Lines Like Old Friends

Certain poets come to seem our secret friends. We may not have met them; we may not have wanted to meet them. But their particular voices, as distinctive and familiar as those of our childhood, accompany us, sometimes for years. We don’t turn to their poems for comfort or for wisdom, though they may offer these in abundance. We say their lines over and over to ourselves for the sheer pleasure of their words, much the way we might hum a favorite melody. Oddest of all, these lines, which memory has made magical, do not grow stale; familiarity only increases their mystery.In an unfinished essay, written sometime in the late 1950s, Elizabeth Bishop spoke of the poets who were her “best friends” in this sense. They were George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Charles Baudelaire, all of whom possessed the three qualities she most admired in poetry: accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Of course, these qualities characterize her own greatest poems, though she was too modest to say so. For her, writing poetry was an “unnatural act.” The skill it required was to make it “seem natural.” Bishop did this so well, and with such artistry, that she has become, now almost 30 years after her death, just the sort of poet she herself most admired.In her “Poems, Prose and Letters” (Library of America, 979 pages, $40), edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, we can see not only how accurate, spontaneous, and mysterious her best work is — and remains — but how hard-won these virtues were. The edition contains her five published collections, from “North & South” of 1946 to “The Complete Poems,” which appeared posthumously in 1979, along with dozens of unpublished and uncollected poems, translations from French, Portuguese, and Spanish, essays and reviews, short stories and reminiscences, as well as 53 of her inimitable letters to such friends as Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell. A detailed and quite interesting chronology of Bishop’s life and career, together with biographical notes (on her various correspondents) and meticulous textual annotation, completes the volume.Bishop was famous for her accurate eye. Some of her finest poems seem little more than sequences of close description. But description wasn’t an end in itself; it was an act of homage to the world as it is. In her poem “The Bight,” from the collection “A Cold Spring” of 1955, she describes a ramshackle harbor whereThe frowsy sponge boats keep coming inWith the obliging air of retrievers,Bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooksAnd decorated with bobbles of sponges.Bishop loved shorelines, from Nova Scotia to Brazil, but she refused to glamorize them. It is the very frowsiness of those sponge boats, prompt to please as Labradors, which delights her eye and enlivens her language. This is our dirty everyday world filtered through the affection of an observant eye. The dredge that scoops the shore, with its “dripping jawful of marl,” is “awful but cheerful,” and the phrase could serve as a motto for much of Bishop’s finest verse. The bight, in a sly play on words, is itself bitten.“Questions of Travel,” the title of Bishop’s third collection, preoccupied her from the beginning. She is the great poet of arrivals, actual and imagined, as well as the bittersweet elegist of departures. She seems never to have had a permanent home, however hard she tried. Born in Worcester, Mass., on February 8, 1911, she was taken to Great Village, Nova Scotia, as a child, after her mother went mad (Bishop saw her for the last time when she was 5). She went to high school in Boston, worked in New York, lived for nine years in Key West, and another 15 in Brazil. Though her poems evoke foreign locales, from Ouro Preto to Cape Breton, and are packed with exactly observed details, they are always somehow domesticated. Even the grubbiest places find a momentary home in her poems. In “Filling Station,” everything is “oil-soaked, oil-permeated,” but there’s “a big hirsute begonia” and a “big dim doily,” which tells us thatSomebody embroidered the doily.Somebody waters the plant,or oils it, maybe. Somebodyarranges the rows of cansso that they softly say:ESSO—so—so—soto high-strung automobiles.Somebody loves us all.Maybe that last line is a bit too quick to comfort, despite its humor, but it expresses a hope we all share. Part of the appeal of Bishop’s greatest poems is the spell of intimacy they create. This is apparent too in her marvelous letters. But the intimacy is never cozy; it serves to convey hard truths. “An ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks,” she wrote in the closing line to “Cape Breton.” Her poems offer us shelter against that chill.eormsby@nysun.com

Lines Like Old Friends

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