The crisis of our lives do not come, I think, accurately dated; they crop up unexpected and out of turn, and somehow or other arrange themselves to a calendar we cannot control.” Elizabeth Bishop
Virginia Woolf bases her novel Mrs. Dalloway on the idea that one day in a person’s life summarizes an entire life. In a similar way, one piece of art can summarize an artist’s work. One self-portrait by Van Gogh expresses something about all his paintings. And one poem can sum up something about a poet’s work. That poem for Elizabeth Bishop was her villanelle, One Art. In many of her poems I hear a similar theme of loss. It became the crisis of her life, and we hear the making of that poem in much of her work.
One Art is considered one of the best villanelles in existence, and it is based on a relationship Bishop had with a woman named Alice Methfessel. They were domestic partners from 1971 to 1979, the year of Bishop’s death.
There are 16 drafts of this poem written in 1976. The first draft of One Art interests me because we can hear the woman in this, not just the poet. Her stream-of-consciousness writing in this draft is where many poems begin. The poem in its original state is all over the page emotionally. It took fifteen more drafts for Bishop to arrive at the understated tone she needed to give the poem power.
But that voice isn’t in the original draft. This is a poem written by an alcoholic who is losing her love because of frequent blackouts. This is a woman who is losing her teaching job at Harvard because she is missing classes. She is losing her friends because she would say things to them when drunk she couldn’t remember later.
Bishop did not lose the relationship with Methfessel as she feared. She wrote about her, “Alice [is] a wonderful traveling companion. Since she is so athletic and big, tall, I mean – I thought I’d never keep up with her (and she is 28 or 29 too [in 1972] – but I managed to. I think you’d like her very much – very American in the nicest way; she cheers me up a lot about my native land – …. Alice has had a happy life and is the only child of devoted parents – pampered, really – but nevertheless has turned out to be kind and generous and very funny. – She’s good for me because she cheers me up.”[1]
Brett Millier wrote about the couple in her book, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory Of It, “Although Elizabeth still described Alice as her ‘young friend’ or ‘secretary’ to certain correspondents, very quickly ‘Elizabeth and Alice’ became a recognized couple in the circle of poets and teachers in which Elizabeth moved and in her letters to faraway friends.
“But an intimate relationship between apparently unequal partners, one of whom was an alcoholic, was bound to have its unruly energies. Alice grew weary from time to time of the great demands placed on her by Elizabeth’s pain and poor health; of the cycles of illness, drunkenness and injury that often marked the last years of Elizabeth’s life; and of doling out the Antabuse that helped to prevent such cycles from getting started. And Elizabeth lived in mortal fear of losing Alice and of what would happen if she were to be left alone to grow old and care for herself in her indispositions and incapacities. Alice’s attempts to put distance between herself and Elizabeth’s myriad problems resulted in desperate attempts on Elizabeth’s part to get her back.”[2]
In the chaos of her life, Bishop created one of the most beautiful poems ever written. It begins in the last lines of the first draft when she begins to describe her lover’s blue eyes. You can see the writer failing then. You can see a person desperate to hold onto a woman she can’t imagine living her life without.
My favorite change in all the drafts is the last one she made. It is in the second line of the poem. For fifteen drafts that line was, so many things seem really to be meant to be lost. It became so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost. She was stuck on the word meant for 15 drafts and sent the final version to the publisher with the awkward meant line. And then, maybe because she had let go of the poem, a way to use the word intent came to her.
Semantically, they mean the same thing, but poetically the line flows much more easily with that final handwritten change called into her editor. It is the line that drew me to this poem so many years ago. It made me ask the question: Are there things in our life we can in no way keep from losing?
It is still a question I ask. It makes for a life of uncertainty, and that’s why this poem is so universally understood. The list of lost things in this poem are things we all lose: car keys, reading glasses, mortgages, a mother’s watch, an hour badly spent, places we meant to travel. These lines are lifted out of life that has sorted through the mixture of things we lose, and the poem progresses slowly through each loss. She begins with car keys, persists through houses and places and ends in losing the woman she loves.
Bishop suggests all these losses in a villanelle, a quiet, elegant form. The villanelle gives the list dignity it wouldn’t have in free verse. But in the villanelle, each thing leans over and kisses us on the cheek as it passes.
When a poet finds the right form for a poem, the tuning fork of the poem sounds right to the ear. The poem has a certain balance it wouldn’t have otherwise. By the second draft of this poem it is starting to look like a villanelle. She had the repeating lines marked out and possible end words scribbled in. In her writing of it then through the various drafts, she remained curious about the poem. She wasn’t stifled by the form.
That’s the difficulty in writing in any form. You begin to think, No, I need a word that ends in “ing” here or I need to stick with iambic pentameter there. It keeps you from experimenting with the poem and changing the whole thing if the “ing” word doesn’t work or doesn’t feel right. Some possibilities begin to be dismissed. Bishop allows the places in the poem she is working on to stay open and receptive to the voices she is hearing. She allowed all the same stream-of-consciousness writing to continue as she doodled in possibilities around the edges of each stanza, as the poem pressed her for new language or longer lines or a different title.
Writing poems is like taking music lessons. We begin writing down our thoughts, we begin with the technical work of writing sentences, and then the unexpected music rises out of the words. The poem isn’t thinking anymore, it is singing. It has departed into the music of its life. Words for the poem, like intent, rise out of a passing voice in a building or from a page in a book. The sensation of the poem rises in us and we imagine a line in a new way.
It is a useful way the muses have given us to pay attention to our imaginations. Every artist is blessed this way. They have another way of listening to the world. A soul and a poem are both connected to intuitions and unknown interests far away.
The fact that the poem became a villanelle so soon in its birth makes me believe that a poem has a form it is called to. This poem wanted to be a villanelle. A poem welcomes certain forms and dislikes others. This means that a poem has a life of its own, its own mind, its own voice, its own likes and dislikes just like a person does. And that means all art does. Art wants to be created in a way that welcomes in all the possibilities of its existence.
(Lines struck through are in red.)
[Draft 1]
HOW TO LOSE THINGS/? /The GIFT OF LOSING THINGS
One might begin by losing one’s reading glasses
oh 2 or 3 times a day – or one’s favorite pen.
THE ART OF LOSING THINGS
The thing to do is to begin by “mislaying”.
Mostly, one begins by “mislaying”:
keys, reading-glasses, fountain pens
– these are almost too easy to be mentioned,
and “mislaying” means that they usually turn up
in the most obvious place, although when one
is making progress, the places grow more unlikely
– This is by way of introduction.
I really want to introduce myself – I am such a
fantastic lly good at losing things
I think everyone shd. profit from my experiences.
You may find it hard to believe, but I have actually lost
I mean lost, and forever two whole houses,
one a very big one. A third house, also big, is
at present, I think, “mislaid” – but
Maybe it’s lost too. I won’t know for sure for some time.
I have lost one long (crossed out) peninsula and one island.
I have lost – it can never be has never been found –
a small-sized town on that same island.
I’ve lost smaller bits of geography, like
a splendid beach, and a good-sized bay.
Two whole cities, two of the
world’s biggest cities (two of the most beautiful
although that’s beside the point)
A piece of one continent –
and one entire continent. All gone, gone forever and ever.
One might think this would have prepared me
for losing one averaged-sized not especially——— exceptionally
beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person
(except for blue eyes) (only the eyes were exceptionally beautiful and
But it doesn’t seem to have, at all … the hands looked intelligent)
the fine hands<
a good piece of one continent
and another continent – the whole damned thing!
He who loseth his life, etc… – but he who
loses his love – neever, no never never never again –
[Draft 2]
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
or many things seem really to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster
Start out with
Begin with little things
her words where they went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
The practice brings losses, lose them faster,
faster
The mastered art of losing’s no disaster.
Look! I’ve had ten houses
Look! and my last, or next to last,
Two cities,
[Draft 3]
the art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things seem almost to be meant
to be lost, that their loss is no disaster.
Begin with car keys
I’ll never
the art of losing isn’t hrd to master
The practice brings losses, lose them faster,
you’ll find your time well spent
the mastered art of loss is no disaster.
[Draft 4]
the art of losing isn’t hard to master
so many things really seem to be meant
to be lost, and the loss is no disaster —
In the draft two, we see Bishop playing with the words start out with, begin with. She realizes she wants to open the poem showing the loss of small things and build to larger ones. She’s writing in the repeat lines now. The awkward line, The mastered art of losing’s no disaster remains for many drafts before she finally changes it. We also have the first of the small things, car keys. We hear her working with irony, You’ll find your time well spent.
Drafts four, five and six are handwritten and unreadable, but in draft five she is trying out end words. In draft seven, we have reading glasses as another possible lost thing. And we see the humorous line, forget the faster-money. A home enters and the important word intent. That remains throughout the drafts. She knows she wants to use it but she’s not sure where yet.
Intent is really the key word in this poem. It says something about the person. If your intent deep down is to lose someone, you will, no matter how big a show you put on to prove you want them in your life. To live with intention is to live paying attention to your feelings and what you really want. Bishop was drowning her feelings in alcohol. She may not have been aware what she wanted. It must have worried her that her intent all along was to lose Methfessel.
Losing things and people had become a pattern in her life. Her partner of 15 years, Lota de Soares (1910 -1967), had committed suicide by overdosing on tranquilizers. Many of De Soares’ family and friends in Brazil blamed Bishop for the suicide. They felt Bishop abandoned De Soares when she was ill and depressed. This must have haunted the poet.
Bishop said in a letter to the poet Robert Lowell in the early 1970s, “I lost my mother, and Lota, and others, too–I’d like to try to save somebody, for a change.”[3]
Bishop didn’t know her mother well and lived with relatives. When she was young, her father died and her mother was committed to a mental asylum. She was sent to live with relatives in Nova Scotia. In the line, I lost my mother’s watch, I hear Bishop saying, I lost my mother.
[Draft 6]
(The handwriting is mostly unreadable.)
[Draft 7]
The art of losing not so hard to master:
so many things seem really to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Start slowly will you, keep, a face, a gesture
Stood with your glasses
Reading-glasses, car–keys, you can master
easy things.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
The practice brings losses, lose them faster,
forget the faster-money, home, intent,
the mastered art of losing’s no disaster.
Look! I myself have lost or
next to last, at least, houses and
[Draft 8]
The art of losing isn’t hard to master
Practicing my
and possibly will end disaster
faster
ent
master
last, or
ent
disaster
ent
master
arts
ent
disaster
In drafts eight we see the “ent” at the end of lines. She knows what sound she is working toward, but she’s not quite sure how to get there yet. She adds the word innumerable here in draft nine. Here also is the word mortgages. She eventually lost the property she and De Soares owned in Brazil.
David Kalstone said about this in his biography about Bishop, A Poet’s Life, “[The suicide] was effectively the end of Bishop’s Brazilian life. She still owned the Ouro Preto house and returned there regularly for several years trying to make it her home, but the living tie that bound her to Brazil had been broken in the most devastating fashion. The life that once seemed to remind her of the way an orphaned child survived in Nova Scotia now reminded her only of her great losses. Their mutual friends in Rio refused to receive her, as if to say she had abandoned Lota; relatives sued to gain the properties Lota’s will had denied them. Bishop lost the house in Petropolis. She began living with a young woman she had met in Seattle. They took an apartment in San Francisco and spent part of the year in Ouro Preto. Bishop loved the house there, which she called Casa Mariana in honor of [Marianne] Moore, but was robbed blind by contractors and domestics in the course of trying to restore it and keep it going. ‘I suppose I had Lota for so long to intervene for me, in Petropolis, at least – and I really was happy there for many years,’ she wrote [Robert] Lowell in December 1969. ‘Now I feel her country really killed her – and is capable of killing anyone who is honest and has high standards and wants to do something good … and my one desire is to get out. But HOW TO LIVE?’ Or again, a few weeks later, of Lota: “I miss her more every day of my life. This is one of the reasons I want to leave Brazil (forgive me.)”[4]
[Draft 9]
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
innumerable thing seem really to be meant so many things that
to be lost, so their loss is no disaster.
Lose something everyday. Oh you can muster a list might muster
the usual list: car-keys keys, reading-glasses, mortgages unsent –
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing bigger, losing faster,
forgetting faster
The practice losing big, losing faster: forgetting faster
places and name and where it was you meant
to go – None of them spells disaster disaster
Lose something every day. Oh, you can muster
the usual list:
Lose something eevery day. Lose every day. Oh ayone can muster
the the packages un sent
Look! I have lost my mother’s watch last two houses homes land my last, or
next-to-last on of my three houses. Where they went beloved houses.
isn’t a problem, much less a disaster.
I’ve lost two cities, loveley ones,
Two cities vanished, loveley ones, and vaster
losses a cape, a continent.
You won’t believe the losses I can master.
Look! I have lost my mother’s watch; my last, or
next-to-last of three beloved houses went they went
Look! I have lost my mother’s watch; my last, or
next-to-last of three loved houses went
into nowhere away somewhere, band they weren’t a disaster.
Two cities, lovely ones. And on to vaster
and vaster loss, a cape, a con an entire continent.
the art of losing isn’t hard to master.
geographical loss – a continent.
The art of losing isn’t too hard to master.
gesture?
All that I write is false, it’s evident
the art of losing isn’t hard to master.
oh no.
anythng at all anything but one’s love (Sat it: disaster.)
We see the word forgetting in draft nine. She was forgetful because of her alcoholism. Forgetting is another way of losing things. We still have the words spells disaster in this draft. She’s playing with the word spells because she’s going to place the word disaster behind it in quotes later. As if to say, “It’s a quote ‘disaster.’ It’s not really a disaster but we’ll just say it’s one.” The word spells emphasizes that.
Disaster is a big word, and she knew that. She’s building the whole poem around that word, and she might have doubts about the poem’s tone. If you say something is a disaster, the tone must reflect that. By playing with these words, she’s asking questions of the poem, How do I craft in the understated tone I want in this. She wants to say the real disaster in life isn’t in losing things but people we love. She is implying that in losing small things we are working toward losing larger things. If we aren’t capable of holding on to small things, we aren’t capable of holding on to important ones either.
In draft one, she quotes the beginning of a line from the Bible in the book Matthew, He who loseth his life (for my sake shall gain it). And I wonder if she didn’t have other verses in the back of her mind from the book of Luke, If a person can be trusted with small things, then he can also be trusted with big things. If a person is dishonest in little things, then he will be dishonest with big things too. If you cannot be trusted with worldly riches, then you will not be trusted with heavenly riches.
Her mother’s watch enters in draft nine as well as a cape, an entire continent. The word geographical is seen for the first time. This is a word we associate with Bishop because of her book titles, Georgraphy III, North & South and Questions of Travel. Bishop not only lost the geography of places but of people she loved.
The interesting line all that I write is false first appears. And later that becomes, lies now, I’m writing lies now. You can hear the desperation in her voice. She’s pleading, I don’t want to lose these things but I don’t know how to stop. Keeping things is really important to me, but I don’t know how to hold on.
She’s also beginning to play with say it versus write it. She goes back and forth between those two possibilities until the final draft.
[Draft 10]
with one exception. (Write it here)
(Why not just write “disaster”?)
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things semm really to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. A list might muster an hour’s
keys, reading glasses, money, good intent one one nights good intent
The art of losing is’t hard to master/
Then practise losing bigger, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to go – and none will spell disaster.
Look! I have lost my mother’s watch. My last, or
next-to-last of three loved houses. They went.
off into nowhere, but they weren’t disaster. nothing so serious as disaster
I’ve lost two cities, lovely ones. Then vaster
things, rivers, a cape, an entire continent. thing: islan a cape, a continent
The art of losing isn’t so hard to master.
But, losing you (eyes of Azure Aster)
But you if I lose you (eyes of azure aster)
all that I write is false. It’s evident lies, now. I’m writing lies now. It’s quite evident.
tha rt of losing isn’t hard to master.
I’ve written lies above. It’s evident
the art of losing isnt’ hard to master
with one exception. (Say it) That’s disaster.
with one exception (Write it!)
(Say it – yes, disaster.)
[Draft 11]
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things we seem really to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
Lose something every day. Grow comfortable with fluster
lost keys, glasses, hour’s intent.
lost keys, The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practise losing bigger, lose faster:
places, and names, and it was you meant
to go. none will spell disaster.
Look! I have lost my mother’s watch. My last, or
next-to-last of three loved houses went.
but nothing quite so serious as disaster.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. Then And faster
then segments of geography; a continent.
The art of losing”s not so hard to master.
But, losing you [eyes of the small wild aster]
above’s all lies now. It’s quite evident
the art of losing wasn’t hard to master
with one exception
except for (Say it! Say it!) that disaster.
I’ve written lies above. It’s evident
the art of losing wasn’t hard to master
in gnereal, but (Say it!)
with one exception, which
not one exception is
The art of losing wasn’t hard to master
All losing hasn’t een too hard to master
but losing you
My losses haven’t been too hard to master
with with but th
with this exception (Say it!) this disaster.
I”ve written lies. I wrote a lot of lies. It’s evident
the art of losing wasn’t hard to master
with one exception (Write it!) Write “disaster.”
In draft eleven is, I’ve written lies. I wrote a lot of lies. This sounds like the speaking voice of a woman talking to someone she loves. I’ve lied to you. It’s all lies. I like this voice is still here in drafts ten and eleven. She continues writing in the voice from the first draft. She wants that voice here whether we see it in the final version or not. That’s the beauty of poetry. We can delete a line, and its presence is still in the poem whether the reader sees it or not. That energy, that desperate tone in the first draft remains throughout the poem. Lies, it’s all lies, you’re really the most important thing in the world to me keeps coming through.
In draft twelve she uses the word stupid. She strikes out Stupid! Write! Here is her inner voice coming through. You’re so stupid to lose her. What is wrong with you. Are you just stupid. This tortured voice reveals how insecure she is, I’m just stupid, I’m worthless, I’m just a loser.
[Draft 12]
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things seem really to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster
Try losing every day. Accept the fluster
of the lost glasses, kesys, houses, intent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to go. And non will spell disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And, look! my last, or
next-to-last of three loved houses went.
off into nowhere. That was not disaster.
I miss them. disaster. two rivers, then a cape; a continent.
— of geography: a cape, a continent
But losing you (even a a gesture)
above’s all lies now. It is evident
the art of losing isn’t wasn’t hard to master above’s not lies, but it is evident
with this exception (Write it!)
but there
will
generally speaking
But, losing you (even to or gesture)
above’s not lies – it’s only evident
the art of losing isn’t hard to master wasn’t
with this exception (Stupid! Write!)
(Write it!) this disaster.
except this loss (Oh, write it!) this disaster.
but this lost it (Go on! write it !) disaster.
But losing you
I haven’t lied above, It’s evident ( even gesture)
[Draft 13]
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things seem really to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door-keys, an hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to go. none will spell disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch, lovely ones, And, vaster,
small realms, two rivers, then a continent. some realms of mine, two rives, a continent
I miss them, but I would not say disaster.
I’d never say disaster.
And losing you new (a special voice, a gesture)
doesn’t mean I’ve lied. It’s evident
the loss of love is possible to master,
even if this looks like (Write it!) like disaster.
In losing you I haven’t lied above. It’s evident
does not mean that I’ve I’m lying. It’s evident
the loss of love is something one must master
even which it look like (Write it!) like disaster.
In draft thirteen is the first appearance of the wonderful hour badly spent. It’s something so many people can relate to, the loss of time. We lose an hour of the day in traffic or on trivialities like finding car keys or reading glasses, and it’s very frustrating.
In draft thirteen, she finally begins to flesh out those awkward middle stanzas. You can see her questioning, What should I put in here, we’ve got to go from car keys and my mother’s watch to something. But what? She picks places, realms, rivers and continents. She’s writing those words around the edges throughout the drafts, trying to work out how to get all this into three lines.
And she wants to hold on to the word lied. When you write a poem, you often have lines and words you don’t want to lose. Sometimes they trigger the writing of the poem. Giving them up for the sake of the poem is difficult, but she manages to hold onto lied until the end.
As we are winding down to the end, the tone of the poem begins to take shape. It reveals itself more and more. Tone is the hardest thing for a poet to hear. You can’t hear how another person is going to read your poem when you are in the thick of it. You lose all sense of that. But the poem starts to give hints that you are on the right track by giving you words and lines that haven’t come before. The poem starts softening in your hands. It’s not the hard clay you began with. It’s the poem’s way of saying, You’re getting this right. And that’s what we see in the final three and four drafts, the words starting to fall into place.
If you write a beautiful poem and have the wrong tone, the poem falls flat on its face. She wanted to flatten out the tone enough that the words would have weight. To scream something in a poem, you must say it quietly. And that quiet tone has entered in now. She isn’t screaming at us anymore, neever, no never never never again. She wanted to scream, It’s all lies! It’s all lies! You’re the most important thing in the world to me but that wouldn’t engage the reader’s interest as much.
[Draft 14]
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things seem really to be meant
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door-keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
The practice losing further, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will spell disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms of mine, two rivers, a continent x I owned,
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
Even In losing you (a joking voice, a gesture
I love), I haven’t lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
even when it looks (Oh write it!) like disaster.
Although it looks like (Write it) like disaster
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
These are not lies.
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
[Draft 15]
ONE ART
The art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things seem really to be meant filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door-keys, the hour badly spent.
the art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
Even losing you (a joking voice, a gesture
I love), these (no lies. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
even losing you (the joking voice, It’s evident
(Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I still won’t lie. It’s evident.
By draft 15 we are finally done with really to be meant, which bothered her all the way through. In almost every draft she plays with that line, crossing parts out, writing words in, trying to discover a way around the word really.
And the word lies is still here. I still won’t lie finally becomes I shan’t have lied in the final draft. I shan’t have lied doesn’t have the tone of, This is all lies, lies. The word shan’t is proper. It’s not a common word but shouldn’t is two syllables, and she needs a one syllable word to keep the line flow. Using shouldn’t wouldn’t have been as seamless.
If I hadn’t seen the it’s all lies in the other drafts, I wouldn’t notice the shan’t have lied. She flattens the tone out so much with that word. When I recite the poem to people who don’t know Elizabeth Bishop or the poem One Art, I always stumble on the word shan’t because it’s not a word I use. As soon as I say it, the poem is placed in a time and diction we don’t use anymore, and I see that recognition in people’s eyes.
She uses parenthesis in the final stanza around both a joking voice, a gesture I love and Write it! She’s making these parenthetical expressions to tone down the words even more. Bishop is a master. She wants us to notice this, so she puts it in parenthesis. A phrase is normally put in parenthesis to mean its incidental to the reading. But by placing these words in parenthesis in her poem, Bishop gives them emphasis. Once again, she’s emphasizing something by toning it down.
She also finds a place for her exclamation points. It is found elsewhere after the word look, but it ends up in these final lines as well. This poem had been an exclamation point inside her all along.
One Art (Final Draft, published 1976)
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
We lose some of the wonderful things from the first draft, the fine hands, the blue eyes. She tries to put the blue eyes in at one point using the words azure and eyes of small wild aster. She couldn’t come up with a way to do that. She wants to say, losing all these other things in life should have prepared me to lose the woman I love, but it hasn’t.
What does it take to write a poem like this? This isn’t a poem written by a 20 year old. It is a poem written by a woman trying to make sense of her life, who feels like it has been a disaster. When I think of this poem, I think of an unpublished poem fragment of Bishop’s from the 1950s:
Where are the dolls who loved me so
when I was young? . . .
Through their real eyes
blank crotches,
and play wrist-watches,
whose hands moved only when they wanted —
Their stoicism I never mastered
their smiling phrase for every occasion —
They went their rigid little ways
To meditate in a closet or a trunk
To let unforeseen emotions
glance off their glazed complexions
In this poem, a child is searching a doll’s eyes for love and acceptance she is not finding at home. She is trying not to feel her needs, trying to be stoic, to meditate in unseen places so she won’t get in anyone’s way.
Bishop’s father died of Bright’s disease in 1911 when she was only eight months old. While her mother Gertrude went in and out of mental hospitals, Elizabeth lived in between grandparent’s houses. It was difficult for her to grow up as an orphan in houses where she really didn’t belong.
In the following poem, she recalls an incident while observing a fire at the age of three:
People were playing hoses on the roofs
of the summer cottages in Marblehead . . .
the red sky was filled with flying moats,
cinders and coals, and bigger things, scorched black burnt
The water glowed like fire, too, but flat . . .
In the morning across the bay
the fire still went on, but in the sunlight
we saw no more glare, just the clouds of smoke
The beach was strewn with cinders, dark with ash —
strange objects seemed [to] have blown across the water
lifted by that terrible heat, through the red sky?
Blackened boards, shiny black life black [feathers] —
pieces of furniture, parts of boats and clothes —
Millier says in Bishop’s biography recalling this event, “On the one hand, she is amazed, not afraid of the fire as she stands in her crib watching the red light play on the walls of her room…. On the other hand, she is alone and in trouble. She stands in her crib terribly thirsty and cannot get the attention of her mother, whom she sees out on the lawn greeting refugees, distributing coffee. In the morning they walk among the refuse,
I picked up a woman’s long black cotton
stocking. Curios[ity]. My mother said sharply
Put that down!
“As an adult, Elizabeth remembered this event as a profound rejection of herself, her curiosity, her observant eye, and, because the forbidden object was a piece of a woman’s intimate clothing, perhaps some aspect of her sexuality as well…. She identifies it as the incipient event of her alcoholism. ‘Since that day, that reprimand … I have suffered from abnormal thirst.’ and in no later memory did she recall wishing her mother’s presence. She became, in the language of attachment theorists, an avoidant child.”[5]
In all Bishop’s poems, we hear her attempts to explain her fragmentary connections with the world. The Shampoo, originally typed into a letter to Marianne Moore and passed around among friends before it was published, reveals something of Bishop’s relationship with De Soares.
The Shampoo (1955)
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
– Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
In this poem, as in all of Bishop’s poetry, every word seems carefully placed. That is especially apparent in these neat six line stanzas. The precision of Bishop’s words is always a little jarring when I read this poem. It is a poem about water, something flowing and languid, but the language is defined and meticulous. There are sharp rocks in that stream, sharp rocks that will surface later in their relationship.
We don’t have many poems written in first person by Bishop, and here is poem about shampooing the hair of another woman in a stream behind their house in Brazil. It is one of the only intimate looks in Bishop’s poetry we have of their life together.
The still explosions on the rocks remind us of orgasms. They grow in spreading circular shocks throughout the body. She connects the image of the circular lichen to the lunar rings around the moon, an image we associate with women.
My favorite word in the poem is attend in the seventh line. To attend means to be available, to be present with someone, to listen to them. This poem, written soon after Bishop met De Soares, is about two women who are attentive to each others needs. Washing someone’s hair is erotic, but it is also very caring and nurturing and a bit playful. The two women may have been laughing or giggling as they did this. But maybe not. Why would they go outside in a stream behind the house to wash each other’s hair? Why wouldn’t they use a sink or shower inside?
This was ritual. They did this for the same reason Mahatma Gandhi and his wife had tea ceremonies together on the shore near their house. The ritual connected them as a couple, but it also connected them with water. This ritual of water between the two women is a kind of baptismal rite in the relationship. And we as the reader enter into that ritual with them.
I’ve seen Lota’s black hair in photos, and I can imagine how black and shiny it would be wet. That kind of blue black reflects the light, so it may have looked like it was full of stars when wet. If this ritual did happen in the dark, which the battered image of the moon suggests, it gives weight to the love making aspect of this poem over the playful one.
Bishop peaks our interest with the subject matter. We want to know more about the woman she is touching. What words will she use to describe her? These are important choices for a poet because these are the words for which her lover will be remembered. She picks two “p” words precipitate and pragmatical. Both four syllable words are full of stops on the lips and tongue. They are choppy and precise, not soft in the mouth at all. The two words are almost opposite in meaning. Precipitate means impulsive, and pragmatic means sensible and rational.
The poem was originally titled Gray Hairs, and its subject was the passage of time. Time is mentioned in this poem with a capital T. Time is perhaps the thing that makes the most difference in a relationship. It must be a willing partner. If the relationship doesn’t become better with time, the relationship won’t last. In this poem time is amenable, but in real life it wasn’t. The couple grew more distant over the years. Nevertheless, I like Bishop’s word choices because the synonyms aren’t as strong. Agreeable works, but it is flatter and not as specific. Bishop took years to finish poems because agreeable is not as accurate or as interesting as amenable.
Both The Fish and In The Waiting Room (see below) are long, thin, narrative poems joined together by a similar idea. They were written 30 years apart, but the idea remained the same in Bishop’s mind. If you catch something or it catches you, you become joined to it energetically. In In The Waiting Room, she is connected with the images in the photos and with the people in the doctor’s office, and in The Fish she is connected with the fish and the life of the fish in the water. But in both poems this feeling of completion is only temporary.
We have the sense in Bishop’s poem The Fish it was a difficult fish to catch. We know from its five-haired beard of wisdom that this fish has been caught many times before but played the line so that the fisherman snapped it too soon.
To catch a fish and write about it is to articulate a life that has been cast off many times before. We receive in our hands the rolling body of a fish, something that has learned how to be still in water. How many times did Bishop feel cast off by people in her life because of her depression and alcoholism?
Poets and mystics experience a kind of metaphysical belonging with other things and people that might be hard to understand. We know how to write about philosophy and the ultimate nature of reality in a fish poem or in a story from the National Geographic, but what trade off do we experience for understanding the world in that way? Boris Pasternak said that poets and artists traditionally have no assured place in society and can only live their lives outside it. We must live outside other people’s worlds in order to see them. It is the price for the gift.
There were many requests after In the Waiting Room published for that particular issue of the National Geographic. And The Fish was published and anthologized in so many places, she finally asked one publisher if he would take any other poem. It was one of her first great hits.
The Fish (1940)
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
–the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly–
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
–It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
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 medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
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.
In The Waiting Room (1976 –1979)
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
“Long Pig,” the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
–Aunt Consuelo’s voice–
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I–we–were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
–I couldn’t look any higher–
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn’t know any
word for it how “unlikely”. . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn’t?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
In At the Fishhouses, we are above and below the surface of Bishop’s life. In this poem, the cold, hard mouth of reality Bishop faced as a child once again comes through. She dips her hand beneath the surface of memory, and the water is cold. Her hand aches. These aren’t waters we want to be dipped in.
At the Fishhouses (1955)
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
In the beginning of the poem we are above the water, smelling and seeing the fish houses, but with the entrance of the seal we dip below the surface. It is a delightful image. The speaker sings A Mighty Fortress Is Our God to a seal. Seals are curious and playful, and something about them seems human. That’s the basis for the Orcadian folklore that seals can shed their skins to become human. As the seal watches from the water, it’s half in one world and half in another.
The speaker also sings Baptist hymns. Baptist brings to mind baptism, the total immersion in the line before. What kind of baptism do we have in this poem? And why that hymn? A Mighty Fortress fits a poem about a fish house. The mighty fortress in the hymn is god, and in Christianity, Christ teachers his disciples to be fishers of men. God, or the church, is a kind of fish house.
It’s intriguing how she ends the poem. We don’t expect those last six lines that question knowledge. The poem suddenly seems allegorical, and that is unusual for Bishop. She usually allows the images or narrative to speak the message for her.
She says knowledge is something historical and derived from rocky breasts. So knowledge is memory, our imagination, something flowing and flown. That use of breasts brings to mind a mother and, in Bishop’s case, a lover. Both for Bishop are images of grief. Earlier in the poem, we have similar images of grief.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
The coats of mail, the sequins, the body armor is scraped away. We see what’s on the surface and what’s beneath. The iridescent coats of mail are covered with iridescent flies, and flies are often an image of death. The pink flesh of the fish beneath these scales is why the fishhouses exist. The buildings are covered with the melancholy stain of dried blood. Just as the old man scrapes the beautiful scales from the herring or the cod to get at the meat of the fish, the poet uses her hands, her tools, her black old knife to show us what’s beneath the surface of life. It’s not all beautiful. Knowledge of our pasts can be painful.
Whenever I see the word armor, I think of the therapeutic practice of de-armoring a person who has been psychologically or physically abused. There are many processes for this, but the point is to transform the cellular imprint of past pain tapes held within the body. If Millier is correct that Bishop was detaching from relationships because she had become an avoidant child, then I see something of the character of Bishop in these fish poems. It’s painful to be de-armored, but it allows feelings to surface so they can be let go of.
The fish in the poem The Fish has learned how to play the line so that the connection is always broken. Bishop has a string of failed relationships, her own five-haired beard of wisdom. She had learned how to play the line so that relationships always ended.
During the 15 years Bishop was with De Soares, she had affairs with other women. One affair happened when De Soares was ill and couldn’t take care of herself. That’s not the action of a person trying to hold onto a relationship. That’s the action of a person trying to lose one. In the poem One Art, Bishop laments her losses, but perhaps she was responsible for them. She was in her own words a fantastic lly good loser.
In the poem The Man-Moth we are once again above and below the surface in Bishop’s life. Unlike At the Fishhouses, The Man-Moth is written in regular eight-line stanzas, with an indented first line. The indented lines almost serve as titles for each stanza.
The Man-Moth (1946)
Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
Moths are drawn to light. The man-moth lives underneath the sidewalks and comes out at night to climb toward the moon, a small hole at the top of the sky. Man observes the moon, but the light is neither warm nor cold for him; it doesn’t attract him like it does the man-moth.
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do: follow this thing he’s attracted to. He doesn’t make it. He never penetrates that round, clean opening in the sky but keeps trying. Each time he emerges back on earth, the world is indifferent to him. He sits on trains traveling backwards, facing the wrong way. The world is an artificial place for the man-moth, but light is real.
Moths seem nervous, and Bishop captures this in the poem using words like flits and flutters. They aren’t like butterflies. Butterflies flutter by gracefully, but moths appear to lack direction. They seem, as she suggests, to be drawn to light as a form of protection. It’s uncertain why moths fly toward light, but it’s thought it helps them fly in a straight line. In the absence of lunar light, they search for man-made light. They use light for navigation.
We see in the moth a kind of vulnerability but also a type of determination. Every time I see the word moth, I see the unfinished word mother. Bishop is writing about a moth because of the misprint, but once again I see the poet tumbling through the dark trying to navigate through life without a mother. The moon is an ancient symbol of motherhood. It mirrors the cycles in a woman’s life and feminine experience.
This man-moth is searching for the moon but always coming up at a loss. The poem ends with the man-moth stuffing his hands in his pockets to keep from touching the third rail on the train line, which would mean death. In the last stanza, the man-moth cries one tear, his only possession. He will drink it if you’re not watching, but hand it over if you pay attention. This one tear holds so much feeling we are fascinated by it.
When we think of moths or butterflies, we think of soft, powdery wings. They are such fragile, quiet creatures. They never scream, never make a sound. Even their wings are quiet. To have this quiet, nervous creature cry one tear contains so much emotion. The man-moth seems like a lost child who wants to be in the skyrails of the world searching for some luminous truth but ends in a whimper. All the power of the poem is in that stanza. It brings to mind the child in the unpublished poem fragment from the 1950s, trying to hide her needs and feelings, but one tear comes bubbling out. She only allows one tear so she won’t be heard.
I like Bishop’s use of the words palms it, like a pickpocket or shoplifter. That’s the image we are left with in the poem. I see a street person on a subway train no one pays attention to, slumping in his seat. He’s unable to break out of this life into a better one. His eye is a haired horizon. Describing eyelashes as hair makes the man-moth seem more beastlike, more inhuman.
But he is very human. We only see the radiance in the man-moth if we step out of our worlds for a moment and notice him. He then gives up his only possession. It comes from the underground springs of his vision and is pure enough to drink. That vision, that recurrent dream of climbing to the top of the sky, of flying toward the things in life we are attracted to is something we can have if we can rise above the shadows of our lives. That’s the gift of the man-moth.
That is the gift of Bishop. Whether she ever felt the completion she was searching for or not, she wrote about it. Writing about one’s life is a way to master it, to see how all the pieces fit together. In all Bishop’s poems, she is trying to map where she fit into the various geographies of her life. Writing is a way to do that, to make the details of a life seem more placed. If all the parts fit together in the writing, maybe they aren’t lost.
[1] Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop Life and the Memory of It (Los Angeles: University of California Press) 436.
[2] Ibid. 436.
[3] David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux), 232.
[4] Kalstone 231.
[5] Millier 5-6.
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