the Himalayas haunt many immature imagina-
tions), but Bishop has a more primitive concep-
tion of the physical world. Her ideas often rely on
pretending to have the untamed eye (if not the
heart—her heart was always a civilized broken
one) of the innocent.
A reader may accede to the faux naı ̈ve out of a
delight in playacting, but it offers only a thin term
of appreciation unless itreturns to the wrongness
of our common sense. There, all lands are
islands—and islands float in the isolation of their
waters. What interests me is not the cajoling qual-
ity of her rhetoric—her arrogation of the reader’s
judgment in her intimate ‘‘we’’ (‘‘We can stroke
these lovely bays’’), the dry irony of her questions
(‘‘Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their
colors?’’), the fine hesitation of her perceiving
instinct (‘‘Shadows, or are they shallows... ’’)—
but the purpose to which the rhetoric is put, here
to blur the distinction between the map and the
world it represents.
The map is not the world, but as rhetoric it
becomes a world, just as our printed representa-
tions don’t just refer to a world but are a world in
themselves. In the orders of that world the guileless
observation may be the most guilty of suggestion.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring
mountains
—the printer here experiencing the same
excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
The labors of history have complication if
no subtlety, but the complications of history
have been resolved in the map, a visual equiva-
lent to the blind work of civilization, where the
names of ports are carried to sea on ships and the
names of inland cities traded across mountains.
Such commerce, of course, required the making
of maps; but commerce was already ancient
before someone looked down on the world like
a god and drew a picture of it.
Emotion that exceeds its cause is usually
labeled sentiment, but here the printer has expe-
rienced the excitement of the discoverer. It is
easier to be a god than to act like a god, and
the power of naming has encouraged the printer
to write the names in water and impose them on
scarps. That is a kind of civilization, too, and an
example of the fate that countries suffer from the
inattentions of history rather than the attentions
of mapmakers. From above we see none of the
hatreds that run over borders, none of the wars
that have put borders in place. (From a plane we
would see no borders at all.) That detachment
allows the mapmakers to devote their art (and
this is a poem intimate with the detachments of
art) to choosing a palette for history’s winners
and losers. The colors of history are all bolder
strokes, as the poem reminds us: ‘‘More delicate
than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.’’
The rhetorical understandings of the poem pro-
ceed by what they ignore: art has here imposed
on history.
Many early readers of Bishop must have felt
that their emotions too were outrunning the cause,
a common reaction to minor poets or private
favorites—Housman, Hardy, and Larkin have
also excited the wary eagerness of readers unsure
whether their fondness did not exceed their judg-
ment. The properties of her poetry are slight and
conditional, and the subtlety of her arguments
is felt neither as a compelled candor nor as a
compelling passion. As a poet of the tentative,
she bears the frailties of a resistance not in the
language so much as beneath it: the intimacies her
poems trouble to create are sometimes desperate in
their resolve, and even her unbearable prettiness—
so tempting and so ingenuous—often cloaks the
unpleasantly real. The virtue of her language, like
the virtue of her emotion, is in its privacy and
reservation; and what it reserves is not just the
announcement of its causes but the retrieval of its
motives.
Bishop therefore did not have—perhaps
could not have had—any significant influence
on the direction of American poetry in the post-
war period; her sensibility was more precarious
and less cautiously disposed than the demand of
the period. She did not grapple with the religious
or formal or personal responsibilities that tor-
mented Robert Lowell, against whose poetryTHE VIRTUE OF HER LANGUAGE, LIKE THE
VIRTUE OF HER EMOTION, IS IN ITS PRIVACY AND
RESERVATION; AND WHAT IT RESERVES IS NOT JUST
THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF ITS CAUSES BUT THE
RETRIEVAL OF ITS MOTIVES.’’The Fish