No, more blue than that – this instant qualification isn’t a trick; it’s a habit of mind – “a feeling mind, feeling its way to thought.”
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Elizabeth Bishop - Poetic Trickster?
Colm
Tóibín, in his absorbing On Elizabeth
Bishop (2015), calls Bishop’s habit of correcting or qualifying herself a
“trick.” He says,
The
enacting of a search for further precision and further care with terms in the
poems (and maybe in the letters too) was, in one way, a trick, a way of making
the reader believe and trust a voice, or a way of quietly asking the reader to
follow the poem’s casual and then deliberate efforts to be faithful to what it saw,
or what it knew.
I’m
not sure “trick” is the right word. It connotes insincerity. It’s too cynical.
When Bishop, in her great “Santarém” (The
New Yorker, February 20, 1978), says, “In front of the church, the
Cathedral, rather,” is she trying to trick us into trusting her voice, or is she simply
trying to be as accurate as possible? Tóibín further says,
The
trick established limits, exalted precision, made the bringing of things down
to themselves into a sort of conspiracy with the reader. But she also worried
about anything that might be overlooked (“no detail too small”), or not noticed
properly, or exaggerated, or let too loose into grand feelings, which were not
fully to be trusted.
I
agree with the “no detail too small” part of this observation. Bishop was a
meticulous observer; she relished visual accuracy. Seamus Heaney, in his “Counting
to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop” (The
Redress of Poetry, 1995), refers to her “obsessive attention to detail.”
But
Tóibín has spurred my thinking. Why enact the qualification? Why not, in
“Santarém,” for instance, just delete “church” and insert “Cathedral”? Why show
both the first word choice and the more accurate second one? I think this is
attributable to another element of Bishop’s style – her Hopkinsian aim to
portray, in her words, “not a thought, but a mind thinking” (quoted in James
Fenton’s “The Many Arts of Elizabeth Bishop,” The Strength of Poetry, 2001). As Fenton says, she shows “the
feeling mind, feeling its way to thought.” One way she does this is by showing
her hesitations, corrections, and qualifications. For example:
Oil
has seeped into
the
margins of the ditch of standing water
and
flashes or looks upward brokenly,
like
bits of mirror – no, more blue than that:
like
tatters of the Morpho butterfly.
[from
“Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,” The New
Yorker, December 24, 1966]
No, more blue than that – this instant qualification isn’t a trick; it’s a habit of mind – “a feeling mind, feeling its way to thought.”
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