Being In and Out of the World

I was looking over several unpublished poems and drafts by Elizabeth Bishop and was struck by a commonality that may shed light on her ideas about the self's interaction with the world. Her poems often describe interior scenes or people contained in dreamworlds who are confronted by the real world.

The poem "In a Room," begins with "There was a stain on the ceiling" and ends with "'But here I am in my room,' I awoke."

A poem titled "A Short, Slow Life" begins with the enclosing concept of "We lived in a pocket of Time," but ends with "Roughly his hand reached in, / and tumbled us out."

In a review of a collection of Emily Dickinson's letters, Bishop even singles out this line of Dickinson's for praise: "but so sure as 'this mortal' essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farmyard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again."

We find this same sort of reintroduction of the self into the world in Bishop's published poems. Perhaps the most noteworthy example is "In the Waiting Room," with its abrubt end to ontological investigation in the final stanza, which begins "Then I was back in it." I'm struck by the way these poems enforce an ultimate end to meditation -- but not an end to dislocation. In other words, the emphatic reality of the world, its concreteness, is unarguable. But its appearance is not able to wipe away the uncertainties of the other experience. The reader's experience, like the speaker's, dwells on the unsettling contemplations contained within the poem. For Bishop, the entrance of the world is requisite for her poetry's accuracy, but it doesn't ground things as firmly as one might expect.

In another untitled and unpublished poem, she writes that "One day a sad view came to the window to look in, / little fields & fences & and trees, tilted, tan & gray. / Then it went away." The world seems to have an unsettling agency of its own. Reality does not come across as unbiased and uninterested. To be reinserted into reality after contemplation is not to have questions answered. I always look back to Walt Whitman's examination of philosophical contemplation and his insistence that actuality (especially the actuality of human contact) is enough to drive those questions away.

But the same isn't true in Bishop. "Little Exercise" is a good example of this. The world sends a storm "roaming the sky uneasily," but though Bishop describes its effects, she encourages us at the end to "Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat / tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; / think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed." In one sense, this is another example of Bishop depositing her character into the world, but in another, this worldly existence barely rouses him. We are "tied to a [...] root," but we nonetheless float in our own place. In "Cootchie," the sea is even "desperate, / will proffer wave after wave." So there's a continual struggle between the world created by human contemplation and the world that buffets us with its forces. We seem to exist in them simultaneously. And though modernists like Wallace Stevens might discuss the world as meditation (in the poem titled "The World as Meditation"...and all his other poems), Bishop would seem to inhabit the gap between meditation and the world.