ELIZABETH BISHOP TRAVELING 229—“a dreadful trip,” she told Marianne Moore. The poem’s first sentence, wind-
ing through six six-line stanzas, gathers a lifetime of familiar things seen and
recalled.
From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;
where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;“From... where... where... where”: small words retrace this topography,
this verse journey varied yet channeled—four to six syllables pacing each line,
two rhyme sounds tuning each stanza. The language, duly plainspoken, blends
humankind with nature: bread and tea with tides, bay, sea, and river, with silt,
sun, and mud. No single word slows or speeds our attention until sun lavishes
the land with lavender rivulets.
How things look trade off with how she looks at them, in Bishop’s take on
the world around her. And her observance needs turns of speech: “long tides”
taking the herrings “long rides,” tidal force making the river “a wall of brown
foam,” a “silted” sun that “veins” the “burning” mud. To look back this way is
to re-present, turning then and there into the poem’s here and now.
“The Moose” moseys along (the poem, that is—no creature ’s in sight), taking
two or three beats per line through small words that move us “on... down...
past... past... through,” but still no main verb for this place and way of life.
on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,