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6 Bishop’sWeightedEye Seasonality is the conventional metaphor for nature poetry’s representational challenge: to make the outdoor world into art, typically, one must defy the deathliness of winter. Whether set in the ripening of spring or the ripeness of summer, nature poems are often infused with an urgency that seems to result from the implacable workings of time. Feeling the underlying problem of knowledge and nature in its most extreme form, though—feeling that knowledge in nature is not only “flowing” but instantly “flown”1—Elizabeth Bishop set herself more difficult, Emersonian problems. For Bishop, poetic urgency is not a problem of time. Any representational effort is immediately too late: it is at the poem’s first word that nature ceases to be natural. The poet-figure may hunt for “A virgin mirror/no one’s ever looked at,”2 but in finding such a thing one always destroys it. No earlier, fresher moment is to be preserved in the poem. Art’s mirror is always held up by someone, and is never seen without a face in it—just as the poet’s nature is never unmirrored in language. Metaphors of space, of “Active/displacement of perspective” (“Roosters”), therefore often take the place of temporal metaphors. Like Dickinson’s, Bishop ’s myth of the Fall into tainted knowledge is an instantaneous myth—and like Dickinson’s, it is simultaneous with the myth of redemption. Everything happens at once in the poem. The challenge of the Emersonian lyric, the thing that makes the poet’s work urgent, is to reconcile these two opposite elements (not just to create a story that includes them both). The lack of narrative pressure , stemming from Bishop’s insight that time is not the real problem, means that her poems can slow down and describe every part of a scene. Without fear of the season’s ending, the poem can gather every rosebud—but each becomes immediately part of the “Clutter of trophies,” one of many “rust-perforated roses” flawed even before they are offered. “The acuteness of the question” of 138 | bishop’s weighted eye death, the sharp cold of winter, “forks instantly and starts/a snake-tongue flickering” (“Faustina, or Rock Roses”); it does not need to be anticipated and cannot be outraced. For Bishop, every physical image holds within it all the sorrow that other poets find in decay. Predecessor poets adjusted their seasonal metaphors as they approached the heart of this problem. Keats, for example, agonized over time’s instant transitions from freshness into decadence, and finally found as his best subject autumn, the season defined by its passing away. The ideal poetic object, in “To Autumn,” is a cider press, and beauty is found not in the quick indulgence of the “bee-mouth” of “To a Nightingale,” but in “Last oozings hours by hours.” Conversely, Robert Frost, as we have seen, felt that nature in its extreme plenty put pressure on the senses rather than the other way around, and began to drain humanity as it was grasped. Thus his autumn-poem “After ApplePicking ” sorrowfully registers a kind of physical memory that aches gladly at an absence: “I am overtired/Of the great harvest I myself desired.” Such autumn resolutions compromise with time: they are apt to release the natural world in favor of a world of memory. Their beauty comes from stately withdrawal rather than fresh engagement. For Gerard Manley Hopkins (the only poet besides Moore whose influence on Elizabeth Bishop is indisputable), chastened withdrawal would not do: the moment of spring was poetry’s necessary object, the moment of the world’s perfection. To Hopkins, in a spring-poem Bishop cites prominently, only one miraculous figure, Christ, has the quickness necessary to hold on to the moment’s life. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning. (“Spring”) The impossible task of nature poetry is to gather the juice of a sunny world into a human structure without tainting it and seeing it cloud up. For this harvesting , Keats’s protagonist at the cider press needs an excruciatingly “patient look,” an attitude that accepts the suffering and even the doom of itself and of the world. Frost resists that doom by incorporating darkness into his vigorous work: he must “lift down” his apples, preserving those whole globes so...

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