conclusion, that ‘‘reality is a cliche ́’’ which the poet
had better try to do without; on the contrary, she
represents a constantlyunquerulous, and some-
times even exuberant, submissiveness to the
hegemony ofl’actuelle, always taking it for granted
that (as Jacques Maritain says in his bookThe
Dream of Descartes) ‘‘human intellection is living
and fresh only when it is centered upon the vigi-
lance of sense perception.’’
Unlike Stevens, it was not her habit to discuss
her poetics in her poetry, but the endlessly absorb-
ing and subtle poem called ‘‘The Map’’ conveys,
for all its indirection, perhaps the best inkling to be
found anywhere of how she viewed her special
responsibility as a poet. Sheis looking at a printed
map, and she notices how the land which is ‘‘shad-
owed green’’ appears to lie in water. But then she
wonders if indeed the land may not ‘‘lean down to
lift the sea from under, / drawing it unperturbed
around itself.’’ May it not be the case that the land
is ‘‘tugging at the sea from under?’’ And, as she
gazes at this map, she marvels at the transforming
perspective that the map-maker’s art casts upon
the surfaces of the earth....
Now, of course, the unspoken premise of the
poem is that the cartographer’s craft is a mode of
art. And his images, like those of any true artist,
practice a very radical kind of metamorphosis
upon the things of earth: they make the peninsulas
of the land appear to be ‘‘flat and still’’; they render
the waters of the sea as calm and quiet, when
actually they are rolled with agitation; they make
it appear that Norway is a sort of hare running
south; and—in, as it were, a spirit of frolic—they
organize themselves into highly intricate patterns
of figuration that belong to the order of the meto-
nymic. Yet the cartographer’s‘‘profiles investigate’’
topographical actualities:he is not free to rearrange
at will the contours of geography: he must be faith-
ful to the given literalities of nature. And thus he
supervises a very ‘‘delicate’’ art indeed—an art, as
Bishop may be taken to be implying, not unlike
that of poetry itself.
So it isamor mundi, nevercontemptus mundi,
that one feels to be inscribed over her entire work.
Though on occasion (as she suggests in ‘‘Wading
at Wellfleet’’) she considers the sea to be ‘‘all a
case of knives,’’ she loves it nevertheless. Though
the ‘‘huntress of the winter air’’ (in ‘‘The Colder the
Air’’) consults ‘‘not time nor circumstance,’’ she
admires ‘‘her perfect aim.’’ And, as she tells us
(‘‘The Imaginary Iceberg’’), she’d ‘‘rather have the
iceberg than the ship.’’ Like the black boy Balthaza ́r
in ‘‘Twelfth Morning; or What You Will,’’ she
thinks ‘‘that the world’s a pearl,’’ and thus her
poems want (as she says of the crude artifact being
described in ‘‘The Monument’’) ‘‘to cherish some-
thing’’ and want to say ‘‘commemorate.’’ Hers, as
Robert Mazzocco says, is ‘‘the middle range, the
middle style.’’ ‘‘History as nightmare, man as a
cipher’’—these ‘‘de rigueursubjects... [she] sub-
verts.’’ And thus she has never claimed the wide
popularity that is more easily won by those writers
who offer some kindof existentialistfrisson. But her
deep influence is easily to be traced in the work of
such poets as Randall Jarrell and Robert Low-
ell and Richard Wilbur and John Ashbery and
James Merrill. And in ‘‘The Map,’’‘‘The Monu-
ment,’’‘‘Roosters,’’‘‘The Fish,’’‘‘Cape Breton,’’‘‘The
Armadillo,’’ and scores of other poems she appears
as one of the most remarkable poets to have graced
the American scene, no doubt not a major figure—
not in the range of a Frost or a Stevens or a Carlos
Williams—but one whoselegacy will long be a
benchmarkagainstwhichfalsesentimentandspe-
cious eloquence will be severely judged.
Perhaps the most notable instance in Bishop’s
poetry of this genius for empathy is the great poem
inNorth & Souththat has been so frequently
anthologized, ‘‘The Fish.’’ The poet has caught
‘‘a tremendous fish’’ and is looking at him, as she
holds him, ‘‘battered and venerable / and homely,’’
half out of water beside her boat. She watches his
gills ‘‘breathing in the terrible oxygen,’’ and she
noticeshiseyeswhichshiftalittle,‘‘butnot/to
return my stare.’’ Then, as she admires ‘‘his sullen
face’’ and ‘‘the mechanism of his jaw,’’ she sees
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like Hemingway’s old Santiago, who, after
he hooks his great marlin, yet pities him in his
wounded, massive dignity and pain, this poet,
too, is deeply moved by the pathos that belongs
to this scarred survivor of man’s predatoriness:
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,The Fish