Questions of Travel: Elizabeth Bishop

“Here is a coast; here is a harbor;/ here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery.” So begins Elizabeth Bishop in “Arrival at Santos,” the opening poem in Questions of Travel, which is divided into two sections, Brazil and Elsewhere. “Arrival at Santos” is a brilliant poem to open the volume with because it both establishes the narrative of Bishop as a traveler reimagining Brazil’s landscapes and myths in poetry, and also because the landscape works as a Rorschach for Bishop, allowing the reader an intimate and revealing look at a poet in emotional turmoil. For instance, this is how Bishop interprets Santos upon first arriving:

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

Only Bishop could read mountains as “self-pitying mountains/ sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery.” The warehouses are termed “feeble,” and the palm trees are “tall, uncertain.” If the reader is still not conscious of Bishop’s vulnerable self-portrait, she intimates herself again with a typically deliberate line break: “and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist/ is this how this country is going to answer you...” Thus, in the opening two stanzas, Bishop begin the process of revealing both herself and a country.

I suspect part of what made Questions of Travel so appealing in 1965, besides the quiet charm, the endearing frailty, and the meticulous details of Bishop’s writing, was that it was written during the heat wave of Confessionalism—Ariel was published the same year as Questions of Travel, and Plath had committed suicide only two years earlier. Bishop’s sensibilities must have struck many readers like a cool breeze. Of course, not everyone found Bishop refreshing. The primary criticism during her career was that her voice was cold and dispassionate, which might make more sense if she was compared to the likes of Plath and Sexton, or even the emotionally violent verse of her contemporary Robert Lowell.

These accousations of sterile verse differ from the post-colonial criticism of today, which explores undertones of imperialism and racism in Bishop’s work—one such reading of her poetry, specifically Questions of Travel, is that from the beginning she sets up a dichotomy between Brazil and Western culture as savagery and civilization. Specifically, the long poem “Manuelzinho” is attacked for its racist intimations. The character in Manuelzinho is a local laborer whom Bishop portrays as sleeping on the job, superstitious, and a liar—basically mirroring American stereotypes of the lazy black—and towards the end of the poem she declares, “You helpless, foolish man,/ I love you all I can.” Though this poem (we are told in an epigraph) is supposedly delivered through the voice of a friend—I’m guessing Lota de Macedo Soares—there’s little denying the condescension.

Elizabeth Bishop, for most of her time in Brazil, lived in a semi-rural setting, and she was attracted to nature both in her life and in her writing. Thus, it makes sense that much of her poetry would focus on the jungle and animals (similar to Marianne Moore, who had to travel to the zoo for inspiration), but to suggest that Bishop characterized Brazil only by savagery is, I think, melodramatic.

Technically—syntactically—Questions of Travel employs several modern strategies, and in some ways it was ahead of its time. For example, in many of Bishop’s poems there’s a duality of voices, often signified by italicized font. This device was used throughout her career, perhaps most famously in “One Art,” when Bishop reminds herself that, “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” This duality of voices comes into play for the first time in Questions of Travel in the title poem. At the end, Bishop writes that:

Continent, city, country, society;
their choice is never wide and free.
and here, or there…No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

The italicized section is in quotations, which makes me think it’s a direct quote, perhaps from Bishop’s journal. But what’s significant about this section is the shift in tone and style and the italics (again, although I italicize quotes on this blog, these are original to text), which clearly mark the section as a second voice, albeit another aspect of Bishop’s. This technique is used again in “Sunday, 4 A.M.” to represent a character’s speaking voice within the poem, and another well-known example comes at the end of “The Armadillo,” when Bishop writes:

Too pretty, dream-like mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

These lines seem to work as a sort of hazy elegy, but they also strike me as mawkish, immature, and indulgent—somewhat in the vein of Hart Crane’s introduction to “The Bridge.”

When my aesthetic taste aligns with Bishop’s, her images are crisp and striking. The poem “Filling Station,” comes to mind, where Bishop writes "Somebody/ arranges the row of cans/ so that they softly say/ ESSO—SO—SO—SO." Brilliant, and the sign of a careful eye. But at times her aesthetics—which I think in this selection are informed partly by verse more formalist and classical than I like, as well as Brazilian folklore—lean a direction I dislike, such as the long poem, “The Burglar of Babylon,” which Lowell praised, and I found only readable. I did enjoy “The Dolphin,” but it still walked a fine line. Although I’m not as enthusiastic about the subject matter of the poems based on folklore as I am about her poems on travelling and the discoveries of self, I would enjoy them more if Bishop didn’t alter her style and tone so dramatically in order to write them. “The Burglar of Babylon” reads like a nursery rhyme, which is what Bishop intended, though it wore me down with its tedious repititions. I like Bishop better when she takes her cues from Marianne Moore.