ELIZABETH BISHOP TRAVELING 237hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,like Moby-Dick surfacing toward Ahab with a lance stuck in his back.
No moralizing blurs this event, as in D. H. Lawrence ’s longwinded “Fish.”
Bishop’s eye undercuts joyous with paltry, to admit them both—“victory” in a
“rented boat,” a “rainbow” from bilge.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.A fish’s iris and oil’s iridescence could give us God ’s saving covenant, “rainbow,
rainbow, rainbow!” Then any victory in this face-off flattens: “I let the fish
go.” Sending her poem to Marianne Moore she called it a “trifle,” yet it has
Moore ’s charged precision, and more. Bishop’s flaying touch with the fish’s
skin and the fisher’s “victory” strains between beauty and rawness, human and
nonhuman nature. “Beauty is nature ’s fact,” said Dickinson—here that wisdom
seesaws.
On Elizabeth Bishop’s existential map, the vivid color belongs to Brazil,
a “different world” where she spent happy adult years living in dramatic
houses with a woman from Rio de Janeiro, traveling the Amazon and else-
where, and translating from Portuguese. There too, inbred violence could chal-
lenge her sense of beauty. “The Armadillo,” dedicated to Lowell and involv-
ing a Rio saint ’s-day carnival, begins with nighttime fire balloons climbing a
mountainside:
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.Then “suddenly turning dangerous” they fall, dropping flames behind her
house. A pair of nesting owls “stained bright pink underneath... shrieked up
out of sight.” Even “a glistening armadillo” fled, “rose-flecked, head down, tail
down.” Clearly the rising human spirit can ravage nature.