A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 551

otherwise. There are poems about travelers (“Crusoe in England”), poems that recall

things seen while traveling (“Arrival at Santos”), poems that ask the question,

“Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” One of her pieces has as its

epigraph a quotation from Landscape into Art by Kenneth Clark: “embroidered

nature ... tapestried landscape”; and this suggests the peculiar ability she possesses

to mingle landscapes literal and imagined, or to find the sources of art and inspira-

tion in the most unpromising and apparently mundane of surroundings – in a

“Filling Station,” for instance:

Somebody

arranges the row of cans

so that they softly say:

ESSO-SO-SO-SO

to high-strung automobiles.

somebody loves us all.

Typically, as here, the revelations her poetic journeys achieve are joyful but also sad –

with the sadness of rootlessness, perhaps, and isolation. Bishop’s watching eye and

musing voice are kept at one remove, in this case unable to determine who the

“somebody” might be – the arrangement is perceived, but not its shadowy creator.

Whether peering through a map at the “long sea-weeded ledges” it signifies, or

looking at a landscape with the suspicion that there is something “retreating, always

retreating behind it,” the quality of distance is always there, enabling wonder certainly

but also loss. As some of Bishop’s personae learn, the solitude that is a prerequisite

of attentiveness, and so imaginative discovery, promotes absence: to look and see is,

after all, to stand apart.

One of Bishop’s poems, “In the Waiting Room,” actually describes how the poet

learned about this apartness. While sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, she recalls,

“I said to myself: three days / and you’ll be seven years old.” “I felt: you are an I,” she

goes on, “you are an Elizabeth”: “I knew that nothing stranger / had ever happened,

that nothing / stranger could ever happen.” The position realized here is the site of

most of her work, whether she is attending to objects, people, or events. Her

explorer’s eye transforms ordinary creatures into extraordinary characters, the stuff

of artifice and legend: a sandpiper, for instance, is metamorphosed into a fanatical

investigator, “final, awkward / ... a student of Blake” in the sense that it evidently

searches for the world in a grain of sand. The aim is not to be merely fanciful or

whimsical, even in more openly bizarre poems such as “The Man-Moth.” On the

contrary, what Bishop is after is a deeper realism. She is trying to reveal things that

may be most available to the unhabituated eye: to uncover, perhaps, the peculiar

strategies we and other animals use to confront and defy the forces that govern us

(“The Armadillo”), or the strange communications that can occur between the

different dimensions of life, the earth and the sea, waking and sleeping. One such

communication is described in “The Fish,” where the poet remembers how oil that

“had spread a rainbow / around the rusted engine” of a fishing vessel led to sudden

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