2001 Paper 2 - Section 3

Good afternoon, friends and classmates. I am very pleased to open the first of our lunchtime lectures for Arts Week at St Jude's. It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. I'd like to begin with an overview of the woman and her life, as I believe this will enhance your understanding of her work. Bishop experienced a rather sad and troubled childhood. At the age of five, she was estranged from her mother who was placed in a mental hospital for the rest of her life. Bishop was then raised by her grandparents and other relatives. 'Home' is not a source of stability or happiness in the poems which I will be discussing today. In her adult life, Bishop was very well-travelled, even by today's standards, spending a large portion of her life in Brazil. Naturally, her travels fuelled much of her poetry and I'd like to address the impact of her travels on her poetry today. But first, let's take a look at Bishop's depiction of her childhood. In 'Sestina' we are shown Bishop's childhood environment, devoid of parents and bathed in tears. In this poem an adult tries to shield a child from pain, but fails. Something 'foretold' has brought sadness to the family home, but we are not told what this is. Sadly, 'tears' predominate this home, from outside and within, … the teakettle's small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove the way the rain must dance on the house. The child's perspective is captured skilfully, objects are personified ('the almanac hovers … above the child'), and the adult's pretence of normality fails to reassure. The grandmother seems resigned to something painful but inevitable. Even the familiar objects seem to know this: 'It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.' The way in which the child absorbs the atmosphere of her home, and the emotion of the 'old grandmother' is unsettling and full of foreboding. The rain and 'hard tears' which surround the child, find their way into her picture: With crayons the child draws a rigid house and a winding pathway. Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears and shows it proudly to the grandmother. The child's environment has clearly left its imprint on her consciousness. The last stanza is chilling as a childhood memory prepares to inform the future, 'Time to plant tears'. It is clear from Bishop's work that childhood experience can have a lasting impact on one's adult life. 'In the Waiting Room' depicts a form of upheaval in a child's consciousness and sense of identity. The poem depicts Elizabeth, the child, perusing National Geographic magazine and being fascinated by images of other cultures. The photographs are not picturesque, and they depict some horrific images - A dead man slung on a pole — 'Long pig,' the caption said … black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. Elizabeth is jolted back into the real world by a scream from her Aunt Consuelo in the dentist's room. However, despite this intrusion from reality, the images from National Geographic persist in the child's consciousness. Reality becomes strangely distorted, as does the child's sense of self. Suddenly her aunt's voice is her voice, and they are 'falling, falling/our eyes glued to the cover/of the National Geographic'. The moment has taken on a surreal, nightmarish quality and becomes a bizarre fusion of child, aunt and the people in National Geographic. Amidst this chaos, the child seems compelled to question the very essence of her being: I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. She is in a mundane, ordinary setting, surrounded by mundane, ordinary people yet she knows instinctively 'that nothing stranger/had ever happened, that nothing/stranger could ever happen'. In questioning her sense of self and identity, Bishop must question her self in relation to others. She wonders what 'similarities' connect her to all of humanity, what 'held us all together/or made us all just one?' Part of the beauty of the poem is that this experience is not explained or demystified by the adult poet. The experience is simply recalled and the reader shares in the loss of control and the sense of 'sliding/beneath a big black wave, /another, and another'. As you can see, startling and unexpected sensations seem to lurk beneath the veneer of the everyday, ordinary world. This is also apparent in 'The Fish' which, like 'In the Waiting Room', engages the reader and builds up to a powerful climax. Here, Bishop catches a 'tremendous fish' whose appearance fascinates her with his 'brown skin hung in strips/like ancient wallpaper' and 'shapes like full-blown roses/stained and lost through age'. This is no ordinary fish! This one carries the marks of a survivor: 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. Perhaps Bishop saw something of herself in this fish who seemed to have survived a lifetime of trauma, yet carried his wounds 'Like medals with their ribbons/frayed and wavering'. Something in this fish compelled her, just as the images in National Geographic once did, 'I stared and stared/and victory filled up/the little rented boat'. The fish's presence overcomes the poet and a grand climax is reached in an explosion of colour 'until everything/was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!' The poet's final act of letting the fish go is a powerful resolution to the poem's narrative. Survival in the face of adversity was no mean achievement for Bishop. She spent much of her life battling with alcoholism, and in 'The Prodigal' she depicts the exile and isolation of the addict with sympathy and understanding. The prodigal son finds himself living among squalor and filth - 'brown enormous odor … glass-smooth dung … the sow that always ate her young'. The prodigal resembles the addict who is cut off from family and friends, living a base and degraded life, unable and unwilling to change. However, change does come and is foreshadowed by 'the bats' uncertain, staggering flight'. The prodigal makes his own decision (it has to be his own decision) to return but this is not glorified or idealised. The poem makes it very clear that the road to recovery is not an easy one. Finally, we come to my favourite poem, 'Questions of Travel'. Many of you in this room are probably aching to travel, to experience other cultures and learn from them. I know I am. Luckily for us, global travel has never been easier. This was not the case in Bishop's day and she travelled the world at a time when most people could only dream of broadening their horizons. 'Questions of Travel' presents the perspective of a world-weary traveller who has seen it all, and now questions the urge to travel, the very thing which shaped Bishop's lifestyle. She portrays the travel bug as a kind of madness: What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The traveller is portrayed as irrational and frenzied in her conquest of newer frontiers. The repetition of 'inexplicable' in this stanza suggests that the traveller/tourist sees too much and sees without insight or understanding. The poet herself seems weary of the whole process and there is a sense that the mystery is lost when we see and experience too much of the world: Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them too? And have we room For one more folded sunset, still quite warm? The traveller becomes a sort of greedy consumer who would turn a beautiful sunset into a portable item if she could. Travel, so often linked with imagination and adventure, is linked with a ' … lack of imagination that makes us come/to imagined places not just stay at home'. Despite its bleak and cynical tone, I found this poem refreshingly honest, and I urge you all to read it. In conclusion, I urge you to read much more of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. I hope I've given you some insight into the woman and her works, and I wish you well on your journeys and adventures in the wonderful world of poetry! Thank you for listening.