What We Get for Free: After Elizabeth Bishop

My themes are: what do we get for free, and what do we have to pay for? I take Elizabeth Bishop as a special case, all the better for being special.

I have found a title for this essay in a poem by Bishop called simply “Poem,” from her last book, Geography III. The poem begins, as many of her poems do, with an object in the world, something apart from herself that she is inclined to pay attention to, in this case a small painting done many years previously by her great-uncle, George Hutchinson. The painting, as she gradually recognizes, is of a village in Nova Scotia that she knew well—Great Village—and it prompts her to think of the life she and Hutchinson had in common, generations apart, the things they saw, the cows, the flowers, the fields; and then she thinks of the small work of art he made of it. Here’s the last section:

I never knew him. We both knew this place,apparently, this literal small backwater,looked at it long enough to memorize it,our years apart. How strange. And it’s still loved,or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).Our visions coincided—“visions” istoo serious a word—our looks, two looks:art “copying from life” and life itself,life and the memory of it so compressedthey’ve turned into each other. Which is which?Life and the memory of it cramped,dim, on a piece of Bristol board,dim, but how live, how touching in detail—the little that we get for free,the little of our earthly trust. Not much.About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows,the iris, crisp and shivering, the waterstill standing from spring freshets,the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

It is not immediately clear what those two “littles” are and whether or not they are the same. They seem to be adjectival to the “detail” in the previous line. “The little that we get for free” picks up on the earlier use of “free,” the painting is “useless and free,” because no one has made any demands on it. “Our earthly trust” is what we suppose we can be confident of, what we hold in trust for the future, and whatever is held in trust for us by the past. “Not much” rebukes the sentiment we may feel about our natural possessions. I wish Bishop had deleted “Not much” and let us make our own judgments. “About the size of our abidance / along with theirs,” the things referred to, the cows, the iris, the water, the elms, the geese: even as an approximation some of this is untrue. We live longer than the cows, the iris, the geese, probably not as long as the elms even though they are yet to be dismantled, and not as long as the water which will be renewed every spring. But “abidance” is not merely a chronological word, it means the life we are confident of while we have it, the transitory individual life and the seemingly permanent wholes or species. Inevitably, that confidence is darkened by a sense of limitation. In “Song for the Rainy Season” Bishop speaks of “our small shadowy life,” and David Kalstone, one of her most perceptive critics, writes of her sense of “with how much frailty we belong in the world.” But there is almost a stroke of gaiety in the way she saves “the geese” for the vigorous end. There is also an echo of “Abide With Me.”

I’ve said that the poem begins, as many poems by Bishop do, with an object out there in the world. Bishop does it justice by describing it, with as much detail as she thinks it deserves. She evidently prefers description to narration. When the description is finished, or as nearly finished as she wishes it to be, she reaches a point where she moves to another level, often a larger or more general consideration, as in this poem she touches issues...