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“surprised at seeing”
Elizabeth Bishop Traveling
A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian
village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain
in those pure blue skies... Flick the lightning rod on top of
the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.he five-year-old daughter heard it, never
forgot it, and years later begins this story-memoir with an echo, as if she were
gazing at a watercolor, blue skies and church steeple you can reach out and
touch.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), the most beloved of postwar American poets,
had a harder start than most. Her father’s death when she was eight months
old, in Worcester, Massachusetts, shattered her mother. They went up to live
with the mother’s parents in a fishing village on the Bay of Fundy. Elizabeth
bonded to the place, but in 1916 her mother broke down and was committed
to an asylum. The daughter never saw her again. Her father’s parents took her
back to Worcester from that loved “home of the long tides,” sunset sea, herring
boats, churches, farmhouses, blacksmith shop, one-room school, old elms, water
meadows, red soil, blue fir, salt marsh. Unhappy and sick with asthma, the girl
luckily went on to spend summers back in her “very small” village.
A good few poems, and one painting she had, call up Bishop’s early years,
with their skies’ slight stain and church’s lightning rod. Any twentieth-century
rural childhood, any childhood at all, may become a lost paradise. This loss
meant all the more to an orphan exiled at five.
Sixty years later Bishop published “The Moose,” which she ’d “written in
bits and pieces over a number of years.” Starting out from “narrow provinces”
back in 1946, it recounts a bus journey west from Nova Scotia down to Boston
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