In Memoriam: perceiving the island

North Haven

In Memoriam: Robert Lowell

I can make out the rigging of a schooner a mile off; I can count

the new cones on the spruce. It is so still the pale bay wears a milky skin, the sky

no clouds except for one long, carded horse¹s tail.

[…]

(BISHOP, 2008, p. 177)

―North Haven‖ announces its elegiac tone even before its verse: ―In Memoriam:

Robert Lowell‖. If in ―One Art‖, loss is gradual – from keys to homes to you –, ―North Haven‖ starts off already with an annunciation of mourning. Another thing that differs the two poems is that, due to its epitaph, the poem‘s interlocutor is quite evident: the person Bishop‘s speaker is talking to is clearly Robert Lowell, while in ―One Art‖, one needs to venture into Bishop‘s biography in order to uncover the “you” found in it. In ―North Haven‖, however, biography is merely optional – even if a reader has no prior knowledge of Bishop, Lowell and their friendship, the ―In Memoriam‖ that starts the poem off already gives up the information we need to infer that this is a poem of mourning and memory.

What is perhaps most fascinating about what follows the epitaph, however, is how un- elegiac these first stanza reads. Lloyd Schwartz states that the poem ―begins with one of Bishop‘s most hyper-real, dreamlike descriptions‖ (SCHWARTZ, 2014, p. 152), a quality not unlike one could find on an earlier Bishop poem, like ―Questions of Travel‖ and its ―too many waterfalls‖ (BISHOP, 2008, p. 74). Helen Vendler also focuses on the descriptive position we find at the beginning of ―North Haven‖, but now, rather fittingly, refers to this moment as one of perception:

Although Bishop‘s elegy for Lowell warns us (with its epigraph ―In memoriam: Robert Lowell‖) that it is an elegy, it ―pretends‖ during its first four stanzas that it is not one.

Rather, it occupies itself at first with defining life as pure sense perception apparently untroubled by temporality. […] Simple perception is always momentary, a brief bodily registering. ―North Haven‖ opens with a stanza of such perception, recording nothing more than a boat on the water, new cones on the spruce trees, the quiet appearance of the bay, and a single cloud in the sky. Living, in this prelude, is indistinguishable from seeing and describing. (VENDLER, 2010, p. 100-101)

What Vendler perhaps fails to notice or to give its proper value is that, in Bishop, perception is never ―simple‖ or straight to the point. In this fist stanza, Bishop‘s speaker is, again, pronounced by a very singular I, just like ―One Art‖ and ―In the Waiting Room‖.

However, for Bishop, description is never absolute – elements in her perception of the world are never merely there. As we have previously seen, Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira argues that, for Bishop, description ―hides as much as it reveals‖ (OLIVEIRA, 2002, p. 44). Vendler, by dismissing Bishop‘s perception of the landscape of North Haven as being simply ―a brief bodily registering‖, ignores the ways Bishop is able, through her particular use of language, to perceive the landscape in a way that is distinctively and subjectively her own. In the first stanza of ―Questions of Travel‖, for instance, this subjectivity through perception came from the way the speaker kept qualifying the landscape for its excess, in verses like ―There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams / hurry too rapidly down to the sea, / and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops / […] (BISHOP, 2008, p. 74‖. The use of these particular words and phrases – too many, too, so many – informs us that these perceptions of the outside are being necessarily filtered by a speaker who finds them excessive. Bishop‘s speaker, then, is able to subjectively imprint their impressions of the landscape onto their perceptive moment of ―brief bodily registering‖, to borrow Vendler‘s term, without ever resorting to using the I to express them.

Going back to the first stanza of ―North Haven‖, we have a clear difference from that of ―Questions of Travel‖ when it comes to the ways this perceptive subjectivity is presented to the reader. Right after the epigraph dedicated to the loving memory of Bishop‘s deceased friend Robert Lowell, literally the first word from ―North Haven‖ is the singular first-person I.

This alone marks a huge departure from Bishop‘s earlier style and from the idea of the poetry being ―as objective as poetry can be‖ (SOUTHWORTH, 1959, p. 213). This departure, however, is not exclusive to ―North Haven‖, as the previously analyzed poem ―In the Waiting Room‖ also prominently features the pronoun I right at the start.

In ―In the Waiting Room‖ the external world is first presented with detail only through the lens of National Geographic; in ―North Haven‖, the world is described by the speaker as it appears before their eye. The crucial point here, of course, is that said description is being filtered through Bishop‘s very particular and subjective perspective: ―I can make out the rigging of a schooner / a mile off; I can count / the new cones on the spruce […]‖. Here, Bishop displays her speaker‘s subjectivity though her particular choice of words, much like the qualifiers in the first stanza of ―Questions of Travel‖, only know this subjectivity is even more pronounced by her particular use of the singular first-person pronoun. Besides Bishop‘s choice of pronoun, her words are also important, as they tell us that this landscape is being perceived, rather than simply described: ―I can make out‖, ―I can count‖. One here is reminded of Merleau-Ponty when he states that ―the object is only determined as an

identifiable being through an open series of possible experiences, and only exists for a subject who produces this identification‖ (MERLEAU-PONTY, 2012, p. 220) and ―every vision ultimately takes up, at the core of subjectivity, a total project of the world or a logic of the world that empirical perceptions determine but that they could not engender‖ (MERLEAU- PONTY, 2012, p. 438).

Merleau-Ponty‘s sensibilities towards a subjective nature of what we see fits the way Bishop chooses to present her own speaker in some of the poems already discussed, like ―In the Waiting Room‖, but it is perhaps in ―North Haven‖ where she chooses to display the subjective nature of her observation towards the external world with the utmost clarity through her particular use of language and what her speaker is able to ―make out‖.

Going back to the first stanza of ―North Haven‖, we can see how elements of subjectivity make their way into Bishop‘s perception of the landscape of the island of North Haven even beyond Bishop‘s markers of first-person perspective. ―[…] It is so still / the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky / no clouds except for one long, carded horse¹s tail.‖, Bishop‘s speaker paints us a picture that clearly evokes more than a simple as-is description of a particular landscape. Bishop, of course, is able to describe a scene in either a dismissive way (like she does at the beginning of ―Arrival at Santos‖) or simply a detached one (like in a poem like ―The Monument‖).

The island of North Haven is vivid through Bishop‘s description of its scenery, with her speaker calling attention to some of the island‘s most notable features. In this first stanza alone, Bishop calls attention to the island‘s nautical history by incorporating a schooner into the poem, a traditional vessel linked to the history of North Haven all the way back to 1775 (MARITIME, s.d.) and the spruce tree, which grew rapidly on the land that used to be used for crops and pasture (THE WHEELS, s.d.). Both of these elements, anchored in the history of the island, make their way onto ―North Haven‖ rather inconspicuously, as Bishop‘s speaker does not draw attention to them as being anything other than components of the landscape.

The history of the island is embedded into the poem, but the poem is not about the history of the island, or even the island itself, as we will see shortly.

Finally, another point of note in this first stanza is how it is essentially separated from the rest of the poem by its use of italics. Vendler states that ―setting off this moment of pure perception by italicizing it, Bishop intimates a sense of homecoming and pleasure in her seasonal return to the island of North Haven‖ (VENDLER, 2010, p. 101). This first stanza, then, works almost as prelude to the poem per se, much like the epigraph to Robert Lowell.

Cook also calls attention to this divide, going further along and identifying three movements in ―North Haven‖. She writes:

The poem has three movements. First is an opening stanza in italics, separated from the rest like a prologue and setting the scene on the island of North Haven, Maine. The speaker is a persona of Bishop herself, with her far-sighted gaze. This is the place, the prologue implies, in which to utter this elegy. ―The first stanza I wanted to give a feeling of an intensely quiet meditation‖ [to Frank Bidart, 9 July 1978, L 624]. (COOK, 2016, p. 253)

As we move along in our reading of ―North Haven‖, the other two movements identified by Cook in the poem will come to the forefront. Most critics seem to be in agreement, though, that this first stanza works mostly to elaborate on the poem‘s setting as suggested by its title. Cook even goes to Bishop in order to better sustain her argument, although perhaps unnecessarily; the feeling of meditation towards the landscape is evident through Bishop‘s writing, making the excursion to biography simply not needed. Also worth noting is that Cook, in her analysis of ―North Haven‖, links the poem‘s speaker to Bishop herself. Reading ―North Haven‖ without taking Bishop as the poem‘s speaker is quite a difficult thing to do, especially when one has any biographical information on Bishop and her quite famous friendship with Lowell. Reading ―North Haven‖, the question of whether or not Bishop‘s speaker is herself seems to point even more clearly towards a ―yes‖, as her speaker starts to move from the landscape (the outside) into memory (the inside), a movement far too important for this dissertation, and a big reason as to why I chose to read ―North Haven‖ and also why I chose to save it for last.