enables it to hold its own against the paternal, symbolic order. All poetry is thus subversive: it weakens gender divisions and challenges the symbolic order itself (Moi 165-66). For this reason, all who would stabilize a social order—from Plato to Stalin and the Fascists—must root out poetry: “The poet is put to death because he wants to turn rhythm into a dominant element; because he wants to make language perceive what it doesn't want to say, provide it with its matter independently of the sign, and free it from denotation. For it is this eminently parodic gesture that changes the system” (Kristeva 31).

Yet this “gesture” signifies as such only within “the system”; furthermore, the semiotic dimension has its own systemically determined margins and centers. The criteria that define certain kinds of semiotic language as poetic are historically and culturally regulated—if not by tradition, then by contemporary consensus. In other words, poetry's formalism is determined, and even if a poet rejects conventional meters, stanzas, or rhyme schemes, she still must set up some artificial formal order, combining in different ways available patterns for organizing the material aspects of the signifier, in order to have a pattern—with “repeats”—to mark the special or poetic nature of her language. Moore is only one example. What seems to subvert the symbolic order, then, also duplicates it in another register by instituting its own hierarchies. For example, meter or what registers as rhythm is not a natural quality of the semiotic dimension; it is an abstract pattern that metonymically substitutes for the physical qualities of a given language. Whether conventional or experimental, forms only represent the semiotic, as it is figured and positioned within the symbolic order, to signify the “natural” face of language. Thus poetic language destabilizes and constantly reverses all simple oppositions like semiotic/symbolic and signifier/signified, as well as the metaphorical alignment of these formal and linguistic dualisms with hierarchical cultural distinctions. This systemic and unstable subversiveness, I would argue, is the larger discursive function of poetry's formalism, one which Bishop fully exploits.

Any discussion of women's poetry in general from a feminist perspective is complicated by at least two other considerations, more historical than generic. The first is the cultural gendering of poetry itself. Especially since the eighteenth century, the increasing separation of subjective and material realms, together with the gendering of these opposites, has aligned poetry with the “feminine” realm of the imagination, the emotions, and personal experience as opposed to the “masculine” values of reason, utility, empirical truth, and public experience. Since the Romantics, the male poet's cultural position of authority has itself come into question. Thus the modernists' poetic anxieties—how to “make it new”—tend to get cast in gender terms—how to write “like a man.” This anxiety affects someone like Moore as much as Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens, whose complex of gender and poetic anxieties Frank Lentricchia examines in Ariel and the Police.

Poetry is a special, sacramental language, a privileged hieratic discourse—historically, a jealously guarded male domain; especially since the Romantics, however, it may focus on personal experience—historically, a female province. In other words, poetry is an elitist discourse that may deal with culturally disadvantaged material. Moreover, while thoroughly intertextual, it may articulate private experience. Again, poetry would appear to maintain and question cultural binarisms like elitist versus communal or public versus private. Yet, as Carr points out, while popular forms of prose are now subject to critical study by feminists, the hierarchical distinction between poetry and “mere verse” remains virtually unchallenged. Poetry maintains its privileged position—ironically, at the cost of becoming culturally marginal—partly because it already radically destabilizes oppositional thinking, including cultural typing not only of gender but of what constitutes individual versus public experience. These terms are neither oppositional nor identical: each is articulated through the other and can play the other's part. And poetry will not reduce to discourse any more than it will reduce to individual expression or formalist sacrament. Feminist criticism of poetry, then, is not well served by arguments for a separate women's poetic tradition or language, for reasons apart from the universalism of such a position that a number of feminist critics have objected to.

The second historical consideration involves the history of twentieth-century poetry. When the idea of an authoritative norm (the consensus of a literary generation about the way to write) disappears with modernism and all historical styles become equally usable, the political efficacy and charge of deviant styles become limited. Conversely, after modernism styles that observe historical conventions are able increasingly to question the rhetoric of their forms and may indeed have greater rhetorical flexibility than experimental styles, which cannot afford to question their own rhetoric. For their only authority is that they are ostensibly nonrhetorical—that they can access truths and processes beyond those available to conventional forms, which alone are seen as rhetorical. Experimental writers end up with less room to question the values (ethical, political, or natural) that they invoke to authorize their forms, for without the identification of forms with certain moral, political, or metaphysical truths, the poet has no authority save that of individual talent, which in poetry is no authority at all. Thus, ostensibly free forms, which must invest in authorities “above” or “below” the historical, conventional, or rhetorical, may enjoy less rhetorical freedom than conservative forms. Bishop takes full advantage of the “narrow” freedom her conventional forms offer, including release from the authority of “natural” truths, and her work increasingly registers the complexity of a woman poet's historical position, not only post eighteenth century but post modernism.

Bishop's autobiographical narrative poem “The Moose” exemplifies her strategic position in literary history. A number of readers have found a specifically female sensibility in this poem; I want to suggest that, far from showing a female sensibility, the poem situates itself firmly within the subgenre of Romantic and modern narratives of personal encounters with nature, observing its gendering of nature as feminine vis-à-vis the masculine-gendered experiencing subject-poet. At the same time, the poem also questions the gender framework of this subgenre, both because the subject is female and because the poem appeals to older narrative forms. In what appear to be introductory notes to her Phi Beta Kappa reading at Harvard, Bishop calls “The Moose” a “sort of ballad, a rather simple record of a bus trip from N.S.” (Drafts). The poem certainly alludes to the ballad form: it is written in three-stress lines, and the buoyancy of the short lines is heightened by occasional extra syllables; its six-line stanzas have no consistent rhyme scheme, but all except one of the stanzas have at least one full rhyme, some of them double rhymes. Her choice of form allows for certain generic narrative conventions to mediate her personal story and, by implication, to point up the construction of this historically specific yet highly naturalized subgenre of personal narrative poetry. Because she inflects a poem that falls within the subgenre of post-eighteenth-century personal narratives with the markers of a ballad, her story's claim to universality rests as much on her generic pre-text as on her individual vision. For her story also tells the story of any life: “Life's like that. / We know it (also death)” (“The Moose” 119-20).

“The Moose” has a long prehistory: Bishop took about 25 years to complete it. Since she took so long to write this poem in particular and personal narrative poetry in general, we may consider it the site where we can engage certain larger issues her career raises. While her angle of vision is always distinctive, Bishop's early work remains fairly impersonal, and her movement toward autobiographical poetry coincides with a movement from largely descriptive verse toward narrative. David Kalstone, whose Becoming a Poet maps the course Bishop steered between Moore's descriptive poetry on the one hand and Robert Lowell's narrative confessional verse on the other, argues that Bishop's early distrust of narrative had to do with her resistance to memory—specifically, memories of her traumatic childhood—and to causality. Lowell's work, he proposes, influenced her final reconciliation with narrative. This psychological explanation does not tell the whole story, however, because Bishop does write narrative autobiographical prose, like “In the Village,” long before she deals with such material in poetry. And when she does, her verse bears little resemblance to Lowell's and falls more properly within the tradition of Romantic narratives that lead up to and out of epiphanies of timeless moments intersecting with ordinary historical time. Thus, her development marks her approach not only to her personal past but to a specific tradition of narrative verse. In this light, we may ask again why Bishop first resisted narrative and memory in poetry: what was at stake in turning to narrative poetry? Post-eighteenth-century personal narratives increasingly privilege the authenticity and universality of the poet's vision and experience over the mastery of formal conventions. Since authority resides in the person of the traditionally male poet, the issue of gender becomes crucial in this genre, and I propose that Bishop's resistance to personal narrative had to do less with personal traumas than with poetic anxieties about her proper place and home as a woman poet.

Bishop returned to her childhood home in Nova Scotia during the summers of 1946, 1947, and 1948, and her encounter with a moose apparently dates to the 1946 trip. Yet the work that immediately emerged from these trips is “Cape Breton.” The landscapes in the two poems have much in common: the grand natural background to the human communities that appear “dropped into” (“Cape Breton” 26) it and the pervading spiritual aura. Christian imagery, loose but insistent, characterizes both poems. The difference is that “Cape Breton” withholds the interior meanings “The Moose” will yield:

Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones—
and these regions now have little to say for themselves

(“Cape Breton” 29-36)

“[T]he ghosts of glaciers [that] drift / among those folds and folds of fir” (17-18) in a thin white mist speak of a geological history inscribed on the landscape, the meaning of which eludes the observer and her descriptive language. If the landscape has any meaning, it appears to be inaccessible or illegible, a conclusion characteristic of much of Bishop's poetry. And her designating the work of glaciers as “scriptures” perhaps marks her comparable distance from an equally stony and “admirable” scriptural history, a history of authoritative writing that is more than de-scriptive (literally, derivative) and makes—or makes for—history. Further, Bishop's mother had spent time, lonely and unhappy as a young schoolteacher, in this Gaelic-speaking region, which is the subject of a story Bishop began in 1948 called “Homesickness.” Although she worked on the story for 15 years, she was not able to finish it (Kalstone 119). Perhaps, then, the “interior” meaning the landscape withholds is also personal—the meaning of the equally illegible script of her personal history. In this poem Bishop's descriptive reserve maintains her distance from both personal and public history; it is an empowering powerlessness that keeps the historical scriptures undecipherable and voiceless, if at the expense of silencing her own past.

“The Moose” is a very different kind of poem. Here, the past is retrieved momentarily, and the landscape yields a vision of its “impenetrable” interior (“The Moose” 134). “The Moose” is also distinguished by its sustained narrative, which gathers up and subsumes local descriptions to a temporal unfolding; here, “[e]verything” is not “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’” (“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” 60), as it tends to be in Bishop's earlier travel poems. “The Moose” follows a carefully designed causal sequence of reversals that enables Bishop to move forward and backward at once. Leaving Nova Scotia in a repetition of earlier departures and reembarking on a journey west into the night, the poet enters “a gentle, auditory, / slow hallucination” (“The Moose” 89-90) induced by the bus, the very vehicle carrying her away “back to Boston” (a subtitle Bishop entertains through many versions).² In this auditory memory she returns to her childhood, where her grandparents' voices, reciting in turn a litany of losses, lull her into sleep or a dream state when the moose appears, “grand, otherworldly” (153). The forward movement of the narrative, repeating other departures, thus returns Bishop to her childhood and also accesses a larger vision, not unlike that of Wordsworth's “awful Power r[ising] from the mind's abyss / Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, / At once, some lonely traveller” (The Prelude [1850] 6.594-96).

Moreover, when Bishop finally gives us a narrative in “The Moose,” her memory also assumes a literary-historical dimension, for she remembers a lost childhood and even—in the hyperbolic terms of “One Art”—a lost “continent” (14) by recovering a scriptural history and reclaiming a largely American and male poetic genealogy. By entering a narrative syntax, which alone can open an approach to her past experience, she also enters a literary-historical syntax, which will transform and recast that very experience. Her grand narrative of all the losses history and narratives effect and record both enables, and is enabled by, a recovery of “Grandparents' voices” (96), poetic as well as familial. In “The Moose” Bishop is able to approach her personal history because her narrative necessarily engages recorded history, the “scriptures” of men. This “erring” detour places her in a generic and literary-historical text that she can call “home.” While this “home” offers no protection and, indeed, costs her her experience all over again, she is no longer an outsider describing and “admiring” the “scriptures made on stones by stones.”

The primal source the “female passenger” (Drafts) recovers in “The Moose” is female, and Bishop emphasizes the moose's sex in even the earliest versions of the poem. Yet the “strait” way to the moose runs through a male poetic history, which should caution us against imputing a special significance to the moose's gender. What is at stake in this poem is that by entering a narrative syntax, Bishop also enters a historical syntax and, thereby, a traditional gender framework. The logic of the historical terms in which she has cast her poem leads her to its climactic recognition: “Look! It's a she!” (150) In this copular metaphor, the moose changes from an “it” to a “she,” and Bishop's wording nicely calls attention to the transformation syntactic conventions effect, a strategy she also uses in the lines “you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth” (60-61) from “In the Waiting Room” to articulate the paradox of identity. While her position as a subject genders the object as “she” and thus repeats the male poet's traditional reading of nature as female, her phrasing also exposes how subject/object relationships are gendered within the larger syntax that governs this representational system. The recognition of the moose's sex simultaneously places it within both a linguistic syntax—in this case a language with gendered pronouns—and a literary-cultural discourse that syntax serves here to mirror.

Thus, it would be a mistake to read the moose as a figure of a special female harmony with nature (Ostriker 118-19) or of a poetic source or community specific to women writers. To read Bishop's figure as a claim to powers specific to women writers would only reinscribe an organicism she—as a feminist—must resist. She only discovers that, within the symbolic economy she has entered, nature becomes female. What has brought her to this figuration is her contract with a particular tradition, written by men, of poems about journeys like the one she has made. Because this figuration is naturalized by the whole tradition of nature poetry, the moose stands out in Bishop's poetry as an uncharacteristic figure: there she “looms” (135), an embodiment of primal nature. Primal nature, which elsewhere in Bishop dissolves into discourse, into metaphoric or linguistic effects, is here in the flesh, “roughly but adequately” (“The Monument” 75) represented as a moose. And this vision exacts a political cost, as she well knows. For the only other poem in which Bishop presents nature as a “she” is “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” where we are looking through the eyes of colonizers (and corroborating tourists). In this case the gendering of nature explicitly serves political agendas for mastery, and Bishop proceeds to judge it in no uncertain terms.

By consciously positioning herself within a poetic history and re-sounding the old “scriptures,” Bishop in effect oversees the assimilation of her—in Adrienne Rich's term—“outsider's” eye. Assimilate contains the built-in difference of similis or likeness, and I am not suggesting that Bishop's vision is absorbed by or becomes identical with a male vision; she is “[a]bove all … not that staring man” (“To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash” 4). I am suggesting, though, that writing has more than one allegiance.³ If a writer attempts to revive meaning in a form recognizable as poetry, appropriating ordinary language for poetic use by appealing to its material qualities for special psychic effect, she necessarily consents to the appropriation of her experience by the history of such language use and its generic requirements and resources. To enter this special discourse is to enter a medium where the individual voice makes itself heard as such only by reviving a history of voices. It is Bishop's re-sounding the “scriptures” of men that gives her—and us—access to the meaning of her experience, at the moment it becomes communal. This is her “ladder road”—to borrow Robert Frost's term (“Directive” 37)—that brings her to the shared truth of communal experience: “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” (“The Moose” 154-56) Despite the parentheses guarding her emphatic repetition and despite the interrogative form, Bishop's assumption about her community with her fellow passengers and readers is uncharacteristically confident. One explanation is that here she is speaking from within a community of other poets, for this “joy” echoes through the tradition of visionary writing, from Wordsworth's “access of joy” (The Prelude [1805] 6.547) to Proust's musing “whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy” (48).

Bishop speaks in the pronoun “we” throughout “The Moose,” referring to the autobiographical self in the third person—a “lone” female “traveller” (33), marginal in more than one sense. Bishop abjures “I,” for the self that is the subject of the poem is not the “I” writing it, who in fact holds a central position in this discourse. If the textual meaning of personal experience can only be a shared meaning, it must appeal to a tradition or history of what constitutes meaning within a given discursive framework. If we start with experience and not metaphysics, truth can only be rhetorical and historical. And since Bishop indeed begins postmetaphysically, with the absence of a home ground, and regards origins as found, and founded, in temporal and historical losses, she has little choice but to entrust herself to time and history. This history is largely male, but there is no way out of it except into metaphysics, which is exactly what anyone who would repossess her or his particular experience must resist. If truth is to remain historical, it must be communal and shared—a rhetorical truth accessible to all, if in theory only. Individuals or groups can claim exclusive truths on metaphysical or natural grounds alone, which Bishop firmly rejects from the beginning; such a position would only mark the beginning of the end, duplicating the errors of history.

“The Moose” audibly recalls a number of American poets, some not heard before in her verse, and in the rest of my essay I want to explore the poem's native ground. Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Hart Crane provide models her poem may be read against, whether they are all consciously invoked or not. For Bishop's recuperation of these models is not a matter of her “anxiety of influence”; rather, it is a matter of her entering a traditional narrative framework of journeys into nature and recoveries of origins, complete with the objectification and gendering of nature that come with the territory. Thus Bishop's narrative of recovering her past as meaning entails abdicating her past, and such a generic risk involves, for a woman poet, a political risk as well. Not only is narrative a patriarchal structure—as Edward Said, for example, has argued⁴—but entering the linear, causal time of narrative also means, in this case, entering the history (necessarily patriarchal) of how personal, temporal experience has been traditionally figured. And yet, for a woman poet, this strategy also explicitly dissociates the author, who is now an intertextual construct speaking in the first person plural, from the subject of the narrative, the “lone traveller” and her particular historical position, and such a revision of the Romantic-humanist identification of the poet with the (male) subject in effect empowers the female author. In other words, her narrative pattern of recovery through loss is not only the subject and strategy of her poem—its approach to meaning—but also the strategy by which she authorizes herself as a woman poet. And this pattern places her poem within the pervasive tradition of secular quest narratives studied by M. H. Abrams. No revision can proceed without activating the history of the model, just as no repetition can be anything but a revision. As readers, we can access Bishop's meaning best by tuning into her literary past, by hearing and imagining as she hears and imagines

an old conversation
—not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices
uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity

(92-98; emphasis added)

The journey of “The Moose” begins with the poet repeating her initial departure from home, and it begins with Whitman, whom she distinctly echoes in her grand first sentence. While Bishop's repetition of words—arguably, her stylistic signature—is quite marked, it is subsumed by the repetition of syntactically parallel phrases and the periodic sentence structure so characteristic of Whitman. Her first sentence especially recalls the opening of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” which establishes the link between narrative and memory. The knowledge of loss enables the narrative syntax and opens up space for memory, which returns Whitman to the initial experience of loss and, farther back, to the source, “mother.” Likewise, the knowledge of time and loss, of “deaths, deaths and sicknesses” (103), authorizes Bishop's narrative, which in turn makes possible a recovery (in memory) of the earliest loss and eventually leads back to a natural, maternal source. While Bishop's journey is not on Whitman's scale, and while her moose is no death mother, the two poems progress along similar lines, and the temporal movement of their narratives follows almost as a reflex of syntax—a movement native to sentences, an impulse generic to writing.

Bishop's first sentence also echoes the fifth section of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” the imperial periodic sentence that travels

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, …
… passing the endless grass,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

(26-32)

This “continental” sentence, to use Gay Wilson Allen's apt term (232), historicizes the landscape, and such syntactic mediation enables Whitman to place the coffin and the violent historical event it represents within a natural order. The sentence performs a generic elegiac function of naturalizing and ceremonializing the unnatural death it mourns. Whitman tells us that a nation acquires a history through such violent experiences as wars and assassinations (“Death” 508). If a national identity is gained by a historical “loss of innocence,” so is poetic identity, and “Lilacs” is a crisis poem for the poet who had begun by declaring himself free of English verse conventions. The occasion by which the nation acquires a national history and identity calls for a recognizable elegy. Thus the event forces Whitman to engage a poetic past he had rejected as foreign—the history of the genre in English—before he can begin again to proceed beyond it, a course not unlike Bishop's negotiation with the poetic history Whitman represents.

“The Moose” also appears to be an elegy of sorts. Bishop's aunt, Grace Bulmer Bowers, was alive when she started the poem, and the first version carries the dedication “goodbye / to my one dear relative,” with the last word crossed out and “relation” substituted (Drafts). The dedication disappears for a while and reappears, in its present form, in Geography III (1976). In the end, the “relation” lost is not only Aunt Grace but a landscape, even a “continent,” and childhood. Like Whitman's sentence, Bishop's opening syntax stages the westward movement of the bus:

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;
where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;
on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,
through late afternoon
a bus journeys west

(1-26)

Her periodic construction with its insistent repetitions superimposes linear and cyclical motion and places the bus's westward journey, which repeats a historical and continental movement west and away from a source, within cyclical natural time, represented by the setting sun. The sun, in turn, is synchronized with the tidal rhythms—the bay repeatedly leaving the sea and coming back “home,” the river entering and retreating. It even evokes the internal rhythms of the bloodstream: the sun setting in a red sea “veins the flats' / lavender, rich mud / in burning rivulets.” Earlier versions explicitly paint the sun “red as blood” and the sea “silted red as blood.” The tides' pulse, as “the sea leaves the sea” (Drafts), answers to the human pulse and the course of history within this grand syntactic order.

Yet Bishop's first sentence does not end where it could grammatically conclude; it flows on for ten more lines as a loose sentence to take in the “lone traveller,” whose destination and destiny remain outside the periodic unit and the Whitmanian harmony it establishes between natural-biological and historical journeys west. By continuing beyond the periodic closure and the harmony of cyclical and linear time it establishes, Bishop domesticates the tidal sweep of the opening stanzas and reduces the scene to a human scale, narrowing her focus to a group of “relations” and ending with “a collie supervises” (36). In view of the aerial perspective of the beginning stanzas, “supervises” is an almost parodic revision of her opening lines. Earlier versions of the departure scene—“goodbye to the aunt,” “female passenger,” and “her seven relatives” (Drafts)—more explicitly identify the traveler as the poet. This retreat not only prepares for Bishop's “narrow way” (the phrase is Henry Vaughan's [“Child-hood” 44]) back to her personal past in the “narrow provinces” but revises the Whitmanian expansiveness she has invoked, marking her post-Romantic marginality to such an order. Thus Bishop acknowledges and repeats Whitman's “imperial” syntax only to place her traveler to the side of it. With a “[g]oodbye to the elms, / to the farm, to the dog” (37-38), the passenger boards the bus, and from then on this metaphoric conveyance limits her perspective and the poem's. At this point, she moves on to another kind of syntax, more casual than causal, with a series of sentence fragments relaying the momentary notations of a specific observer and concludes with the one-word sentence “Gone” (61). Although such writing revises the opening sentence, Bishop's “narrower” experience still signifies within an established framework.

A similar tension exists between this six-stanza-long sentence and her short, intermittently rhymed lines of five or six syllables and three stresses. If, as she has suggested, her verse means to allude also to the ballad form, what better way to assimilate a syntax that carries Whitman's signature than in such a common, communal form in “old English meters”? The ballad functions as a common ground and rhythm—a generic, even anonymous, prepersonal narrative form—accommodating both Whitman's sentence and her improvisation, which, far from claiming originality, actually returns to a pre-text. Her “balladizing” of literary history makes room for her experience within an older text and resists Whitman's organicism and its bass tone of natural rhythms. Bishop's subjecting Whitman himself to a generic and historical pre-text, parsing his sentence along ballad lines, suggests that any ideas of correspondences between poetic and natural movements carry historical freight; by now they are “beat-up” (30) vehicles that we would be ill advised to mistake for natural transports. The very fact that Bishop can use Whitman's syntax in ballad lines emphasizes the conventional nature of her lineation, which here does not coincide with syntactic units, and thus privileges a longer poetic history, protecting her from Whitmanian organicisms and sublimities.

The second American poet “The Moose” recalls is Robert Frost. I am thinking less of poems like “The Most of It” or “Two Look at Two,” where it is “as if” we have face-to-face encounters with nature, and more of “West-Running Brook” and “Directive,” with their countercurrents against loss and entropy. As a figure of poetic transport, Bishop's “beat-up” bus is a temporal and historical, westward-bound conveyance. Yet, because meter carries a historical memory and metaphoric substitution enacts both loss and recovery, the very vehicle that takes her away also returns her home. The entropic transportation of this temporal medium enables a transport out of time and delivers her to origins and sources in the very process of leaving them. Frost calls this a “backward motion toward the source” (68): “The universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness—and unresisted, / Save by some strange resistance in itself, / Not just a swerving, but a throwing back” (56-59). For Frost, it is this “tribute of the current to the source” (70) that “most we see ourselves in” (69). In “West-Running Brook,” saying, naming, and, above all, making moral analogies between human discourse and nature's course enable humans to resist the entropic movement they are carried away by and to pay tribute to the “source” they thereby locate.

“Directive” is even more to the point. The salvation it offers is both in earnest and ironic; while the poem instructs “you” to find “yourself” in nature, “nature” comes down to a species of metaphor. Backing out of a world “now too much for us” (1) is both a quest for self-purification, descending through layers of history to a natural, watery source, and a rhetorical quest through the “serial ordeals” (20) of simile (4), personification (16), metaphor (37), and allusion (59), leading to the archetypal symbol of water as an unconscious source. The ritual of rhetorical purification—going “back” beyond legend, childish make-believe, and Gospel alike, beyond all rhetorical confusions, to a primal figure or archetype or original metaphor—is the moral and spiritual quest for wholeness “beyond confusion” (62). Frost's ironic tone undermines his apparent resistance to poetic con-fusions, for while the vessel or “goblet” (60) may be broken and stolen, we will need it to drink of the “waters” (61). Frost is dubious about searching for origins beyond metaphoric language and questions the Romantic and modern versions of such quests that his poem ostensibly reenacts. If we are to regain lost innocence, we must grow more sophisticated rather than less: we must be properly educated in metaphor to recognize that the poetic “quest” only progresses from figure to figure, from one kind of figuration to another.

Bishop's rhetorical progress is similar. Her bus trip is a simultaneous metaphor for life's journey and for metaphoric conveyance itself. And the entropic course of syntax, narrative, and analogical likenesses that travel away from origins “runs down in sending up,” in Frost's terms (“West-Running Brook” 65), the memory of “Grandparents' voices,” just as their conversation “in Eternity” about “deaths, deaths and sicknesses” sends up the vision of the moose. This vision coincides with the narrator's falling asleep or even dreaming, when the bus stops and turns off its lights. Bishop's moose is seen as if dreamed, dreamed as if remembered; it is a vision that crosses the categories of experience, imagination, and memory. Although the moose, driven deep into the interior, can reappear and hold her own against Father Time, it is still “our quiet driver” (158) who returns us to this maternal source, if only to hear a “man's voice” assure us she is “[p]erfectly harmless” (143-44). In Frostian fashion, the return is effected by the very poetic and rhetorical structures—the “ladder road” (“Directive” 37)—that the vision purports to transcend, just as male conveyances (vehicular and historical) bear the “female passenger” to her encounter with mother nature-mother memory. In this move, Bishop masters much more than personal history. That her journey and mode of travel are prescribed does not block but, in fact, yields meaning. Yet such meaning as poetry discloses on its historical and figural road can only be a shared meaning—that is, historical and rhetorical. She writes her experience as it is written by the resources—historical, formal, and figurative—of the common language of poetry.

Yet this coincidence of personal and communal experience may be only a dream or vision sent up by the shared discursive resources. Before Bishop settles on “otherworldly” to describe the moose, she considers “half-seen,” “night mare,” “spectre,” and “heraldic as a dream,” a line that survives through many drafts. While she means the experience to be visionary, she beholds the “otherworldly” through the bus window. She frames the sublime experience so carefully within the narrative of transportation and the metaphor of transport that it becomes a vision as much of poetic resources—again, not personal possessions—as of natural sources. Accordingly, she can describe this primal source only by means of another divagation from it—in similes like “high as a church” (140) and “safe as houses” (142), which repeat the “man's” “Perfectly harmless” in another register. The substitutive logic that earlier had modeled the artifacts of civilization on nature (clapboard houses and churches “ridged as clamshells” [23]) now shifts into reverse: the moose is no sooner seen than lost again, assimilated by civilization, history, and the very rhetorical and syntactic processes that have enabled the vision. According to Joanne Feit Diehl, the moose, whose “unanticipated” appearance interrupts the “continuum of expectation” and “challenges our notions of a verifiable, ordered universe,” “embodies a female strangeness that constitutes an inherently subversive notion of the Sublime” (107). As I have suggested, though, the moose's appearance is no more “unexpected” than her femaleness, and Bishop's subversiveness lies rather in her foregrounding the rhetorical processes that first conjure and then assimilate her vision of the female moose into the given discursive framework—with its polarities of civilization versus nature, male versus female, historical and narrative sequence versus the visionary moment—that shapes her entire journey and has already determined the moose's gender. The terms of Bishop's assimilation are not very subtle: her similes stand out because they aim not so much to efface themselves and accurately describe her vision as to make it fit back into the world of churches and houses. Her similes openly exercise power over what they figure, because her point is to call attention to the rhetorical processes that “right” her experience and resublimate the Sublime.

At the same time that Bishop's journey repeats Whitman's and Frost's journeys, her historical difference also revises them. Whitman's way is the open road—even in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” he goes back only to go forth—while Frost heads “back” in order to recover a lost origin. Bishop's narrative superimposes and disorients both journeys. She embarks on a westward journey, away from home ground, yet faces no new territory: she is only going “back to Boston,” repeating original departures (hers as well as Whitman's). Given her different historical position, then, her repetition amounts to a redirection. Similarly, she revises a Frostian return when she backs out of origins and makes for “Boston.” She resists Frost's nostalgia (however ironic) as much as Whitman's futurism (however strained). For Bishop there is neither virgin territory nor an original source, but only repetition, which keeps revising and repositioning arche and telos. Nevertheless, this double and duplicitous road still affords a glimpse of the moose.

The “sublime” experience over, the last stanza returns to ordinary time. Once again, this return both follows and challenges the linear logic of narrative and metaphor:

For a moment longer,
by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

(162-68)

The remembrance of a poetic history that enabled the “backward glance” resumes and now leads back out of the vision. The poet the final stanza may be read against is Hart Crane. Many passages from The Bridge (1930), like the first stanza of “The Harbor Dawn,” find their echoes in “The Moose.” Crane's project of seeking a “pardon for this history” (“Atlantis” 84) through an investment in memory, carrying “the reader into interior after interior” (Crane 251), prefigures Bishop's. In particular, I am thinking of the “Van Winkle” section with the “[m]acadam” that “[l]eaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate” (1-2), the poet-as-Rip-Van-Winkle “not here / nor there” (29-30), and the personal and continental memory confronting an alien present. Here, Pocahontas as “time's truant” (marginal gloss) represents Crane's American musememory of a primal nature before history, and remembering this source amounts to envisioning a secular salvation that would “justify the evil of our mortal state” (Abrams 116). This Romantic revision of the Christian paradigm of history that Abrams plots also informs Bishop's poem, however “far gone in history or theology” (“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” 15) she may be. As in Crane, the New Eden glimpsed in “The Moose” assumes a recognizably American shape; an enigmatic scribble on the margins of one version of Bishop's description of the “moose” (from the Algonquin for an indigenous North American animal) seems to read “Plymouth Rock” (Drafts).

When we return to ordinary time, then, we recognize it by the smell of gasoline in a violent Cranian juxtaposition with the moose's smell. The gasoline that has brought Bishop to this encounter now takes her away. Her last words remind us that an erring technological progress has led her to her vision, a compensation comparable to what the other temporal and historical movements in the poem offer. Yet Bishop has nothing of Crane's transcendental impulse. It is only that, “by craning backward,” the sense of smell can hold on to the experience “a moment longer.” After repeated injunctions to look—“Look! It's a she!” (150), “Look at that, would you” (160)—Bishop ends with the sense of smell. Like taste, it carries memory better than sight and allows, in fact, for Crane's “blood remembering” (“The Dance,” marginal gloss); in Proust's words, “when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection” (50-51). Thus Bishop's concluding with the sense of smell connects her to the moose's sniffing the gasoline odor on the bus's hood—they are equalized here—and grounds her literary recollection in an instinct for continuity, in the survival value of “craning backward.”

Such a regression within progress is what literary memory, narrative, allusion, metaphor, and meter all offer. The remarkable recognition of “The Moose” is that an original homelessness, a liberation from metaphysics, binds the poet all the more not only to the common condition of mortality but to a shared history. In deploying the resources that are the legacy of this history, Bishop's work both challenges the models of an essentially or historically separate women's poetry and necessarily revises the figure of a universalist patriarchal tradition. Her position allows both for the error of our separate histories—which is, of course, their truth in the face of the dominant history—and for the truth of a shared history—which is, of course, its error from the perspective of marginalized histories. Indeed, the metaphysical binarism of margins/centers itself comes into question in Bishop's revisionary vision. “Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise” (20), advises her “White-throated Sparrow's” (17) hexameter in the elegy “North Haven”; repeating by revising and revising by repeating, Bishop proves this is not bad advice.

Notes

1. Keller presents a judicious analysis of the continuities between Moore's and Bishop's descriptive poems.

2. The first version of the poem has a title crossed out and “The Moose” written in, but “Back Again” can be made out under the crossed lines (Drafts). In any case, this phrase would describe her duplex movement more aptly than “Back to Boston,” since it suggests at once “back again to Nova Scotia” and “back again to Boston.”

3. Rich ultimately finds Bishop not altogether “satisfying,” proving that the “living … have still more work to do” (“Eye” 135), because she resists assimilation into Rich's lesbian tradition. Ironically, Rich is much less critical of, and far more dependent on, a patriarchal figuration of the poet as a master of her words, who speaks for one and all, getting “it” and passing “it” on, wheeling and dealing in “power,” “guns,” “scenarios,” histories—the big production of “Harper's Ferry” is my case in point (Time's Power 38-42).

4. Said writes that “the imagery of succession, of paternity, of hierarchy” underlies such “genealogical connections” as “author-text, beginning-middle-end, text-meaning, reader-interpretation, and so on” (162).

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———. Time's Power. New York: Norton, 1989.

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