hers sometimes acted as a subtle counterirritant—
the softer inflections of his middle period were
among the few signs that a poetry might be written
to allay her influence. Their regard was mutual and
their echoings of each other sometimes concordant;
but everything Lowell touched turned to poetry,
and it was impossible for Bishop not to measure
herself against such fluentself-transformation—her
disappointments and impediments never seemed of
such artistic value.
Bishop was treated as a peculiar case, a
deviant and unhelpful example like Marianne
Moore, to whose poetry—similar in its observant
miniatures—hers was often compared, at times to
her disfavor. She had accepted Moore’s friend-
ship and patronage, which came bound with the
misapprehensions of critics. Moore’s early poems
had considerable radical force, in their carapace
of poetic manner (Moore’s early poetry has still
not been completely absorbed; but then later in
life Moore apparently did not comprehend, or
had little liking for, the uncomfortable burs of
that poetry). Bishop was a poet uniformly more
conventional, whose timidity and mordant self-
deprecation never seemed virtuous to herself
(‘‘[O]ne has wasted one’s talent through timidity,’’
she once wrote in a letter). One might see in her
sequence of prose poems, ‘‘Rainy Season; Sub-
Tropics,’’ the barely concealed triptych of a per-
sonality and its defeats: of all the tropical fauna,
why else choose a poisonous toad that longs to be
touched; a wandering crab ignorant of its terrible
fragility and far from home; and a huge lumber-
ing snail, asking for pity, which can never see its
own gorgeous shell? Each has been crippled in its
hope by the consequence of its limitations.
Bishop’s major gift, what might be called the
stimulus to the higher and less provisional reaches
of her art, was a nakedness of the observing eye,
of seeing the world as if the world had never been
seen before—she seemed to come upon objects
with a little delighted gasp (‘‘Why couldn’t we
have... /... looked and looked our infant sight
away’’). Marianne Moore had a similar gift; but
though Moore might claim an imaginative prior-
ity the gift was original in its effect on Bishop—
the characteristic turns in her early drafts might
have come after reading Moore’s poems, but they
are already part of a sensibility more warmly
functioning, more intimate, and quite different
in its occupations, if as yet more tentative (com-
pared to Bishop, Moore is a finicky clipper of
news articles, her gift more scientific, more primly
precise, and therefore much cooler).
The course of Bishop’s poetry is largely a
history of the use of this gift, its development
(and taming) and temptation. Poetry functions
supremely well in the visual frequencies, since lan-
guage trades not just in observation but in the
metaphorical transformations that lie as deep as
etymology or as shallow as simile. At its simplest
but most gratifying level Bishop’s gift was formed
not just in the chromatic saturation of individual
comparisons but in the variance of their emphases
and strategies, and the passivity of their forced
beauty:
Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
(‘‘The Fish’’)
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and
glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as
matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as
possible.
(‘‘The Bight’’)
The world seldom changes,
but the wet foot dangles
until a bird arranges
two notes at right angles.
(‘‘Sunday, 4 a.m.’’)
Now flour is adulterated
with cornmeal, the loaves of bread
lie like yellow-fever victims
laid out in a crowded ward.
(‘‘Going to the Bakery’’)
Other poets have had descriptive gifts as strik-
ing,butrarelyhasapoetrybeenorganizedtotake
better advantage of this gift in particular. The lyric
arrangement of her poems often became subordi-
nate to the presence of these images, which some-
times (in ‘‘The Bight,’’‘‘Seascape,’’ and ‘‘Florida,’’
most obviously) entirely usurped the office of argu-
ment. In such poems one detail succeeds another
but, within the margin of the subject, often has
little to do with it. Suchpoems, not surprisingly,
offer the critic a progressive freedom as well as a
regressive constriction inhis interpretation—the
argument is not apparent at all or is apparent
only in the interstices.The Fish