The Bight by Elizabeth Bishop
"The Bight" by Elizabeth Bishop is a lyric poem composed of thirty-six lines that reflects her keen observation of the natural world and metaphoric expression. Set against the backdrop of Garrison Bight in Key West, Florida, where Bishop resided in the winter of 1948-1949, the poem explores the intricate relationship between human experiences and the surrounding landscape. The title refers to a small bay, and the work captures a moment of introspection, suggested by the subtitle, "On my birthday," which implies a reflective assessment of life and environment.
Bishop's writing draws heavily from personal correspondence, particularly a letter to fellow poet Robert Lowell, intertwining descriptive imagery with a narrative quality. The poem presents a seemingly random assortment of sights and sounds, yet each detail invites deeper contemplation, bridging the gap between the observer and the observed. Through her use of vivid similes and sound devices, Bishop infuses the ordinary with symbolic significance, encouraging readers to engage with the world more profoundly. The poem encapsulates Bishop's aesthetic philosophy, emphasizing accuracy in perception while weaving together the interconnectedness of life, nature, and personal reflection.
On this Page
The Bight by Elizabeth Bishop
First published: 1949; collected in Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring, 1955
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“The Bight” is a lyric of thirty-six lines that provides a veritable showcase of Elizabeth Bishop’s aesthetic of observation and her metaphoric impulse. The bracketed subtitle—“On my birthday”—suggests both an occasion and, perhaps, a gift. Such an occasion usually implies the assessment that people are prone to on their birthdays, but, in this case, the poet seems to be tallying up the contents of a localized landscape.
A bight is a small bay between two points of land, and here the topography in question is Garrison Bight in Key West, Florida, where Bishop lived during the winter of 1948-1949. The poem draws heavily from a letter Bishop wrote to poet and close friend Robert Lowell in January, 1948. The details of her description of Key West appear in the poem’s opening lines, and she tells him that the untidy bay resembles her desk.
One of the problems Bishop faces in this poem is how to infuse what seems like a purely descriptive exercise with some of the impetus of narrative. The poem consists of an apparently random survey of activity, both natural and human, and the detritus left behind by it all. Each focused detail, however, is an invitation to concentrate and see clearly not just what is but also what can be. The speaker seems separate from the scene, distanced, but her imaginative capacity closes the gap. The water, the birds, the “frowsy sponge boats,” the ramshackle scenery are eventually taken in by the speaker/observer, a gift on her birthday, one might say, to herself and to the reader. In the following passage, the movement from distance to interiority, from disparate object to meaningful symbol, reflects the overall movement of the poem:
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
Like her early mentor, poet Marianne Moore, Bishop finds a more compelling reality in the imagined scene, the individualized, personalized world. “The Bight” depicts that reality as it comes into being.
Forms and Devices
One of Bishop’s aesthetic standards as a poet was accuracy; poet-critic Randall Jarrell noted in one of his reviews that “all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it.” Yet accuracy for Bishop means something more than objective, literal transcription. She must allow her reader not only to see the object before her but also to experience the whole meditative, discursive act of perception. To re-create this experience, she brings to bear a range of poetic devices, tactics that give her language the expansiveness and elasticity of a mind freed by engagement with the world around her. Thus, the envisioned objects can take on symbolic significance.
The mention of the great French poet Charles Baudelaire seems justified by his own proclivity for searching the material world for analogies to the human soul, as when he writes: “Imagination is an almost divine faculty which perceives immediately and without philosophical methods the inner and secret relations of things, the correspondences and analogies.” In her allusion, however, Bishop treats this idea ironically, noting that “if one were Baudelaire/ one could probably hear” the evaporating water in the bay “turning to marimba music.” The qualifications in this passage (“if one were . . ./ one could probably…”) suggest that Bishop herself draws back from such fanciful and elaborate flights of invention. Later she confirms a less exalted, more modest intention than Baudelaire: “The bight is littered with old correspondences.”
In keeping with this urge for a down-to-earth clarity, Bishop’s tropes are designed to link whatever is seen with something that is at least as common or more so. Pelicans crash into the water “like pickaxes”; man-of-war birds open their tails “like scissors” or tense them “like wishbones”; shark tails are hung on a fence, “glinting like little plowshares.” All such similes envelop the reader in Bishop’s own conception of the interconnectedness of things. Readers are meant to delight in their sheer appropriateness.
The poet’s presence is also registered in the masterful but subtle control she exerts over the form of the poem. She constructs sentences that sprawl over the course of several lines, seemingly casual but pulling the reader from phrase to phrase by means of their accumulated detail and sporadic enjambment. Note the momentum in the following passage and the way in which Bishop herself slips into the description, less to qualify it than to endorse it:
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
Bishop also links the various images of the poem by her use of sound, employing feminine rhymes (“jawful”/“awful”) and assonance (“plays”/“claves”; “jawful of marl”). In the passage cited first, near the end of the poem, she quietly puns on Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” aligning them with “torn-open, unanswered letters.” As “untidy” as the poem itself might appear, she reminds the reader, it has been carefully arranged, and such rhymes and word-play are there as inconspicuous evidence. However, it is just such allusion and figurative language that establishes Bishop’s claim upon the scene.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Boland, Eavan. “An Unromantic American.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14 (Summer, 1988): 73-92.
Fountain, Gary. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
MacMahon, Candace, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927-1979. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980.
Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Motion, Andrew. Elizabeth Bishop. Wolfeboro, N.H.: Longwood, 1986.
Parker, Robert Dale. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Schwartz, Lloyd. That Sense of Constant Readjustment: Elizabeth Bishop “North & South.” New York: Garland, 1987.
Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.
Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.
Wylie, Diana E. Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Nemerov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.