She once said, ‘we are driving to the interior’. One has been put on high alert. Perhaps, like ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’, we find the uncertainty exhilarating. After all, he ‘loves that sense of constant readjustment’. Eliot, as C. K. Stead brilliantly observed, used his ‘nerves’ in ‘Prufrock’. Bishop’s is also an art of the nerves, in her case optic. ‘Love Lies Sleeping’ does not denote repose. As dawn comes we must ‘clear away what presses on the brain’ as ‘the day-springs of the morning strike . . . alarms for the expected’. No going back to sleep, then.
Le Roy, in ‘Songs for a Colored Singer’, probably sleeps soundly. Though his woman wonders ‘Le Roy, just how much are we owing? / Something I can’t comprehend, / the more we got the more we spend.’
An eternal mystery and not just in the Le Roy household. Well, ‘life’s like that’, a line from ‘The Moose’ (twenty years to complete – ‘revise, revise, revise’, a trait noted by her friend, the arch-reviser himself,
Lowell), and it is sometimes in opposition to Art, compelling us to choose. Would we, as she insists in ‘The Imaginary Iceberg’, ‘rather have the iceberg than the ship, / although it meant the end of travel’?
Art, like icebergs, which ‘behoove the soul’, is part-hidden, ‘self-made from elements least visible’, and is often dangerous to the ship of life, being as it is an obsession.
‘Crusoe in England’ knows obsession, knows it well and also knows its price. He remembers the moment: ‘Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it / another minute longer, Friday came.’ Perfect. This blindingly
brilliant poem was inspired by Darwin, about whose obsession Bishop wrote, ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing necessary for its creation, a self-forgetting, perfectly useless concentration.’ Defoe was also self-forgetting, publishing his masterpiece as being that of an anonymous survivor of a shipwreck. He knew we’d find him out.
Bishop’s Larkin-like genius for the sense of place – often most powerful in those who fear displacement – is again clear in ‘Filling Station’: ‘Oh, but it is dirty!’ Attention. ‘Be careful with that match!’ And in that line she’s got us. Beyond the dirt and possible danger, she notes with heartbreaking accuracy, ‘Somebody embroidered the doily.’ And continues her enumeration of small graces in unexpected places: ‘Somebody / arranges the rows of cans / so that they softly say:
ESSO–SO–SO–SO / to high-strung automobiles.’ She ends with an almost casual elegy: ‘Somebody loves us all.’
‘One Art’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ are late poems. They afford us no place to hide. ‘Lose something every day . . . – Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident /
the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.’ It’s lines like that that make one, initially a reluctant convert, tremble. The congregation grows larger day by day; one notes in pews marked ‘reserved’ a Nobel Laureate, Heaney; a Poet Laureate, Motion; Fenton, winner of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. It’s perfectly possible that Elizabeth Bishop, who avoided myth and grand statements but who found ‘In the Waiting Room’ one of literature’s most frightening, and frightened, voices – that of the terrified child – is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. And that is perhaps what frightens us: in our own blindness we might have missed her