To be fair to Stevenson, he uses this movement with works in Bishop's catalog that almost demand this particular blurring of lines, such as the short stories "In the Village" and. In his essay "Elizabeth Bishop: The Discipline of Description", McNally counters the aforementioned Southworth quote that Bishop's poetry is "as objective as poetry can be" (SOUTHWORTH, 1959, p. 213).
Bishop’s cartographies
The long trip home
Although the stanza is filled with questions, Bishop's more descriptive style is still evident throughout, as in the image of a "folded sunset, still quite warm" just as the stanza ends. To better understand how this sense of "universality" is so strong in Bishop's poetry, we will momentarily set aside "Questions of Travel" to discuss "Filling Station" as the understanding of how Bishop captures emotion through perception and description in a poem that places this "universal self" at its peak with its ending of "Somebody loves us all" (BISHOP, 2008, p. 75).
Stopping for gas
Filling Station,” our reading of “Questions of Travel” will benefit greatly from returning to it and finding the same perspective hidden within its questions and landscape. After setting the scene, we move on from simply exploring the landscape to exploring the people who inhabit that “family gas station” (BISHOP, 2008, p. 123). As we move toward the end of “Gas Station,” Bishop's speaker questions the very existence of those objects that seem to clash with the almost inherent filth and indelicacy of a gas station.
In the final stanza of "The Filling Station," we are finally able to fully realize Bishop's evocation of a universal human experience, removed from herself, her speaker, and even the very characters who inhabit the landscape that she creates.
Back on the road
Instead of asking, for example, whether the will to see the sun on the other side of the globe is childish or not, the speaker already positions this urge as being childish in the first place, instead of asking us "What childishness is that". Oh, shall we dream our dreams / And have them too?', asks the speaker as we approach the end of the stanza, essentially rewording the initial travel questions. Another worthwhile thing, it seems, is simply to look into the world and the landscape with the awe demonstrated by the bishop's speech as they perceive it: the birds, the brickwork, the sunset, all seem to bring a sense of new, which we have previously linked to a childish perspective on the world.
The French thinker Gaston Bachelard, hugely influenced by phenomenology, wrote extensively about the experience of childhood.
The pity of not having been at all
In the first chapter, we covered an early poem (“The Map”) and poems from Bishop's middle period (“Questions about Travel” and “Gas Station”) to illustrate Bishop's perception of the outside world. But almost immediately upon its release, "One Art" replaced "The Fish" as Bishop's signature poem. If Bishop is known for her perception of the external world and its objects, she is in "One Art."
Yet, in "One Art", elements of the "outside" that we clearly observed in the first chapter were few and far between. As we move forward in our reading of "North Haven," the other two movements identified by Cook in the poem will come to the fore. It is in the encounter between nature (repetition) and the author (revision) that Bishop is able to catch a glimpse of his interlocutor and move from the outside in.
The art of losing
Lost houses
Some elements present in the published poem were there from the beginning - the idea of. I think the very reason Bishop decided to incorporate the image of the lost door keys so prominently is that it directly ties into the beloved houses she mentions a few verses later. Bishop thus conjures an image of lost door keys to lost houses, not unlike the more immediately sophisticated images she conjures of objects in "The Map" or "Questions of Travel."
By evoking the image of lost keys before conjuring the houses to which the keys belong, Bishop masterfully suggests a synecdoche of those houses by mentioning the lost door keys.
A watch‘s memory
Having said that, it's hard to believe that a poet as perfectionist as Bishop would simply go with the first thing that came to mind, or that the lost door keys would be just a stand-in for some small object whose loss would be a minor annoyance . However, the meaning of a certain object - a watch - is not a coincidence either, because, as we have already mentioned, Bishop never includes the element arbitrarily in her poetry. I believe that the prized object of a watch can be directly related to the loss of time, just as lost door keys can be related to the loss of a beloved house.
There is a movement that links the small, tangible objects – the lost door keys or the watch – to larger, more intangible losses, such as time or home.
You
The greatest loss in "One Art", even greater than the entire continent, is the speaker's interlocutor, only in name. Reading "One Art" does not, however, provide any confirmation of the identity of this particular "you" - if it even exists. Many of Bishop's full-length biographies argue for this particular reading of Methfessel as the "thou" in "One Art."
This loss is final and almost breaks the logic of 'One Art' in its entirety.
An Elizabeth
National Geographic
In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuela to keep her dentist appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. In the Waiting Room" as "the last poem that Bishop completed and for which she drew material directly from her childhood experiences” (STEVENSON, 2006, p. 40). Tonally and structurally, ―In the Waiting Room‖ is reminiscent of the aforementioned ―First Death in Nova Scotia‖ in its childish language.
If we view Cucinella's view of the Bishop's body as ambiguous and universalistic, we may see why exactly Bishop's speaker in ―In the Waiting Room‖ would mislead themselves.
An I
In the Waiting Room‖ seems to be testing precisely the boundaries between the body and the world, as highlighted by Merleau-Ponty in the quote above. The second stanza of "In the Waiting Room" comes even more clearly from a subjective perspective. We already know that we are participating in the epiphany of a child who is nearing his seventh birthday.
Zachariah Pickard, as mentioned earlier, drew attention to the way Bishop's eye "collects and controls." PICKARD, 2008, p. 34), but in 'In the waiting room' control is far too difficult; the revelation her speaker faces when viewing the photographs on National Geographic is one that shakes them to the core.
Questions of being
Now with this newfound sense of subjectivity—of being both themselves as "I" and part of something larger as "one of them"—we move into the final stanzas of the poem, in which the Bishop's epiphany continues. As we move to the end of the poem, we return to the real world. By the last stanza of the poem, after the speaker's epiphany and recognition of their subjectivity, Bishop seems to almost revert to the style she was often characterized—or reduced to—as: distant, descriptive, impersonal.
When Bishop's speaker proclaims, "Then I was in it again," what exactly is this, "it" is not as simple as going back to the waiting room.
The inside and the outside: the further art of losing
In Memoriam: perceiving the island
Right after the epigraph dedicated to the loving memory of Bishop's late friend Robert Lowell, the first word of "North Haven" is literally the singular first person I. However, this departure is not exclusive to "North Haven," as the previously analyzed poem "I the waiting room" also has a prominent place with the pronoun I right at the beginning. 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.
Also worth noting is that in her analysis of “North Haven,” Cook links the speaker of the poem to Bishop herself.
Pretending
Reading ―North Haven‖, the question of whether or not Bishop's speaker is her seems to indicate an even clearer yes, as her speaker begins to move from landscape (outside) to memory (inside). an incredibly important move for this dissertation, and a big reason why I chose to read "North Haven" and also why I chose to save it for last. In this stanza, Cook mentions how in it "the claim that the earth can move after this death is not a seismic thought, but a dreamy thought" (COOK, 2016, p. 254). Bishop often used the first-person plural in a way that seemed universal, broad, or undefined, as in the first lines of "The Imaginary Iceberg," "We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship, / Though it meant the end of the Voyage‖ .
In "North Haven," the reference to "our favorite month" (my emphasis) feels much more like a tale of two individuals than a universal meditation (as in "Imaginary Iceberg") or a meditation on travelers as a whole (as in ―Travel Questions‖).
Repeat, revise
The fourth stanza is crucial to the poem's theme of loss, as this loss now begins to directly interfere with the way Bishop's speaker perceives the landscape. In Cook's view, the bird's song is almost incompatible with the sense of mourning that the speaker (or the mourner) anchors in it. Cook draws attention to the particularities of both repeating and revising texts and in 'North Haven' and the specific genre of elegy, stating that 'genres like elegy change over time in this way: repetition, repeat, repeat;
This human quality is even more apparent as we move on to the next stanza and near the end of the poem, so it is very important not to overlook it.
You
For Vendler, the memory interrupts the speaker's perception of the landscape and forces them to face the loss of their friend. In Bishop's third use of design, he emphasizes a verse that is crucial to the poem, sets it apart from the rest, and, as already mentioned, divides the poem into two halves—the outer and the inner. Here we immediately remember the public figure to whom "North Haven" is dedicated.
The biography is welcome here mainly because it is foreshadowed at the beginning of the song, when Bishop dedicates ―North Haven‖ to her lost friend.
Change
