ELIZABETH BISHOP TRAVELING 231Then with no warning, our bus window turns visionary in richer light. How
else could we see the fog’s crystals “slide and settle / in the white hen’s feath-
ers”? And spot white string along with whitewashed fences? A painter’s eye
catches that pure color, and a child ’s gaze whose mother left her back where
the journey began. For crystals to settle upon “lupins like apostles,” light must
be supernatural. Praise of a sort, Hopkins tempered by Dickinson, magnifies
the things of this world: sweet peas cling to string on fences, and as “bumble-
bees creep / inside the foxgloves,” quietly “evening commences.”
After stops at quaint but true places—Lower, Middle, and Upper Economy,
“Five Houses, / where a woman shakes a tablecloth / out after supper”—our
invisible guide spots odd omens. “A pale flickering. Gone” over marshes could
be will-o’-the-wisp. “An iron bridge trembles / and a loose plank rattles.” A
ship’s red running light “swims through the dark,” a dog barks. This land-
and-sea outlook breaks when “A woman climbs in / with two market bags,”
then it returns.
Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a pasture.Loath to show nature mimicking human concerns, Bishop favors actual and local
imagery: mist caught “like lamb’s wool on bushes.” And finally no “I” but “we”
enter, a first-person speaking for passengers, poet, maybe reader as well.
Afternoon, evening, now night has fallen as we enter the woods. For Dante
it was a selva oscura, his journey’s dark wood as in myth, fable, fairytale. Here
“The passengers lie back. / Snores. Some long sighs.” We hear “an old conver-
sation /... back in the bus: / Grandparents’ voices.” Making “Grandparents”
her own, Bishop drifts back to childhood eavesdropping on talk of marriage,
childbirth, sickness, drink, “who got pensioned,” “She went to the bad,” a “son
lost / when the schooner foundered.”
“Yes.. .” that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes.. .”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life ’s like that.
We know it(also death).”It took a yearning ear to tune these lines to drowsy fitful gab.
Confiding to us inside this southbound, nightbound bus, our guide says