Elsewhere in "Elsewhere"

The poems in Elsewhere vary greatly from the ones in Brazil. Whereas Brazil's poems focused solely on nature and the Brazilian environment, Elsewhere focuses entirely on family and relations between other people. In fact, the poem "Manners" is all about a grandfather teaching the speaker about how to politely interact with other people. It says so much about values, the character of the grandfather, and also technology's effect on interpersonal relations. The poem begins with

My grandfather said to me

as we sat on the wagon seat,

“Be sure to remember to always

speak to everyone you meet.”

The poem goes on in that fashion, with the grandfather passing on worldly advice to the youngster, until they encounter a car. The last two stanzas read:

When automobiles went by,

the dust hid the people’s faces,

but we shouted “Good day! Good day!

Fine day!” at the top of our voices.

When we came to Hustler Hill,

he said that the mare was tired,

so we all got down and walked,

as our good manners required.

Note that the main characters are riding in a horse drawn carriage.

I think the crucial line is “When the automobiles went by, the dust hid the people’s faces…” yet the characters still attempt to be genial. They’re only met with the dust from the car, even after yelling their greetings at the top of their voices. Despite this, they still walk the remainder of the way to accommodate the tire mare.
New technology (automobiles) may bring people to their destinations faster, but it eliminates the simpler way of life, when it was important to take time to interact with one’s neighbor and fellow man.

A really interesting poem that caught my eye is “Sestina.” Obviously, it is a sestina. Now that we’ve got the hard stuff out of the way…

The most important motif in this poem is the animation of inanimate objects. By this I mean that non-living objects are either personified or portrayed to be real objects, rather than drawn on paper.

“the child is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears dance like mad…the way the rain must dance on the house.”

“Bird-like, the almanac hovers half open above the child, hovers above the old grandmother and her teacup full of dark brown tears.”

“It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.

“I know what I know, says the almanac”

With crayons the child draws a rigid house

and a winding pathway. Then the child

puts in a man with buttones like tears

and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother

busies herself about the stove,

the little moons fall down like tears

from between the pages of the almanac

into the flower bed the child

has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Notice how tears fall from the almanac, the almanac and stove speak, the tears fall into the flower bed (the drawn flower bed, not a real one). The million dollar question is, why the sestina form? Well here’s my theory.

The sestina form seems to be one of the strictest poetic forms out there. In this respect, one can argue that it is an “inanimate” form, in that there is no wiggle room with respect to form. The author is bound by the rules. However, a skilled poet can bring this form “alive” through, well, good writing. Bishop is stating that ideas and objects that aren’t necessarily “real” can be brought to life, and she says this through both the content and the form.

more on "In the Village"

I figured I’d spend a little time on some instances of figures of speech in “In the Village.”

First of all, I think one of the coolest similes in the entire book is “The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons…”

I suppose I shouldn’t say that “In the Village” is strictly prose because metaphors, similes, and other tropes are so abundant and so poetic-sounding (I know that’s a vague and very generalized term to use but I can’t think of any others) that it may be classified as prose poetry. Personally, I don’t like that term at all. I’d much rather describe it as uniquely-descriptive prose, but I guess poetry experts would prefer prose poetry. Here are some instances:

“…and the straw matting smelled like the ghost of hay.”

“He is enormous. His rump is like a brown, glossy glove of the whole brown world.” Speaking of the horse.

“His trophies hang around him, and the cloud of his odor is a chariot in itself.”

“King George’s beard is like a little silver flame.”

Tropes such as these work to add to the imagery that Bishop creates in her writing. This extremely vivid imagery seems to be Bishop’s calling card as the Brazil poems exhibited beautiful descriptions and settings.

On another topic, it is interesting that the story begins and ends with the child hearing a sound. I quoted the opening paragraph in one of my previous posts. The story ends with,

Clang.

Clang.

Nate is shaping a horseshoe.

Oh, beautiful pure sound!

It turns everything else to silence.

But still, once in a while, the river gives and unexpected gurgle.

“Slp,” it says, out of glassy-ridged brown knots sliding along the surface.

Clang.

And everything except the river holds its breath.

Now there is no scream. Once there was one and it settled slowly down to earth on hot summer afternoon; or did it float up, into that dark, too dark, blue sky? But surely it has gone away, forever.

Clang.

It sounds like a bell buoy out at sea.

It is the elements speaking: earth, air, fire, water.

All those other things—clothes, crumbling postcards, broken china; things damaged and lost, sickened or destroyed; even the frail almost-lost scream—are they too frail for us to hear their voices long, too mortal?

Nate!

Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!

Also for context, the child’s mother was moved to a sanitarium and that is why she says that the scream had gone away forever.

The fact that the story begins with the child listening to a discomforting scream and ends with the child admiring the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer tells us that the child has become somewhat detached from her mother’s condition. By the end of the story, her mother has hit rock-bottom, been moved to a sanitarium, and the child’s aunts have moved back to Boston since they no longer have to take care of their sister. These events are very jarring and even traumatic for a child but for our main character, the absence of the “scream” is really just a side-note. She’s captivated by the sounds of Nate’s work but not disturbed by her mother’s illness. I just think that the difference between the sounds at the beginning and end of the story shows that the child has ultimately disconnected from the events that unfolded in the story.

checked my settings..

Hey guys I checked my settings for this blog and saw that it was set so that only registered users could comment. I changed it to "anyone" so I think it should be easier.

"In the Village" a prose story

Elsewhere begins with a 30 page prose story of a child and her mother’s descent into insanity in a small village in Nova Scotia. The story follows the girl as she visits the blacksmith, plays with her horse Nelly, and runs errands for her grandmother. All of this occurs, however, with her mother’s sickness looming overhead. In addition to the child’s adventures, the narration involves darker images and events which cast an ominous tone and feeling for the whole story. The descriptions of the blacksmith’s forge, a barn fire, and a pervasive scream all darken the tone.

“In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner. A tub of night-black water stands by the forge. The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons and follow each other like bloody little moons to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting.”

“A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon—or is it around the rims of the eyes?—the color of the cloud of bloom on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats; something darkening over the woods and waters as well as the sky…She stood in the large front bedroom with sloping walls on either side, papered in wide white and dim-gold stripes. Later it was she who gave the scream.”

The scream detailed in the opening paragraph of the story (quoted above), is a motif that reappears several times in the story, building the feeling of a lingering madness. The scream appears at random and sometimes with no more than a sentence devoted to it.

“My grandmother’s hair is silver and in it she keeps a great many celluloid combs, at the back and sides, streaked gray and silver to match. The one at the back has longer teeth than the others and a row of sunken silver dots across the top, beneath a row of little balls. I pretend to play a tune on it; then I pretend to play a tune on each of the others before we stick them in, so my grandmother’s hair is full of music. She laughs. I am so pleased with myself that I do not feel obliged to mention the five-cent piece. I drink a rusty, icy drunk out of the biggest dipper; still, nothing much happens.

We are waiting for a scream. But it is not screamed again, and the red sun sets in silence.”

The mother is kept in a bedroom upstairs where the child’s grandmother and aunts try to take care of her. We first learn of her illness on the second page of the story:

Speaking of the mother, who was/is a dressmaker

“First, she had come home, with her child. Then she had gone away again, and left the child. Then she had come home. The she had gone away again, with her sister; and now she was home again.

Unaccustomed to having her back, the child stood now in the doorway, watching. The dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass.”

Just for context, in the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar II goes insane and thinks he is an animal after being spoken to by God.

The mother’s mental state becomes worse and worse, with a climax occurring at the same time as the barn fire in town.

“I wake up and it is the same night, the night of the fire. My aunt is getting out of bed hurrying away. It is still dark and silent now, after the fire. No, not silent; my grandmother is crying somewhere, not in her room. It is getting gray. I hear one wagon, rumbling far off, perhaps crossing the bridge.

But no I am caught in a skein of voices, my aunts’ and my grandmother’s, saying the same things over and over, sometimes loudly, sometimes in whispers:

‘Hurry. For heaven’s sake, shut the door!’

‘Sh!’

‘Oh, we can’t go on like this, we…’

‘It’s too dangerous. Remember that…’

‘Sh! Don’t let her…’

A door slams.

A door opens. The voices begin again.

I am struggling to free myself.

Wait. Wait. No one is going to scream.

Slowly, slowly it gets daylight. A different red reddens the wallpaper.”

“In The Village” is definitely the centerpiece of “Elsewhere” as the poems seem to just be asides to the main story. It sets the tone and context for the rest of the volume as well as introducing the characters that will appear in the poems. It is a very detailed and intricate work, and because of this it pretty much flew right over my head on my first read through. After a few more reads though I finally figured out what was going on in the story and everything else seemed to fall into place.

tropes

Bishop’s descriptions are rich with figures of speech and poetic devices. Metaphors aren’t abused by any means, she uses them just the right amount without sounding forced.

From various poems:

big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,

blue, blue-green, and olive,

with occasional lighter veins and edges,

or a satin underleaf turned over

simile:

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

Another:

Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler.

Metaphor:

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,

short-eared, to our surprise.

So soft!—a handful of intangible ash

with fixed, ignited eyes.

Tropes, used in conjunction with personification and vivid imagery, thicken Bishop’s descriptions and make the reader feel closer to this expansive Brazilian rain forest. With regards to imagery and description, Bishop put on a clinic in “Brazil.”

I’ve been planning on saving the next part, “Elsewhere,” for my week two blog posts as I think it’s so different from “Brazil,” and frankly hard to digest, that it deserves it’s own week.

role of nature

I’d like to spend a little time looking at the role of nature in Bishop’s poems.

In many ways the Brazilian environment is just as much a character in the poems as the speakers are. Almost all of the poems contain numerous descriptions of Nature, references to river spirits, and/or personification of nature itself. The environment plays an antagonistic role in the poem “Electrical Storm.”

Dawn an unsympathetic yellow.

Cra-aack!—dry and light.

The house was really struck.

Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler.

Tobias jumped in the window, got in bed—

silent, his eyes bleached white, his fur on end.

Personal and spiteful as a neighbor’s child,

thunder began to bang and bump the roof.

One pink flash;

then hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls.

Dead-white, wax-white, cold—

diplomats’ wives’ favors

from and old moon party—

they lay in melting windrows on the red ground until well after sunrise.

We got up to find the wiring fused,

No lights, a smell of saltpeter,

and the telephone dead.

The cat stayed in the warm sheets.

The Lent trees had shed all their petals:

wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls.

Because Nature plays an extremely prominent role in these poems, it is often personified to reinforce it as a character. This is a good example of personification found throughout the volume:

2^nd stanza of “Song for the Rainy Season”

In a dim age

of water

the brook sings loud

from a rib cage

of giant fern; the vapor

climbs up the thick growth

effortlessly, turns back,

holding them both,

house and rock,

in a private cloud.

At night on the roof,

blind drops crawl…(poem continues on)

Again, nature is a character in many of the poems and to reinforce this Bishop uses personification abundantly. In the poem “the Riverman,” the story revolves around the local river dolphin, which has supernatural powers. The speaker in the poem wishes to become a witch doctor that works with water, known as a sacaca. It is a seven page poem that incorporates the river dolphin, Luandinha the river spirit, serpents, and the pirarucú, an Amazonian fish weighing up to four-hundred pounds.

I was re-reading my last post and I just realized that I got side-tracked and forgot to relate the free verse form to the content in "Brazil, January 1, 1502."

As I'm looking over the poem again I'm finding half-rhymes but there doesn't seem to be any regular pattern to them. The half-rhymes also seem to break down a bit more in the last two stanzas, becoming more sparse. The last stanza has none while the second to last makes use of only the "l" sound in its end words. These slant rhymes may say something about how broken and ravaged Brazil was after being invaded by Portuguese explorers. It's as if, just like the rhymes, the people were barely hanging on. The randomness of the rhymes represents the chaos that ensued after the Portugeuse enslaved the South Americans, effectively destroying the civilizations they had built over thousands of years.

"Questions of Travel" by Elizabeth Bishop

This volume is separated into two parts: "Brazil" and "Elsewhere." In this post I'll go over only "Brazil."

As the name suggests, this part depicts life in the raw Brazilian environment as well as personal stories of some of its inhabitants. The first poem, "Arrival at Santos,” documents what seem to be the initial impressions of a traveler in Brazil. What struck me first while reading the poem was the negative and unappreciative diction in depicting the Brazilian surroundings.

“Arrival at Santos” Stanzas one and two:

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;

here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:

impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,

sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,

some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,

and some tall, uncertain palms.

This entire poem describes to the reader the disappointment and, at times, ignorance of this newcomer to Brazil. In the very next stanza, Bishop uses a rhetorical question to explicitly state the tourist’s dissatisfaction:

Stanza 3, 3^rd line:

Oh, tourist,

is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world,

and a better life, and complete comprehension

of both at last, and immediately,

after eighteen days of suspension?

On several occasions we discover the tourist’s ignorance of Brazilian life (I added the bold):

The tender is coming,

A strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.

So that’s the flag. I never saw it before.

I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

And later:

The customs officials will speak English, we hope,

and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.

Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,

The speaker’s only concern, as evidenced in the preceding quote, is whether he will be allowed to keep his bourbon and cigarettes when leaving Santos. This poem, as well as many others in this volume, is written in 4 line stanzas with abcb rhyme scheme. I don’t necessarily think that this rhyme scheme directly relates to the content in many of the poems, but it does serve a very important purpose in that it allows Bishop to use rhyme-less free verse poems to send a clearer message. Basically, exploiting the abcb scheme in most of the poems highlights the poems that do not involve that pattern of rhymes. For example, the poem “Brazil, January 1, 1502” is written in free verse with long lines and stanzas.

After noticing that, I began to think about why Bishop would write this particular poem in free verse. Well, the entire poem is depicting the conquistadors’ invasion of Brazil. The poem begins with vivid imagery:

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes

Exactly as she must have greeted theirs:

every square inch filling in with foliage—

big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,

blue, blue-green, and olive,

with occasional lighter veins and edges,

or a satin underleaf turned over;

monster ferns

in silver-gray relief,

and flowers, too, like giant water lilies

up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves—

purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,

rust red and greenish white;

solid but airy; fresh as if just finished

and taken off the frame.

The “theirs” in the second line refers to the conquerors. The second stanza continues with the Nature imagery but in the third stanza the tone and content change dramatically:

Still in the foreground there is Sin:

five sooty dragons near some massy rocks.

The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts

splattered and overlapping,

threatened from underneath by moss

in lovely hell-green flames,

attacked above

by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and neat,

"one leaf yes and one leaf no” (in Portuguese).

The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes

Are on the smaller, female one, back-to,

Her wicked tail straight up and over,

Red as a red-hot wire.

Now Bishop uses words like “Sin,” “sooty,” “splattered,” “hell-green,” “wicked” and “red-hot.” I usually abhor symbolism, but I think that these “wicked” and sinful lizards represent the conquistadors themselves. Bishop says that these dragons are in the foreground, as if they haven’t entered the picture (Brazilian environment and population) yet. In the next stanza, Bishop develops the theme by directly referencing the conquistadors.

Just so the Christians, hard as nails, tiny as nails, and glinting,

in creaking armor, came and found it all,

not unfamiliar:

no lovers’ walks, no bowers,

no cherries to be picked, no lute music,

but corresponding, nevertheless,

to and old dream of wealth and luxury

already out of style when they left home—

wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.

This “brand-new pleasure” leads us into the last stanza where Bishop depicts their evil deeds:

Directly after Mass, humming perhaps

L’Homme armé or some such tune,

they ripped away into the hanging fabric,

each out to catch an Indian for himself,--

those maddening little women who kept calling,

calling to each other…

I love how Bishop juxtaposes piety and evil by saying that the Portuguese proceed to rape the women after Mass.

That’s all I’ll write for now, more posts to come!

Some more important things

Professor White has raised questions that I overlooked and are in need of answering. I believe the most important point raised is the relationship between the level of strictness with regards to form and the tone of the poem...

AH HA!

Well, I mentioned in the previous post that poem 6 follows the Italian sonnet form extremely closely. After re-reading the poem with Professor White’s question in mind, I realized a very important thing: the entire poem is about the speaker imprisoning and confining an angel.

Outside my door I keep an angel chained.

I never feed him, never let him loose,

And no one has accused me of abuse,

Although I wouldn’t care if they complained.

I like the way he looks as if he strained

To put his two carved wooden wings to use

And still stood still, impassive and abstruse,

Aware of all he could do and disdained.

And that is our relationship. He stands,

For now, where I have put him. His restraint

Is no more and no less than what it seems.

An angle doesn’t have to be a saint.

They fall like us, then try to make amends.

As when he comes and pleads with me in dreams.

Could it be coincidence that a poem about imprisonment follows the sonnet form to a T (especially considering most of the other poems do not)? I think not. The words he chooses: chained, abuse, strained, impassive, disdained, restraint. These words all coincide with how closely the poem matches the sonnet form.

The very next poem, number 7 ( which was written out in my last post), also follows the Italian sonnet form very strictly and it is no surprise that its content is extremely somber, doubtful, and depressing.

Jarman is using the form of the poem to further convey and strengthen his message. Hence the title Unholy Sonnets. They are unholy both in religious and poetic terms. He is both questioning his religion and varying the level of strictness he follows in form.

The only thing I am unsure about is whether Jarman is also speaking out against conservative views of poetic form by matching perfect sonnet forms with poems about imprisonment and car crashes.

Unholy Sonnets by Mark Jarman

My understanding of the blog posts was to not necessarily perform close readings of the poems, but comment on the overall intent and theme of the volume itself. So here goes:

As one would expect by the title, "Unholy Sonnets" concerns itself almost wholly with religion and concepts related to religion. Before reading the book at all, I assumed the poems would mostly be about rejecting God and be fairly clear in atheist beliefs. Upon reading, however, I found that each poem was very different in its attitude towards God. The tones ranged from praising God to strongly challenging God’s “wisdom” and compassion. One gets the sense of a genuine confusion and “lost” feeling with regards to religion. Here is an example of one of the more overtly questioning poems:

(7)

In which of these details does God inhere?

The woman’s head in the boy’s lap? His punctured lung?

The place she had bitten through her tongue?

The drunk’s truck in three pieces? The drunk’s beer,

Tossed from the cooler, made to disappear?

The silk tree whose pink flowers overhung

The roadside and dropped limp strings among

The wreckage? The steering column, like a spear?

Where in the details, the cleverness of man

To add a gracenote God might understand,

Does God inhere, cold sober, thunderstruck?

I think it’s here, in this one: the open can

The drunk placed by the dead woman’s hand,

Telling her sond, who cried for help, “Good luck.”

I won’t close-read the poem, but it is clear that the speaker questions God’s motivations and compassion through the subject matter alone.

Science also appears several times throughout the work, raising the issue of coexistence of religion and science. There are references to pi, meteors, atoms, and the dual wave/particle nature of light (a quantum theory allusion). One portion of a poem seems to very directly raise the issue of science and faith:

(4, 12^th line)

He saw and heard the marine biologist pray

As if he could, by word and gesture only,

Pry open the mute heavens like a bivalve.

My first thought was of Seinfeld, but after that it was of the speaker watching from afar, chuckling to himself as he knew a man of science could not possibly communicate with God. None of the other poems are as direct as this in raising the issue of science and faith.

The poems also display subtle humor at times:

(47, 4^th line of second stanza)

And asked if I knew how to make God laugh.

Dazed by my brilliance, I didn’t get the question.

He paused for breath, then whispered, “Have a plan.”

In some poems Jarman barely fit the sonnet form and in others perfectly followed its rules. The only sonnet “rule” that is found in all poems is that each one consists of fourteen lines, or if a longer poem, each stanza contains fourteen lines. Poem 6 almost perfectly fits the Italian sonnet as it has an eight line stanza followed by a six line, all in iambic pentameter, and with an abba abba rhyme scheme in the first stanza. The other poems range in adherence to sonnet form from that of poem 6, to seemingly free verse poems with 14 lines.