Bishop in Love

“Read ALL of somebody,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in a letter of 1948. The eighty-five poems published during her lifetime fill fewer than 130 pages in the 2008 Library of America volume, Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters. But the “ALL” of the experience cannot be measured, since each of the poems offers itself up as a sensuous world of unique depth and proportion.

Fit though few, we might say: when it comes to poetic influence, Eliot’s on his half of the twentieth century was to derive from six or seven poems published between 1915 and 1925. While Williams spoke of Eliot’s impact as that of a bomb going off, Bishop’s might best be likened to a slow burn. Overshadowed during her life by the histrionic Lowell, she had become, by the century’s end, the more dominant figure, earning for herself a place as one of “the two towering presences”—the second is Charles Olson—with whom Jahan Ramazani chooses to open Volume 2 of his 2003 edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Like Yeats, Bishop grew stronger and deeper as she grew older, a development culminating in Geography III (1976). Along the way she gave us such masterpieces as “The Map,” “The Fish,” “At the Fishhouses,” and “Arrival at Santos,” all of which prepare the way for the ultimate dramatic monologue on exile, solitude, loss, and survival, “Crusoe in England,” a poem to set alongside “The Waste Land,” “Home Burial,” and “Sunday Morning.”

Bishop’s longest poem is also a love poem. “Shampoo” and “One Art” each invoke a present or a lost lover, but “Crusoe” is the only Bishop poem that enacts the story of a relationship. I follow most readers in taking the poem as an elegy for an actual life companion, found and lost. On a trip to Brazil in 1952, while staying with a friend named Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop fell ill after eating a cashew nut. Lota cared for her, and then asked Bishop to stay. “I’ve never in my life had anyone make that kind of gesture toward me,” Bishop was to say, “and it just meant everything.” The warrant for reading their story back into the poem comes not only from the many likenesses between the Crusoe-Friday relation and the Bishop-Lota connection, but also from the notoriously discreet poet allowing Lota to enter the order of the published poems themselves, when she names her in the dedication to Questions of Travel (1965), her third book:

  FOR LOTA DE MACEDO SOARES … O dar-vos quanto tenho e quanto posso,Que quanto mais vos pago, mais vos devo.     Camões

Finished in 1970 and first published in 1972, “Crusoe in England” is a poem of 182 lines and three distinct parts: the Before, the During, and the After. Everything is measured from the moment when “Friday came.” The interval that follows, the time of love on the island, is very brief, consisting of only eleven lines. The After, Crusoe’s posthumous survival in England, the place from which he speaks the poem, takes up a page. The Before receives the most space, almost four full pages of poetry. As in “The Moose,” Bishop takes her time in arriving. The poem enjoins a patience and so enforces the Emersonian recognition that “Everything good is on the highway.” Or, perhaps, what poetry wants to say cannot be said. Bishop once told Frank Bidart she “believed in closets, closets, and more closets.” In her longest poem, she fills the lines with a sweet reluctant amorous delay:

  Crusoe in England A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— rose in the mate’s binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island’s still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right.

“Crusoe” begins with a “fiery event,” a phrase from...