Elizabeth Bishop, 1911 - 1979

Sonnet

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.


Today February 7, is the birthday of poet Elizabeth Bishop, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1911). Her father died when she was a little girl. Her mother had an emotional breakdown from grief and spent the rest of her life in various mental institutions. Elizabeth spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between her grandparents in Nova Scotia and her father's family in Massachusetts. For the rest of her life, she was obsessed with travel, and she never felt at home anywhere.

She was painfully shy and quiet in college, but during her senior year she mustered up all her courage and introduced herself to her idol, the elder poet Marianne Moore. The meeting was awkward at first, but then Bishop offered to take Moore to the circus. It turned out they both loved going to the circus, and they both also loved snakes, tattoos, exotic flowers, birds, dressmaking, and recipes. Moore became Bishop's mentor and friend, and Bishop said that every time she talked to Moore she felt, "uplifted, even inspired, determined to be good, to work harder, not to worry about what other people thought, never to try to publish anything until I thought I'd done my best with it, no matter how many years it took."

Moore persuaded Bishop that poems didn't have to be about big ideas, that they could be precise descriptions of ordinary objects and places. Bishop began to write poems about filling stations, fish, and the behavior of birds. Her poems rarely revealed her emotions. When other poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman began to write confessional poems, Bishop said, "[I] just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves."

Bishop's first collection of poetry, North & South, came out in 1946. That same year she took a car trip to New Hampshire, but as she was driving, she impulsively decided to drive all the way to Nova Scotia, which she hadn't seen in more than 15 years. The trip brought back all kinds of memories from her childhood, and it inspired many of her best poems, including "First Death in Nova Scotia" and "The Moose." When she moved to Brazil a few years later, she found herself thinking about almost nothing but Nova Scotia.

She was an extremely slow writer, and published only 101 poems in her lifetime. She worked on her poem "One Art" for more than 15 years, keeping it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines again and again until she got it right. But she was an obsessive letter writer. She once wrote 40 letters in a single day. She said, "I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here." One Art: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop was published in 1994.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote,

"I'd like to retire... and do nothing, or nothing much, forever... look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light."

Source: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac