Monday, February 8, 2010

Elizabeth Bishop and the Weed of Desire

Elizabeth Bishop's "The Weed" is a great poem to read using Structuralist and New Critical methods. She builds two related and productive binary oppositions, one between death and life and the other between stillness and movement. The poem begins with that very Dickinsonian opening: "I dreamed that dead, and meditating, / I lay upon a grave, or bed." Later, the poem contrasts this deathly stillness with life and movement: "Suddenly there was a motion, / as startling, there, to every sense / as an explosion." The poem investigates what one does with this spurt of life after resigning one's self to death.

But it is important to recognize that the form this intercession takes is a weed, an unwanted growth. The speaker seems to favor the idleness of death to the life represented by the weed. In a Freudian sense, the weed seems to represent the drives, which are felt to be a substantial threat to the ego. The stable and "grave" ego is unsettled by the growing weed. The weed grows in the heart, which "began to change / (not beat) and then it split apart / and from it broke a flood of water." The weed is almost swept away by the flood that it creates. The speaker feels an innate (though chilly) fear of the weed and its potential destructiveness:

"What are you doing there?" I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: "I grow," it said,
"but to divide your heart again."

The speaker subtly understands her complicity with the weed's actions ("with my own thoughts?"), but recognizes how it works to disintegrate the heart. Rather than seeing unconscious desires as a "true" sort of heart, Bishop suggests that the ego's emotions are the Self's emotions; rather than being a secret heart, the weed is antithetical to the heart.

The perspective in this poem is in keeping with Bishop's tendency to emphasize and ensure the distance between the subject and his desire. Even in the breach, when the unconscious emerges in all its power, the poem is a tale of disintegration. The poem is paradoxically a creation myth and a narrative of psychological decay. While breaking free from stillness, the brittle heart is assured destruction.

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