North and South by Elizabeth Bishop

First published: 1946

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

North and South, Elizabeth Bishop’s first book of poems, is full of waking up and the sea. There are poems set in Paris, others in rural Florida. Some characters are human, some animals, still others are surreal. Poems like “The Man-Moth,” “Roosters,” and “The Fish” stand powerfully on their own, displaying the mastery that elevated Bishop to the status of a major American poet of the twentieth century. North and South as a whole expresses the young Bishop’s effort to attune her craft to the world she was encountering.

Although Bishop, unlike other poets of her time, did not use her poems to confess her personal life, the longing and sorrow in them is formidable. Loss characterized her earliest years. Eight months after her birth, her father died suddenly. Five years later, after several breakdowns, Bishop’s mother became permanently insane, and Bishop never saw her again. The child lived alternately with family in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. Illness, especially asthma, kept her from attending school regularly, but she entered Vassar in 1930 and graduated in 1934, the year that the well-known poet Marianne Moore befriended her and the year Bishop’s mother died. During the decade that Bishop worked on the poems that constitute North and South, she lived in New York City and traveled in France and other European countries, and after 1937 (in the hope of relieving her asthma) wintered in Florida.

The first third of North and South conveys a sense of starting out and tentativeness. The speaker in the initial poem, “The Map,” contemplates much of the Northern Hemisphere and at first playfully considers whether the land “lean[s] down to lift the sea from under.” A cautious note sounds when place names run across nearby features, reminding the poet that sometimes “emotion too far exceeds its cause.” “The Imaginary Iceberg” emphasizes longing for the fantastical—a condition in which one can feel “artlessly rhetorical” and “rise on finest ropes/ that airy twists of snow provide.” “The Gentleman of Shalott” portrays a character content to be incomplete, even indefinite.

One element of Bishop’s uncertainty is artistic. She organizes several of her poems around conceits—witty, extended metaphors. She demonstrates in “Wading at Wellfleet” that a single image—in this case, the flashing chariot wheels that depict the awesome movement of the sea—can be inadequate. In the final lines, the immensity of the water makes “the wheels/ give way; they will not bear the weight.” Another element is emotional. Anxiety pervades “Chemin de Fer” from the “pounding heart” of the second line to the hermit’s shotgun blast and the challenge he screams, “Love should be put into action!” A similar intimidation underlies “From the Country to the City,” as the speaker is drawn irresistibly toward a city consisting of mocking images.

Of the three poems that follow, all making city life fearful, “The Man-Moth” has been most appreciated. Inspired by a newspaper misprint of “mammoth,” Bishop created a surreal character—half human, half insect—who, ironically, surpasses his human counterpart. “Man” stands passive in the moonlight like an “inverted pin” and seems unable—or unwilling—to comprehend. The Man-Moth, on the other hand, while fearful, “must investigate as high as he can climb.” The explanation “what the Man-Moth fears most he must do” characterizes the plight of a number of Bishop’s characters. The poem contrasts characters (the first time Bishop does so in North and South), but there is no hero to admire. Instead, after the first stanza introduces Man, the next four stanzas emphasize the Man-Moth’s uneasiness. Mistaking the moon for a “small hole at the top of the sky,” the Man-Moth scales buildings “fearfully,” “his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him.” When he returns underground and boards a subway train, he sits “facing the wrong way” and “travels backward.” The ride seems endless. In fact, his life is a nightmare; death rides constantly beside him, and he must resist the temptation of suicide. The oppressiveness of the city, nevertheless, allows for hope. In the final stanza, the reader (“you”) has the chance to break the Man-Moth’s isolation and share his sorrow. Although the tear that slips from Man-Moth’s eye is associated with “the bee’s sting,” empathy permits one to recognize it as “cool” and “pure enough to drink.”

Before Bishop goes to new locales, leaving the city, “The Weed,” “The Unbeliever,” and “The Monument” reiterate the importance of empathy and provide a symbol of the artistic endeavor. “The Weed” dramatizes the invigorating influence of life upon a “cold heart” prone to isolation. The weed eventually splits the heart, releasing “a flood of water.” The spillage into the speaker’s eyes permits sight; each drop seems to contain “a small, illuminated scene,” suggesting that the river has retained “all/ the scenes that it had once reflected.” As jolting as the weed’s intrusion has seemed, the possibility of insight seems preferable to the self-protective sleep depicted in “The Unbeliever.” Understanding this distinction qualifies one to respond in the affirmative to the question that begins the third poem—“Now can you see the monument?” It turns out to be hard even to describe, and Bishop allows for a mocking response (“It’s like a stage-set; it is all so flat!”). She defends the contraption: The very carelessness of its appearance “gives it away as having life, and wishing.” Such is the “beginning” of art.

After this assertion of the importance of the artistic impulse, one may expect an outward movement, aesthetically speaking. Bishop’s postgraduation trip to Europe in 1935 yielded several poems set in Paris, but there is little sense of expansiveness. An automobile accident cost her friend Margaret Miller the lower part of the arm with which she painted, and the poems have an intensely melancholy air. However, there is also a technical—and perhaps temperamental—advance evident in “Quai d’Orleans.” Rather than impose her ideas, for the first time Bishop lets place and occasion suggest her discovery.

A larger change occurred, as the title North and South implies, when Bishop experienced Florida. Exotic tropical details expanded the possibilities for her art, just as they had the poetry of her modernist predecessor Wallace Stevens. The final ten poems in North and South contain various voices and embrace much more of physical place. In “Florida,” for example, Bishop assembles detail after vivid detail—in the way that her mentor Marianne Moore had—to suggest the emotion that holds the poems together. In Florida, Bishop took great interest in the lives of Cubans and blacks. While living in Key West in the house she bought with her lover, Marjorie Stevens, she also observed signs of American industry preparing for World War II. One finds imagery of warfare and battling in several poems in the latter half of North and South, but “Roosters” is Bishop’s greatest poetic response to militarism. Like so many poems in the book, this one begins at dawn. The clamorous crowing and the repeated use of “gun-metal blue” prepare the reader for the appearance of the birds who gloat “Deep from protruding chests/ in green-gold medals dressed,/ planned to command and terrorize the rest.” The birds fight to the death, “with raging heroism defying/ even the sensation of dying.” The three-line stanzas and insistent rhymes mock the martial subject but do not reduce the menace.

Such balancing characterizes not only the tone of the poem but also the commentary in the second section. Bishop recalls the rooster’s role in Peter’s denial of Christ and suggests that one might find hope in the forgiveness that followed. The serene portrayal of the new morning at the end of the poem perhaps confirms that hope. It is perhaps naïve, however, to miss the sarcasm in the question, “How could the night have come to grief?” Part of the greatness of “Roosters” is that, instead of deciding for the reader, it involves the reader in the emotional turmoil brought on by violence. The poem makes the reader part of the violence he or she may claim to abhor.

The other animal poem in North and South, “The Fish,” has been, as Bishop herself came to resent, often anthologized. Her encounter with the “tremendous fish” may remind one of the shocking effect of the weed liberating the “cold heart”; the hooks and lines “Like medals with their ribbons” hanging from the fish’s mouth suggest that the fish is another victim of human violence. In this fine poem, the fisher is moved to empathize with the fish to a degree unusual in Bishop’s early work. As in “Florida,” Bishop adds image to image to narrate the incident. Many of the details are similes that dramatize the struggle to comprehend the unforgettable fish. The description of his eyes indicates some of the difficulty—and challenge in doing so: “The irises seem backed and packed/ with tarnished tinfoil/ seen through the lenses/ of old scratched isinglass.” In addition, they do not “return my stare.” This is no romantic bonding with nature. The fish remains “other” and the poet continues to study hard. After she allows that the hardware in the mouth may be a “beard of wisdom,” she is overwhelmed by “victory.” Partly, it is her own, having comprehended the immensity of the unlike being; but, in his dignity and survival, the fish shares the triumph.

“Anaphora,” the concluding poem, harkens back not only to the many poems that recount awaking and the day’s beginning but also to the euphoria of setting out in “The Map.” In rhetoric, anaphora refers to figures of repetition and renewal. It can also denote the moment in Christian worship that the Eucharistic elements are offered as an oblation. “Anaphora” describes—commemorates and celebrates are better words—the passage of the days, and Bishop skillfully repeats sounds and words and extends repetition to the structure of the poem—two fourteen-line stanzas—their rhymes and thought-patterns reminding one of shrunken sonnets. Morning’s “wonder” becomes “mortal/ mortal fatigue,” but the poem ends hopefully, the beggar’s fire providing “endless/ endless assent.”

The publication of North and South in 1946 finally assured Bishop that she was a poet, that years of preparation, hard work, and doubt had not been wasted. That the book—nominated by Marianne Moore—had triumphed over eight hundred other entries for the Houghton Mifflin Prize alerted the literary world of an important new presence. Bishop’s next book would win a Pulitzer Prize. Poet Robert Lowell’s admiring response would begin Bishop’s second close friendship with a writer of her own stature. Within five years, she interrupted her voyage around South America. Ill from an allergic reaction, she stopped in Brazil and remained there almost two decades with her lover, architect-designer Lota de Macedo Soares, and continuing the enlargement of her poetry’s embrace of the world around her.

Bibliography

Ellis, Jonathan. Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Ellis argues that scholars should more closely scrutinize the relationship between Bishop’s art and life. His analysis of her work demonstrates how she used the events of her life to create her poetry.

Fountain, Gary, and Peter Brazeau. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Bishop’s life is told through interviews with more than 120 relatives, friends, colleagues, and students and through information based on extensive research in her published and unpublished writings.

Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Harrison studies the evolution of Bishop’s poems as vehicles for expression. Chapter 2 discusses intimacy and romance; chapter 3 emphasizes the effect of events, particularly World War II, on Bishop’s imagination. Includes extensive notes, bibliography, and index.

Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. Reprint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. A probing study of Bishop’s complex friendship with Marianne Moore, which coincided with the making of the poems of North and South. Includes notes and index.

Lombardi, Marilyn May, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Collection of essays focusing on Bishop’s sexual politics and her representation of gender.

Parker, Robert Dale. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Studies the wishful nature of North and South—the anxiousness behind Bishop’s poems, as well as her readiness to look outside herself for subjects. Includes notes and index.

Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. Boston: Twayne, 1966. One of the best starting points for studying Bishop’s life and work. Outlines the period relevant to North and South and examines several poems. Contains helpful primary and secondary bibliographies, notes, and index.

Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Relates North and South to two phases in Bishop’s work—“enclosure” and “history.” Provides detailed but understandable interpretations of many poems. Offers an illuminating explanation of Bishop’s interest in Surrealism and the Baroque. Includes notes, primary and secondary bibliographies, and index.

Walker, Cheryl. God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Walker examines Bishop’s poetry to understand the poet’s relationship with God and religion.