by Jonathan Ellis<\/p>\n
1<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2018Bishop is parenthetical. Her parentheses create emphases even when their purpose is to hesitate not asseverate.\u2019 These are Maureen McLane\u2019s words, not mine, from her astonishingly sharp essay on Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein in which she reflects on how she came to read Bishop after Stein and how Stein rather than Bishop became the poet in parenthesis: \u2018My Elizabeth Bishop\/ (My Gertrude Stein).\u2019 \u2018People make friends over Bishop and enemies over Lowell,\u2019 she writes:<\/p>\n Some people say you cannot like both Stein and Bishop they line up in little teams they taunt the other teams or refuse to let them play on their field this is moronic like many a schoolyard game. Not that there is not discrimination required but discriminating may yet bring you to a place where Bishop meets Stein meets Bishop and they are quite congenial and have tea in the mind. Life is surprising like that so is poetry most people do not wish to be surprised especially once they have announced their team and bought their team uniforms.<\/p>\n An essay on a mutually admired poet runs the risk of repeating what we already know, and perhaps implicitly refusing to let other poets on the field. I thought I\u2019d surprise myself, and hopefully you as well, by presenting something less finished, more, there is no better word for it, parenthetical. In terms of methodology, I\u2019m going to follow McLane\u2019s example. This is an essay, like hers, of \u2018breakdowns and impasses.\u2019 \u2018I return to these early impasses in reading,\u2019 she admits, \u2018not simply to indulge in autographical meanderings but rather to suggest the important function of impasse in experience.\u2019<\/p>\n Impasse comes from the French. According to the OED, it refers to \u2018A road or way having no outlet; a blind alley, \u201ccul-de-sac\u201d. Also a position from which there is no way of escape, a \u201cfix.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n Bishop doesn\u2019t use the word impasse in her poetry, or any of the obvious synonyms. But there are certainly sticking points in her writing, moments where she doesn\u2019t advance very far on the poem\u2019s opening statement, or, equally frequently, moments where she can\u2019t seem to stop herself repeating the same phrase or word. <\/p>\n Certain poetic forms might be described spaces of impasse too. We call them fixed forms. Set positions from which there is also no way of escape. <\/p>\n Clogs. Clots. Snarls. And string. Bishop\u2019s work is full of lines, threads and trails, many of which double back on themselves.<\/p>\n \u2018A holy grave, not looking particularly holy.\u2019 Katrina Mayson has written about Bishop\u2019s fondness for numbers, particularly the number three, in a recent essay. I\u2019d like to cite from her conclusion here. For Mayson, \u2018[Bishop\u2019s] numbers are one way of creating the impression of being exact, and yet they are also elastic. The best analogy is that of music, where different combinations of notes and pauses can take up the same length of time. Once we look behind Bishop\u2019s number line, some of the planks that lie behind her seemingly narrative poems are illuminated, elements like her interest in time, movement, and memory. Examining how numbers work, the detail of rhyme and rhythm reinforces the strength of Bishop\u2019s poetry as being a poetry of cognition, not simply of biography.\u2019<\/p>\n Exact but elastic. That describes Bishop\u2019s pivoting aesthetic well, what Mary McCarthy pinpointed as \u2018her way of seeing that was like a big pocket magnifying glass\u2019 alongside a \u2018mind hiding in her words, like an \u201cI\u201d counting up to a hundred and waiting to be found.\u2019 Bishop has a way of seeing things but not being seen herself. Or perhaps we see her through how she sees others?<\/p>\n Bishop was aware of this element of her writing well before other readers noticed it. She compared it to her maternal grandmother\u2019s glass eye. \u2018The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight<\/em> and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n The real eye sees; the glass eye only appears to see or rather sees in a different way. The days of Bishop being celebrated primarily for her descriptive eye are thankfully well and truly over. I like to think of the glass eye as the eye that dreams and hallucinates. The eye that cries and thus cannot see for tears. The eye that has visions even if she is not comfortable labelling them so. An eye, eventually, that cannot see because it is dead. Bishop\u2019s poetry is full of these eyes (yes, even dead eyes). In fact, perhaps the glass eye is more prominent than the real eye in her writing, the synthetic perspective more common than the everyday gaze or look. <\/p>\n 2<\/strong><\/p>\n Bishop\u2019s early poetry, what we might half-playfully call her French period, is full of these literal and metaphorical glass eyes. The most haunting example is surely the Man-Moth\u2019s, \u2018all dark pupil,\/ an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens\/ as he stares back, and closes up the eye.\u2019 What do we see in the Man-Moth\u2019s eye? Darkness. Night. Something that doesn\u2019t reflect or show any light. A miniature black hole. An impasse. Look long enough, however, and we are rewarded by seeing something escape from the eye, something that may kill the Man-Moth by releasing it. A solitary tear that embodies the Man-Moth\u2019s solitariness. \u2018Then from the lids\/ one tear, his only possession, like the bee\u2019s sting, slips.\/ Slyly he palms it, and if you\u2019re not paying attention\/ he\u2019ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he\u2019ll hand it over,\/ cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.\u2019<\/p>\n Bishop doesn\u2019t cry very much in her poetry. The majority of the tears in her writing come in just two poems: \u2018Songs for a Colored Singer\u2019 and \u2018Sestina\u2019 in which there are five and seven references to tears respectively. Even these tears are on the way to becoming something else, buttons, moons, tea stains. <\/p>\n The Man-Moth\u2019s one tear speaks of loneliness, but it is a loneliness that is implied not spoken. While we are encouraged to imagine the act of drinking it, in a manner oddly similar in phrasing to the conclusion of \u2018At the Fishhouses,\u2019 we are not sure what the consequences of this might be for either the Man-Moth or for ourselves. If handing it over is likely to kill the Man-Moth, might it kill us too? The Man-Moth\u2019s tear belongs to the category of what Eugenie Brinkema in her book The Forms of the Affects<\/em> calls the \u2018somewhat-tear.\u2019 Beginning with Marion Crane\u2019s tears in the shower scene in Psycho<\/em>, a scene that Brinkema describes as \u2018the loneliest death in cinema,\u2019 she reflects upon the difficulty of reading and interpreting emotion more generally: \u2018The tear that is not immediately legible as a tear is marked by its resistance, and by its intense solitude. And in the end, this is the only kind of mark that leaves its trace. It does not ex-press but im-presses; hers is a tear of the one alone, failing to communicate inward with the nuances of the judging mind, or with the skin on which it rests, or with the world that would mirror it and feel alike in turn. The extraordinary solitude of the tear that does not drop but folds is the ethical consequence of its extraordinary ontology.\u2019 The Man-Moth\u2019s tear, like Marion\u2019s, is<\/em> an image of \u2018extraordinary solitude.\u2019 It belongs, like her tear, neither to the body that released it nor to the viewer watching it. A tear that does not drop but folds. Only filmed or written tears can do this. Real tears dry or run away. The emotion has to go somewhere. Perhaps a poem is a storage jar for such emotions, these somewhat tears? A fixed form for non-fixed emotions to live and outlive the person that released them. An ability to impress through impasse is one of Bishop\u2019s singular achievements. She neither hides nor tidies up emotion so much as point to its outward signs. <\/p>\n 3<\/strong><\/p>\n Bishop\u2019s second visit to Europe in 1937 was understandably overshadowed by the car accident in which her friend Margaret Miller was badly injured. In her notebook at the time, the notebook she took with her to Paris, she completed the following short, rather cryptic poem, sending a copy to Marianne Moore in an envelope without a covering letter:<\/p>\n To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash<\/strong><\/p>\n I live only here, between your eyes and you, The poem reads like a riddle. A message written in whitewash is normally an invisible message. A message written on a mirror in whitewash, on the other hand, is a message written to be seen. By writing in whitewash on a mirror the author subverts the mirror\u2019s usual function. Instead of seeing oneself in the glass, one sees somebody else\u2019s writing. The mirror becomes a page. An act of introspection becomes an act of analysis, of reading. The mirror only becomes a page if the reader treats the poem\u2019s title as an instruction on what to do with the text underneath it: \u2018To be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash.\u2019 By doing this, the poem comes alive, or more accurately the writing voice comes alive, intervening between our eye and the image in the mirror. \u2018I live only here,\u2019 the poem says, \u2018between your eyes and you,\/ But I live in your world.\u2019 These words are not exactly ours, but they are not exactly the writer\u2019s either. We have to do or at least imagine doing something to understand the poem. Without a mirror, without whitewash, the poem doesn\u2019t make sense. <\/p>\n Bishop\u2019s relationship to representing emotion is similar. She gives us the outlines of an emotion, the words, but without adding something of ourselves (something of \u2018you\u2019), the poem cannot be properly written. This is why \u2018we\u2019 is one of the words Bishop uses most frequently in her writing. I\u2019d go so far as to say it\u2019s one of her favourite words\u2026<\/p>\n \u2018We\u2019d rather have the iceberg than the ship\u2019 4<\/strong><\/p>\n This brings me in a rather roundabout fashion to the title of this essay: \u2018\u201cFor a\u00a0Child\u00a0of 1918″: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old.\u2019 I had two anniversaries in my mind at the time of beginning to think about it: Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s birthday on 8 February 1911, or more particularly the hundredth anniversary of Bishop turning seven on 8 February 2018, and my son\u2019s birthday on 24 November 2009, or more particularly the memory of his seventh birthday in November 2016. I couldn\u2019t help comparing Elizabeth Bishop at nearly seven to my son at a similar age. It made me re-read Bishop\u2019s poems about being six and seven in a way I found surprising. I\u2019ll come to this in a moment. I say poems, not poem, because I think there are at least three poems about this very precise time period in Bishop\u2019s collected writing, a period roughly between September 1917 and February 1918. These are, in the order in which they appear in the 2011 edition of Poems, \u2018Manners\u2019 (in which the epigraph \u2018for a child of 1918\u2019 features), \u2018Sestina\u2019 (whose opening line dates the poem to \u2018September\u2019 but which September?), and \u2018In the Waiting Room\u2019 (very precisely dated to the \u2018fifth\/ of February, 1918,\u2019 three days before Bishop\u2019s seventh birthday). <\/p>\n I\u2019d like to take these three poems in turn and ask a question about each. Like \u2018To be Written in the Mirror in Whitewash,\u2019 there is something mysterious about each poem that doesn\u2019t quite make sense. A moment of impasse that calls on the reader to intervene. <\/p>\n At first glance, and I admit to never really giving \u2018Manners\u2019 more than a first glance until recently, it is a fairly simple poem to understand, its old-fashioned abcb<\/em> ballad form a perfect match for its old-fashioned approach to early twentieth-century questions of transport. Why take a car when you could take a horse? \u2018Remember to always\/ speak to everyone you meet.\u2019 \u2018Manners\u2019 follows \u2018In the Village\u2019 in Bishop’s 1965 collection,\u00a0Questions of Travel<\/em>. It is the second text in the second section of the book, the \u2018Elsewhere\u2019 to the opening part\u2019s focus on \u2018Brazil.\u2019 <\/p>\n The 1983 Complete Poems<\/em>, like the 2011 Poems<\/em>, erases the history of \u2018Manners\u2019 as Bishop\u2019s second not first response to growing up in Atlantic Canada. \u2018In the Village\u2019 famously begins on a scream, or rather the echo of a scream. The relationship between an experience and its memory is one of Bishop\u2019s main themes in \u2018In the Village\u2019 in particular and across her body of work more generally. Perhaps \u2018the memory of it\u2019 is as important as the original \u2018it,\u2019 if one can name \u2018it\u2019 anymore. Bishop often doesn\u2019t. A scream might be uttered by the mother, but I think we have to be careful of reducing the mother to that scream. She is more than just a voice, even if that voice is one of the few sounds her daughter records of her. \u2018In the Village\u2019 ends not in the grandparents\u2019 house but in the blacksmith\u2019s shop nearby, or more accurately it ends with the narrator hovering on the bridge next to these two places to stare down at the river: For me the moment on the bridge is another moment of impasse, where the past is suspended as if in water and we are transported back to Nova Scotia in 1915 or 1916. In looking at an abandoned Ford or runaway trout in the river, Bishop is creating an aquatic self-portrait just as she does in \u2018At the Fishhouses\u2019 or \u2018The Riverman.\u2019 Like the trout seen from above, the portrait is both \u2018as transparent as the water\u2019 and also \u2018opaque.\u2019 It looks like we can see through the trout but this is only an illusion. If we did catch one, we would see its fleshy belly and fins. Objects in Bishop\u2019s writing, including objects she knows well, frequently tip between transparency and opacity, from a real eye to a glass eye. The movement here is from seeing through<\/em> to seeing less<\/em>, but neither way of seeing dominates. <\/p>\n What happens next? Nate\u2019s \u2018Clang\u2019 is heard twice; \u2018the river gives an unexpected gurgle\u2019 (\u2018Slp\u2019 it says); the Clang is heard a third time; \u2018everything except the river holds its breath.\u2019 I\u2019d not noticed this breath-holding before. It\u2019s a strange inversion to have human beings holding their breath out of water not under water as if life in the village is what makes living impossible. What about the scream? At first we think it is \u2018gone away, forever,\u2019 like the mother who uttered it. A few sentences later, the narrator isn\u2019t so sure, asking whether the \u2018almost-lost\u2019 voice can still be heard. If the scream has gone but now is only \u2018almost-lost\u2019 might we hear it again soon? Is it getting closer not further away?<\/p>\n This question hovers over the conclusion to \u2018In the Village\u2019 and cannot help but influence our reading of the poem that follows it, if, of course, we have the story and poem published together. Let me assume from now on that we do! \u2018Manners\u2019 comes with the dedication, \u2018for a Child of 1918.\u2019 The poem is set in Great Village, Nova Scotia. We know that from the reference to Hustler Hill, a real place name in Great Village. The\u00a0child\u00a0is Bishop, the grandfather her grandfather, William Bulmer. Or so we assume. But what is the seven-year-old Bishop doing in Nova Scotia in 1918 and why if the poem is about her does she address it generally to \u2018a child of 1918\u2019? As we know from recent biographical studies by Brett Millier, Sandra Barry and Megan Marshall, Bishop had been taken (\u2018kidnapped,\u2019 according to \u2018The Country Mouse\u2019) from Nova Scotia to New England the previous autumn, that\u2019s October 1917, to live with her paternal grandparents. She didn\u2019t return to Nova Scotia until the summer of 1919 and thus didn\u2019t set foot in Nova Scotia at all throughout 1918. We know this from Bishop\u2019s own writing of course. One of the most famous child-narrators of 1918 is the \u2018Elizabeth<\/em>\u2019 of \u2018In the Waiting Room,\u2019 reading the\u00a0National Geographic<\/em>\u00a0and waiting for the world to stop spinning. \u2018In Worcester, Massachusetts,\u2019 the poem famously begins, not \u2018In Great Village, Nova Scotia.\u2019 <\/p>\n Did Bishop get her dates wrong in \u2018Manners\u2019? Did she really mean to write \u2018for a child of 1917\u2019? I doubt it. The first mention of the poem is in a letter to Howard Moss on 6th July 1955. \u2018Please don\u2019t think I\u2019m getting stuck back in Nova Scotia!\u2014but I suppose such a drastic move as to Brazil does turn one backwards for some time.\u2019 Getting \u2018stuck\u2019 in any place is normally unpleasant, but I suspect if Bishop could have been \u2018stuck\u2019 anywhere, Nova Scotia would have been the place. If moving to Brazil in 1951 felt \u2018drastic\u2019 to Bishop, how much more so must have seemed the move from Canada to USA in 1917? That second exchange of countries must have reminded her of her first. In \u2018The Country Mouse\u2019 Bishop takes us from her departure from Halifax station to her arrival in New England, her first few unhappy months in her grandparents\u2019 house over winter, and her eventual collapse in the dentist\u2019s office in February 1918, an experience she reworked a decade later in \u2018In the Waiting Room.\u2019 In \u2018The Country Mouse,\u2019 Bishop writes of coming close to dying during this period: \u2018First came constipation, then eczema again, and finally asthma. I felt myself aging, even dying. I was bored<\/em> and lonely with Grandma, my silent grandpa, the dinners alone, bored with Emma and Beppo, all of them. At night I lay blinking my flashlight off and on, crying.\u2019 In April 1918 her grandparents realised they had made a mistake and took her to live with her aunt\u2019s family in Revere, Massachusetts, a place where, we have recently learned from the Dr Foster letters, she was sexually abused by her uncle. \u2018There isn\u2019t too much to it,\u2019 she wrote to Ruth Foster, \u2018but I think it made me afraid of men for a long time. Once when I was first there, I was eight, he undertook to give me a bath\u2014I guess he did several times. In the course of the bath he handled me sexually. In my innocence I guess I just thought it was an unusually thorough washing but then I remember feeling suddenly very uncomfortable and trying to pull away from him. \u2026 I got to thinking that they were all selfish and inconsiderable and would hurt you if you gave them half a chance.\u2019 <\/p>\n In the chronology attached to the letters, Bishop was very clear about where and with whom she was living in both 1917 and 1918:<\/p>\n 1917: That summer my Bishop grandparents came to visit & took me back to Worcester with them. With them lived from time to time my Uncle Jack & Aunt Florence. In a letter to Anne Stevenson on 6 March 1964 Bishop expanded on these details, confirming the dates of her two removals, first from Nova Scotia in October 1917 and secondly from her grandparents\u2019 house in Worcester in May 1918:<\/p>\n The Bishop grandparents came to visit in Canada several times, apparently—twice that I remember. Although my father had married a poor country girl the older generation were still enough alike, I think, so that they got along in spite of the money difference\u2014it was the next generation that made me suffer acutely. The B\u2019s were very early motorists\u2014once they actually drove to GV and their huge car and chauffeur made a sensations\u2014also the fact they wired the local hotel for rooms & bath\u2014when there wasn\u2019t a bath in the village\u2026. The B\u2019s were horrified to see the only child of their eldest son running about the village in bare feet, eating at the table with the grown-ups and drinking tea<\/em>, and so I was carried off (by train) to Worcester for the one awful winter than was almost the end of me.<\/p>\n 1917-18. The final sentence makes clear how horrible these months were for Bishop and how hard it was, even half a century later, to put them in words. The awkward end to the line, \u2018too grim to think of, almost,\u2019 is reminiscent of the \u2018almost-lost scream\u2019 in \u2018In the Village\u2019 and of the half dozen other occasions in which \u2018almost\u2019 appears in her poetry, nearly every example connected to a bad dream or difficult memory the poem\u2019s narrator would rather forget, from the cocks \u2018now almost inaudible\u2019 in \u2018Roosters\u2019 via the \u2018gloaming almost invisible\u2019 in \u2018At the Fishhouses\u2019 and \u2018the almost unused poison\u2019 of \u2018Giant Toad\u2019 to the \u2018yesterday I find almost impossible to lift\u2019 in \u2018Five Flights Up.\u2019 <\/p>\n In 1918, as she lay in bed crying, Bishop must have been daydreaming of a return to Nova Scotia. As she was driven round Worcester by her paternal grandparents\u2019 chauffeur, the same chauffeur who carried her up the stairs to her aunt\u2019s house when she could no longer walk, she must have remembered her maternal grandfather\u2019s buggy and his kindness to every creature he met, even the mare who had carried them up the hill. In \u2018Manners\u2019 she sides with the Bulmers over the Bishops, Nova Scotian \u2018good manners\u2019 over New England good education. The poem is dedicated to and written \u2018for a child of 1918\u2019 not because Bishop didn\u2019t remember where she was living in 1918 but because she remembered too well that she wasn\u2019t a resident of Great Village anymore, that she had been taken away twice, once by her Bishop grandparents, a second time to live with the family described in the chronology she shared with Dr Foster as \u2018Aunt Maude & her husband,\u2019 George Shepherdson\u2019s name significantly omitted. <\/p>\n Are dedications such as these poetry? According to Anne Greenhalgh\u2019s A Concordance to Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s Poetry<\/em>, they are not. In her preface, she notes that \u2018in accordance with the conventional practice, the concordance does not include: titles or Roman numerals numbering poems; dedications, quotations, or explanations introducing poems; or dates and footnotes at the end of poems.\u2019 This sounds relatively uncontroversial until you begin thinking about what is left out from this categorisation of a Bishop poem. The explanation of the title of \u2018The Man-Moth\u2019: \u2018Newspaper misprint for \u201cmammoth.\u201d\u2019 The dedication of \u2018Quai d\u2019Orl\u00e9ans\u2019 to Margaret Miller. The dedication of \u2018Anaphora\u2019 to Marjorie Stevens. The epigraph from Hopkins at the beginning of \u2018A Cold Spring.\u2019 The parenthetical \u2018On my birthday\u2019 before the opening line of \u2018The Bight.\u2019 The dedication of \u2018Letter to N.Y.\u2019 to Louise Crane. The date at the end of \u2018Arrival at Santos\u2019: \u2018January 1952.\u2019 The epigraph from Kenneth Clark at the beginning of \u2018Brazil, January 1, 1502.\u2019 Parenthetical information on who is speaking before the opening line of \u2018Manuelzinho\u2019: \u2018Brazil. A friend of the writer is speaking.\u2019 The dedication of \u2018The Armadillo\u2019 to Robert Lowell. The parenthetical \u2018From the plane\u2019 before the opening line of \u2018Night City.\u2019 The long-delayed and often-promised dedication of \u2018The Moose\u2019 to Grace Bulmer Bowers. The dedication of \u2018Objects & Apparitions\u2019 to Joseph Cornell and the post-script reveal that the poem is \u2018Translated from the Spanish of Octavio Paz.\u2019 The addition of \u2018in memoriam: Robert Lowell\u2019 to \u2018North Haven.\u2019 The parenthetical identification of Rio de Janeiro as the location of \u2018Pink Dog.\u2019 We can argue the case about whether a dedication affects our interpretation of a poem\u2014I don\u2019t see how it cannot\u2014but I think it\u2019s almost impossible to dismiss the other information Bishop sees fit to include above, below, or, in the case of \u201812 O\u2019Clock News,\u2019 alongside her poetry. They tell us something we need to know, something we need to keep in mind as we read the poem. I consider these days, place names and quotations as other ways of locating oneself within the poem, a glass eye to a real eye, or a real eye to a glass eye. <\/p>\n 5<\/strong><\/p>\n I mentioned two other poems set located in 1917 and 1918: \u2018Sestina\u2019 and \u2018In the Waiting Room.\u2019 The dating of \u2018Sestina\u2019 isn\u2019t as clear as \u2018In the Waiting Room\u2019 of course which ends on \u2018the fifth\/ of February, 1918,\u2019 three days before the real Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s seventh birthday. According to Sandra Barry, in August 1917 Maude and George Shepherdson arrived in Great Village for a holiday. A few weeks later, Bishop\u2019s paternal grandparents arrived. This is Barry\u2019s account of what happened in September 1917:<\/p>\n Though the Bulmers had plenty of room (their home was always filled with visitors\u2014family, friends, passing strangers, the Bishops stayed at the Elmonte Hotel just across the river. They had come to claim their granddaughter. Being her legal guardian, John Bishop had a right to do so. They did not simply descend and snatch up Bishop, but stayed for several weeks, probably to allow Elizabeth to get to know them. On 11 October the Truro Daily News recorded, \u201cMr and Mrs Bishop and Mrs George Shepherdson\u2026 have returned to their homes in the States. They were accompanied by little Miss Elizabeth Bishop who will spend the winter with her relatives.<\/p>\n Bishop was resident in Great Village from April 1915 until October 1917 so she spent three Septembers with her maternal relatives: September 1915, September 1916 and September 1917. September 1917 would have been the September she remembered most of course, not just because she was older at the time, but also because it was her final September living with her grandparents. She was six years old at the time. More accurately, she was six and a half years old, five months short of her seventh birthday. The sestina is obviously a poetic form structured around sixes. It is a fixed form of six lines, all stanzas having the same six words at the line ends in six different sequences. Most sestinas end with a triplet by way of conclusion. Half the length of the other stanzas, the final triplet looks and reads like a half stanza compared to the rest of the poem. A sestina, in other words, might be summarised as a poem not of six but of six and a half stanzas. No wonder Bishop chose it to commemorate this moment in her life. If children are aware of anything at six and seven years old, it is not just being six and seven years old but knowing down to the month and day how close you are to the next birthday. We see as much as \u2018In the Waiting Room\u2019: \u2018I said to myself: three days\/ and you\u2019ll be seven years old.\u2019 August and September not June and July are the midpoints of the year for children born in February and March. Her memory of becoming an \u2018Elizabeth<\/em>\u2019 in February 1918 might be more well-known but the memory of becoming a Bishop rather than a Bulmer six months earlier when she left Nova Scotia for New England is surely of equal significance. I can\u2019t help but conclude she included her age at the time in the poetic form she chose to write about it. For what is a sestina if not a form of impasse?<\/p>\n Let me end by placing the dictionary definition of the word alongside the conclusion of \u2018Sestina\u2019.<\/p>\n A road or way having no outlet; a blind alley, \u2018cul-de-sac\u2019. Also a position from which there is no way of escape, a \u2018fix.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Time to plant tears<\/em>, says the almanac, \u2018For a\u00a0Child\u00a0of 1918\u2019: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old by Jonathan Ellis 1 \u2018Bishop is parenthetical. Her parentheses create emphases even when their purpose is to hesitate not asseverate.\u2019 These are Maureen McLane\u2019s words, not mine, from her astonishingly sharp essay on Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein in which she reflects on how she came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":322,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[379,382],"tags":[388],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n\u2018A kite string?—But no kite.\u2019
\n\u2018round and round and round\u2019
\n\u2018Deny deny deny\u2019
\n\u2018rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!\u2019
\n\u2018argue argue argue\u2019
\n\u2018faint, faint, faint\/ (or are you hearing things)\u2019
\n\u2018ESSO\u2014SO\u2014SO\u2014SO\u2019
\n\u2018something, something, something\u2019
\n\u2018ch\u00e1-cha, ch\u00e1-cha, ch\u00e1-cha\u2026\u2019
\n\u2018Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek<\/em>\u2019
\n\u2018shush, shush, shush<\/em>\u2019
\n\u2018repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n
\nBut I live in your world. What do I do?
\n\u2014Collect no interest\u2014otherwise what I can;
\nAbove all, I am not that staring man.<\/p>\n
\n\u2018We stand as still as stones\u2026\u2019
\n\u2018we hear the first crow of the first cock\u2019
\n\u2018It is like what we imagine knowledge to be\u2019
\n\u2018We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping\u2019
\n\u2018Oh, must we dream our dreams…\u2019
\n\u2018I\u2014we\u2014were falling, falling\u2026\u2019
\n\u2018We know it<\/em> (also death).\u2019
\n\u2018the little that we get for free\u2019 <\/p>\n
\n
\n Every Monday afternoon I go past the blacksmith\u2019s shop with the package under my arm, hiding the address of the sanitarium with my arm and my other hand.
\n Going over the bridge, I stop and stare down into the river. All the little trout that have been too smart to get caught\u2014for how long now?\u2014are there, rushing in flank movements, foolish assaults and retreats, against and away from the old sunken fender of Malcolm McNeil\u2019s Ford. It has lain there for ages and is supposed to be a disgrace to us all. So are the tin cans that glint there, brown and gold.
\n From above, the trout look as transparent as the water, but if one did catch one, it would be opaque enough, with a little slick moon-white belly with a pair of tiny, pleated, rose-pink fins on it. The leaning willows soak their narrow yellowed leaves.
\n
\n
\nWhat does this moment at the end of the story represent? Going over the bridge is something the child does everyday, certainly on the days she takes the package to the post office. Stopping and staring at the river is to some extent a delay tactic. She is putting off another awkward conversation with the postmaster about her mother\u2019s health. On the other hand, to stop and stare at the river is not to avoid her mother\u2019s absence but to confront it in a different form\u2014\u2018the old sunken fender of Malcolm McNeil\u2019s Ford\u2019 that has \u2018lain there for ages and is supposed to be a disgrace to us all\u2019 a displacement or reminder of the child\u2019s mother who has also been elsewhere \u2018for ages\u2019 and is similarly treated as an embarrassment, at least by her maternal relatives. The little trout, \u2018too smart to get caught,\u2019 dancing around the fender, are akin both to the child\u2019s actions in the story, evading physical proximity to her mother, and the writer\u2019s own movements to outflank the past by treating it, as here, as if it were something still happening in the present that could be changed or corrected. Here we can look down and see it. At the beginning of the story we can hear it, touch it even. \u2018Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.\u2019 <\/p>\n
\n1918: In May I think, I was taken to live with Aunt Maude & her husband in Revere.<\/p>\n
\nI had already had bad bronchitis and probably attacks of asthma\u2014in Worcester I got much worse and developed eczema that almost killed me and had the beginnings of St. Vitus Dance along with everything else. One awful day I was sent home from \u201cfirst grade\u201d because of my sores\u2014and I imagine my hopeless shyness has dated from then.\u2014In May, 1918, I was taken to live with Aunt Maud; I couldn\u2019t walk and Ronald carried me up the stairs\u2014my aunt burst into tears when she saw me. I had nurses etc.\u2014but that stretch is still too grim to think of, almost.<\/p>\n
\nThe grandmother sings to the marvellous stove
\nand the child draws another inscrutable house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"