550 The American Century: Literature since 1945carefully to the ordinary objects around her; and then, through that gesture of
attention, to catch glimpses of what she calls “the always-more-successful surrealism
of everyday life.” The more closely she observes something, the more it seems to
become arrested in time, translated for a moment into a world of stillness and
dream. This resembles Moore’s habit of using close attention as a means of
imaginative release. However, Bishop’s poetic voice is unlike Moore’s. Strongly
musical rhythms, unexpected but inevitably recurring rhymes, wit and clarity of
idiom, above all a use of inherited formal structures that is characterized by its
elegance and tact: all help to create a poetry that balances itself between mellow
speech and music, the lucidity of considered thought and the half-heard melodies
appropriate to a more sensuous, magical vision.
The dream-like sharpness of sight and the alertness of tone that typify Bishop’s
best pieces are illustrated by a poem like “The Map.” The subject is a favorite one: like
so many American poets, Bishop is interested in space, geography rather than history,
and she uses maps as both a figure and a medium for imaginative exploration. As the
opening lines indicate, the poem has a fairly tight yet unobtrusive formal structure,
enhanced by delicate tonalities and repetitions: “Land lies in water; it is shadowed
green /,”the poem begins. “Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges / showing the
line of long sea-weeded ledges / where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.”
The picture Bishop paints is at once precise and surreal, in the sense that it is through
a careful enumeration of the details of the map that she begins to unlock the mysteries
of the land and water, shadows or shallows, that it encloses. As the poet’s imaginative
voyage continues, so her feeling for potential magic grows. Sometimes, the tone is
languorous, even sensual: “Labrador’s yellow,” she murmurs, “where the moony
Eskimo / has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays ...” At other moments, Bishop
allows her wit to play around the given particulars: “These peninsulas take the water
between thumb and finger,” she observes mischievously, “ / like women feeling for
the smoothness of yard-goods.” Neither the play of fancy, nor the feeling for mystery,
is unrestricted, however; both are firmly yet quietly anchored to an awareness of the
actual, the formal constraints of map and poem. The contours of the map are
constantly kept before our eyes, and the poet never strays too far from the original
structure, the dominant rhythms and idiom. The closing four lines, in fact, return us
to the frame established in the opening four, an emphatic rhyme scheme contained
within a simple, bell-like repetition: “Are they assigned, or can the countries pick
their colors?” the poem asks. “– What suits the character or the native waters best. /
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West. / More delicate than the
historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.” By this stage, the arts of the map and the
poem describing the map have become almost indistinguishable. A democratic eye
that discloses the wonder nestling in everything, a lively imagination that denies
limits, spatial or otherwise, in its efforts to retain the world for the mind: these
qualities, Bishop intimates, characterize both the map-maker and the poet, as they
attend to the sights we see, the signs we create.
The map for Bishop is like a poem because it is a symbolic journey, an excursion
that is perhaps promising and perhaps not. Her poetry is full of travel, literal andGGray_c05.indd 550ray_c 05 .indd 550 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM