175: Elizabeth Bishop Poems

Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Rosalyn Vastias. Rosalind, you have been on the show several times in the past, but it's been a while. So why don't you reintroduce yourself? Sure. I am a poet from Pennsylvania. I have a day job. at a nonprofit up here in Rhode Island where I've lived for, I don't know, 26 years or something like that.

Yeah, I think that's the important stuff. I have a wonderful dog. Well, all those things qualify you to be on the podcast in my book. Oh, and his name is Dashiell Doggett. He's named for Dashiell Hammett. The pulp writer. Yeah. Literary connection. I do like Dashiell Hammett. I think I think I prefer Raymond Chandler, but I do really love Dashiell Hammett. And I do love the Thin Man movies.

Thank you for being on. Rosalind, in the past, you've done a lot of the episodes on poetry, and I'm very grateful to you because I think that poetry is the one... aspect of literature that a lot of people feel like they're unqualified to talk about. And if this podcast is about anything, it's about my fervent belief that everyone has the right to read whatever they want to. And poetry is...

is there for you if you want to read it and you don't need to worry too much about whether you get it right or wrong. Because I also think that the idea of getting it right or wrong is probably not what most poets had in mind. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I've always been a pretty big tent poet, I think. And right now, in particular, we're living in a really wonderful time for poetry. There's...

Just a real diversity of voices that I would say was not necessarily the case in the 80s and the 90s when I first started reading poetry. in a kind of committed way um so i think it's a a great time to hop in but there are voices um i mean i always feel weak actually when i talk about poetry because i feel so um Like my grounding is really in contemporary writing and I'm a real strong advocate for reading contemporary poetry because people are not really aware that.

that there are poets living and breathing and writing like all the time right now. And you probably see them walking their dogs and on the bus and at your job. And you may not even. Be aware that they exist. So, yeah, there's pretty much everything you could possibly find is out there. And if there's a poet that you don't like. it's easy to kind of move on and find one that speaks to you or find many that speak to you. And I think today's poet is a pretty good example.

So this time we are doing Elizabeth Bishop, who her dates were what? 1911 to 19... Did she live into the 70s? Yeah, 1979. Yes. So... Mostly known for her work in the 50s and 60s. What is your background with Elizabeth Bishop? So I probably encountered her first in... an anthology in my family's home. I think it was maybe the poem, I think it's called First Death Nova Scotia. It's about her cousin. I think it's about her cousins.

um funeral um and he's a little probably a baby um and it's a home funeral And I think I was probably a teenager maybe when I read that poem. And it was accompanied by Analysis because it was in an anthology that was a textbook. It was probably my brother's textbook. And I remember being supremely kind of creeped out by that poem. It's really visually evocative, I think, in...

Some ways it has the same color pattern as one of the poems we'll be talking about today, Caruso in England, where it's very white and red. But then really...

I didn't really encounter Bishop again until I was in my MFA program, because like I said, or maybe like I've alluded to in the past, I feel so untrained. I was... I was largely doing a lot of reading on my own through high school and college. I mean, I was an English major, but just reading of contemporary poetry kind of in a very undisciplined way. So it wasn't until probably I went and got my MFA that I had anyone telling me like what was what. Yeah, which hopefully.

I've learned some things. I encountered Elizabeth Bishop through an anthology. And also, there's a link to my own master's program. I was... in the master's program for fiction, but part of that was I had the responsibility one semester for teaching an introductory creative writing. class and that included both fiction, prose fiction and poetry.

If you want to talk about feeling unqualified, you know, I had to go out and I had to buy all these books on approaches to poetry. It was literally things like, here's how to teach your... kids to use uh imagery you know like like and they're the and i one thing that i liked about the books i read was they they were very like uh improv you know they were sort of sort of like

you would come up with like a list of words and then string them together onto a poem or a list or like say in in 20 lines use 20 different uh imagistic phrases or whatever. And what I appreciated about that was it got me to not take it so darn seriously, which I think is a good thing when you approach writing this.

I chose for my class that they get a copy of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. which I believe has since been divided into two volumes of modern and contemporary. But at this time, there was just the modern one. And that was where I read. I read one of the poems we're going to be doing in here, the filling station, and I read the man moth.

which is another famous poem by her. And those stuck with me. And when I read her, I remember thinking I was angry that I hadn't been exposed to her before.

And I think that she occupies Bishop occupies a strange place in American letters in that people who know poetry. know her very well and consider her to be one of the most important poets of the 20th century. But I don't think she gets taught a lot. in high schools, and I don't think she gets taught a lot even in survey classes in colleges. That may have changed. I don't know what gets taught these days.

But I remember feeling the same way that I felt when I learned about the Spanish flu for the first time. I was like, why has no one told me about this before? Because I thought that I found her. poems to just be the most immediately accessible modern poems that I'd read.

And modern poetry has this reputation for being difficult. I think it's T.S. Eliot's fault. It's always supposed to be about... illusions that you don't get or, you know, there's some sort of a Romana clay and it only makes sense if you know the figures who were friends of Allen Ginsberg or whatever. You can pick up pretty much any Bishop poem and just read it with no prior knowledge of anything that she's written and get something out of it, I think.

Yeah, I think one of the reasons that she may be overlooked is in part because she was, like, when... When I learned about her in my MFA program, she was kind of lumped in with the confessional poets, which she would not have probably considered herself a confessional poet at all. She got along. She was very good friends with Robert Lowell. But from what I read about her in preparation for this is that she really, I mean, she was famously very private.

But she also had some contempt for the confessional school. And I think also she did some teaching, but I don't know if she... I loved being in the classroom. And I think also perhaps her appearance. She, again, when I was reading about her, I was like, oh, she had all these affairs with younger women. It's like, sounds amazing.

But I think she presented as reserved and like a maiden aunt. And she's not flashy. Like, I think what I love about her poetry is... It's really very rich and reveals kind of this, like the speakers have these very rich, imaginative.

kind of thought processes and imaginative inner lives. But it's very grounded. There's not a lot of weirdness happening. You're not like... you know, she's going to kind of take you through the poem and you're going to feel pretty comfortable most of the time, even in, um, like, you know, in the moose which famously has this kind of like it's a sort of visionary poem like the the

The speaker almost gets kind of unstuck in time as she's on the bus, like listening to conversation that's happening. And she's sort of like rocking in this primordial. cradle of like all the voices of our ancestors and then this moose steps out of the forest but even though there's this kind of like very magical sort of suspension of time and space in a way It is a pretty grounded poem. Nothing, nothing. And even the vision, it's like a moose. It's kind of homely. Like, um, so, um.

But I really, I really love that. I love that about her. And I appreciate it more, I think, at this at this age, even when I'm thinking about like what young writers might want to emulate. And how it's okay. Like, it's always okay to be grounded. Like, weirdness and groundedness are friends, really. Like, and you can make your weird poetry. kind of more appealing if you're bringing the reader along with you.

And speaking of, I'm just going to touch on this real quick. The thing, the poem that I think we talked about a lot in poetry school was One Art, just for the... craft of that but i i do want to get into um uh

the poems we're actually going to talk about. Let me just give a little bit of background about Bishop. You mentioned her friendship with Robert Lowell, who is also a name that if you know poetry, you know. well, but I don't know how well he's remembered in the larger literary, like a general readership. Bishop, I have a lot of affection for because she's another Boston area poet. You know, she.

She was born in Worcester. She went to school at Vassar, which has since been subsumed into Harvard, but at that time was the... the woman's Harvard. And she did kind of, she was in a lot of places in her life. She spent some time in Brazil. Her orbit always took her back to Boston. She ended her life doing some lecturing, and she was friends with Robert Lowell, who was the director of the writing program at Boston University at the time.

She was also a lesbian writer at a time when that was not, especially in the 60s and 70s. It was seen as a very aberrant behavior, especially for a woman to be homosexual. And there was kind of all these ideas about Freudian ideas that something had gone wrong with this person's development. And so she was very private about it. And later, you know, when second wave feminism came along, she sort of disavowed.

her being either a woman poet or a lesbian poet and some of the second wave feminists were a little bit uh concerned about that they said that she must have had some sort of internalized misogyny there but it was mostly you know she wanted her work to stand on its own merits I don't know. I can certainly relate to that too, though, because I think poetry can sometimes, probably particularly at that time, felt like a boys club. And you...

Just out of a sense of self-protectiveness, you would want your work to be judged on its own merits. And so, yeah, it might be... it might make you feel uneasy to suddenly find the feminist movement claiming you and wanting to claim you when, you know, that, I mean... There, you know, there probably was a great deal of conflict there.

Yeah, and you mentioned her reservations about confessional poetry, which, again, if you don't know what that is, listener, there was this post-war movement. in poetry to write poems that were based upon your internal... works, particularly like talking about your obsessions, your bad qualities. your childhood, your bad relationship with your spouse or whatever. It kind of was also a thing in post-war fiction, too, when you think about people like Saul Bellow.

Philip Roth or something like that. And the thing that whenever I think of confessional poetry, I think of one specific poem, which is Snodgrass's April Inventory. which was a poem that I really liked a lot when I was younger. But as I've gotten older, I realized it's a poem that's literally about a college professor getting older and lusting after his female student.

And I think that's the sort of thing that men could get away with at that time. And there were scenes like, oh, it's very honest and open and how refreshing for someone to admit this about themselves. I don't think women were able to get away with it that much. There was a funny line I came across in my research where she actually wrote to Robert Lowell at one point, he was going to release a...

book of poetry that she found offensive and because it was so confessional. And in her letter, she said, one can use one's life as material. One does anyway. But these letters, aren't you violating a trust? if you were given permission, if you hadn't changed them, etc. But art just isn't worth that much. Well, I would put money on her having better boundaries than Lowell any day of the week.

Okay, we've gone on long enough with this preamble. Let's get to our poems. Let's go through them in... chronological order, which means the first poem is Sestina, which was published in 1956. And this was a poem that you suggested. Sestina, excerpt. September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with a child, beside the little marvel stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinacial tears and the rain that beats on the roof of the house were both foretold by the almanac, but only known to a grandmother. The iron kettle sings on the stove. She cuts some bread and says to the child, it's time for tea now. But the child is watching the tea kettle's small, hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove, the way the rain must dance on the house.

Yeah, I think this is such a beautiful example of the Sestina form because... I can be a little allergic to formal poetry because one of the difficulties is that the form will be louder than the poem. The masterful thing about this Sestina is that the form is not louder than the poem. I think it's really beautifully crafted. So a Sestina is six stanzas. of six lines and there are repeating end words um so um you know it's if you're if your words

Well, I can tell you what her words are. Her end words are house, grandmother, child, stove, and almanac. And those words repeat in variation at the end. of each line of each stanza. And then there's a three-line envoy at the end of the Sistina, which uses all six words.

one is in the middle and one is at the end um you should look it up actually reader listener listener you should look it up um but that's that's kind of the essential thing to know um And what's really great about her end words is that the most complicated one is almanac.

they're sort of primal. They're very primal words. And the actions of the poem are kind of... primal there's a grandmother feeding wood to the stove and a child drawing pictures and they're reading jokes from the almanac and then the grandmother um hangs the almanac up and this is not a thing i knew again until later in life i i think

I had read this, maybe become acquainted with this poem and then seen a farmer's almanac, like at the grocery store or something. And they still have a hole punched in the upper corner where it's bound. So that you can like put a string through it and hang it in your kitchen, I guess. Like it's this, it's how you store an almanac. So it's close at hand. But.

The hanging of the almanac, I think she compares it to a bird. Bird-like, the almanac hovers half open above the child. There's also some stuff that... Bishop does with language. And I wrote some notes down about this, the small, hard tears and the hot. black stove. I think that occurs in the third stanza. It's time for tea now, but the child is watching the tea kettle's small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove.

And so you can see that this isn't a poem where end rhyme occurs, but there's still like repeating sonic patterns. And there's... imagery aplenty um the child is described as um the child puts a man into her drawing with buttons like tears and then this really beautiful image that happens as the grandmother turns toward the stove, little moons fall down like tears.

from between the pages of the almanac, and they fall into the child's drawing, into the flower bed in the child's drawing. And the moon, the moons are like a thing that are in the almanac, actually. They're the phases of the moon that you would... that you would turn to the almanac to see, like, is it time to plant whatever? Because you have to plant in the waxing of the moon. So, and...

Also, this must be a brand of stove, but the little Marvel stove. And then at the end of the poem, Bishop calls it the Marvelous stove. So she does a little wordplay with the... the branding of the stove and the word marvelous. So I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm making too much of that, but I really like how Marvel repeats in marvelous. So. Those are some of the things that I noticed. It's very enclosed.

There's a sense of enclosure because of the form, and then it's also in-house, and then there's the further enclosure of the stove itself. The drawing is a kind of enclosure. There's just these ways that Bishop repeats a kind of coziness or... rigidity even. She mentions that the house is rigid and the path is winding in the child's drawing.

And I think there's a tension there, John. And I think that's why the form works, because like there's this tension between cozy and restrictive. And I see the same thing in her Crusoe poem where it almost feels like. It's a horror poem because of what's happening in the landscape. But I don't want to get too ahead of myself. What did you think of this?

What did you think of this poem? Well, first of all, I don't think you're making too much of anything. One of the things that I absolutely adore about this poem is the way that images all fold back on themselves. As you mentioned, this is a sastina, which is a Renaissance form. And if you know like sonnets, you think of those as very restrictive forms. But the sastina is kind of...

like a sonnet on speed. It's very complicated. In fact, there is apparently a rule structure for how you rearrange the end words on each. a succeeding stanza. I have never been able to understand that, but listener, if you're interested, go look us up on the internet, see if you can figure it out. It reminds me a bit of the VNL. which is another Renaissance form, which is what Dylan Thomas's Go Not Gentle Into That Dark Night is written in a VNL form.

What this reminded me of, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there's a poem by Gertrude Schnagenberg called Supernatural Love, which is a poem about... herself as a young girl in a study with her father while she's doing needlepoint. The imagery is thick with Christian images. It's thick with discussions of etymology and the relationship between the daughter and father. Similarly, it takes a small domestic scene and makes it into something sort of supernatural or cosmic.

And Schnakenberg, like Bishop, folds images back on each of themselves. They repeat each time they have a slightly different cadence, a slightly different meaning. So the fact that she refers to this as the little Marvel stove and then later the Marvelous stove. is very purposeful, and I appreciate it as a reader when I can see that the... that the writer has taken a lot of care with their words because that makes me want to take care with my reading. This is apparently a

poem about a very specific moment in Bishop's life. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother had a breakdown, and so Bishop was sent off. to live with her grandmother and this is a poem about the time and the aftermath of that. It's not explicitly stated. in the poem itself. So if you read it through without knowing about Bishop's biography, you may never... really tease out those facts, but you do tease out that this is a moment where there is a discrepancy between

the child's understanding of the moment and the grandmother's understanding of the moment. And this is about that space between... perspectives, but it's all told through external cues. It's all told through careful observation of the physical objects. and the physicality of the characters and what they're doing in the room. There is not really much, if any, interior dialogue. Yeah, I think that's...

I think that's exactly why, I think that's exactly what, how do I want to say this? I think that's why she is parallel. to confessional poetry um because she has kind of figured out how to thread that needle of as basically what you said from the letter that you read, she uses her life, but she doesn't necessarily reveal her life.

She is still doing the thing that confessional poets do, which is a kind of myth-making. But she's allowing herself... the screen of privacy. And I think I forgot to mention that one of the end words is tears. I think I only named... maybe five of the end words and there's there's six and one of them is tears and the repetition that so the grandmother has actual tears but they come back in the tea they come back as the drops of water kind of dancing out of the tea kettle um and so

It's a way of pointing to that sadness, as you said, without maybe dwelling on it. But also making it sort of permeate the... the kind of emotional landscape of the poem. And that's what N-Words and Asistina do. They are obsessive, and they make the emotional landscape of the poem really loud so that you can't... You can't avoid it. But so it's a great tool, actually. I think it's a really challenging form, but it's a good form to use if you have something.

that you're trying to write about that's maybe hard to approach or something that you have obsessive feelings about. I think it's, as I think form is usually good for that, but I think the Sestina is exceptional.

for that. I think you're absolutely right that highly structured, formal... approaches to poetry are one way to deal with strong or difficult emotion when I was an undergraduate. I took a class in... medieval literature and one of the things we read in there was the poem Pearl, which is a poem that appears in the same manuscript with Gowan and the Green Knight and it's generally considered to have been written by the same poet.

But that's a poem about the poet dealing with the death of his child, his daughter. And it's written in the most elaborate... scheme you could possibly imagine. I won't go into it here. If you're interested, just look up. the medieval poem Pearl. It's a great poem. It has the most complicated structure I've ever seen in anything. But I remember my professor saying,

You know, this is one way that you deal with grief is you find the most structured way of approaching it. I love that. Let's move on to the next one. This is the one that I chose, Filling Station. Filling station. Excerpt. Oh, but it is dirty, this little filling station. Oil-soaked, oil-permeated, to a disturbing overall black translucency. Be careful with that match.

Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms. And several quick and saucy and greasy sons assist him. It's a family filling station. All quite thoroughly dirty. Do they live in the station? It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it, a set of crushed and grease-impregnated wicker work. On the wicker sofa, our dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide the only note of color, of certain color. They lie upon a big dim doily, draping a tabaret, part of the set, beside a big hirsite begonia.

Part of the conceit of the poem is describing in detail all of the material culture of a filling station in 1965. And since I am a highly nostalgic person and I work in museums and I'm very interested in material culture, I just love reading these sorts of things. Americana that has disappeared from living memory. But even in this poem, which is about a filling station, it's also about the strange little homey touches of this filling.

filling station, the presence of someone who is providing an extraneous domesticity to what is a place of oil and gas and commerce. She looks at the careful way that the oil cans are arranged. She looks at the laced oils of the potted plants. It's a poem about small graces and about noticing.

the care that goes into things that you normally overlook. I love how she does this and she does it a little bit in Crusoe too. Like this poem is... It feels like the poet has us kind of by the elbow. Like, it feels like we're with her. And she's like, we're looking at the gas station together. And she's kind of talking to us. There's these parentheticals. She does something that is like almost verboten. In her first stanza, she uses two exclamation points.

I think most people in a writing workshop if you put two exclamation points in one stanza they would lose their minds. Um, so, and I, so I love that she does that. I think it gives us permission. Um, and she starts like the very first line. Oh, but it is dirty exclamation point. I love that. And then. This kind of very cheeky, the last line of that same stanza after she's described how oil-soaked this filling station is, be careful with that match, as if we could...

as if we, the reader, or her and us together could burn it down. So there's this intimacy here, and then the... the parentheticals and she also has these like rhetorical questions um that come up particularly um really to great effect um when she's kind of

pondering why why this why this filling station is so um why it isn't just anonymous right why does it have this plant why does it have the doily why the extraneous plant why the tabaret why oh why the doily and then another parenthetical and she tells us how it's stitched and what it's stitched with. So it's the close, close, close eye of the poet, but she's also kind of doing really fun stuff with like tone.

So I think, again, and she has this turn at the end, and we'll talk a little bit, I think, about turns when we get to Crusoe. Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant or oils it maybe. Again, that like cheeky, cheeky, cheeky speaker. Somebody arranges the rows of cans.

And I was wondering, John, I don't think this is explicitly about the loss of family, but I think grief kind of underpins a lot of her work and that sense of... looking for home and thinking about home places and thinking about locations on a map and moving restlessly around the world. It's, it's that somebody is there, but they're not, they're only there through their actions kind of. So the person who is tending the plant.

and placing the doily down is absent, but we know them through their actions. I don't know.

I feel like that was a long way of saying something very simple. It reminds me of the opening of The Glass Menagerie, where... I forget. I'm going to forget the main character's name, but the main character's talking. Tom? Tom is the narrator. Right. When Tom comes out and he talks about the various characters in the play, and then he says there is one character.

who is as important as all the rest, but doesn't appear in the play other than in a photograph on the wall, which is the absent father. That is a, you know, that's a play about the trauma visited upon a family because of loss.

a poem about looking into a situation that the poet is starting to realize is much more domestic than it needs to be and wondering about, you know, presumably... the the mother figure in this in this family we see the the father we see the sons but there's the somebody you know i i don't want to be too gendered with my assumptions here but i the somebody who exists who is stitching embroidery and who is watering plants and who is arranging the cans so that they say SO, so, so, so.

And it is that recognition that, and the last line, somebody loves us all, is this very wistful, you know, it is very wistful if you know about. Bishop's own loss of parents. But it is a beautiful sentiment that, you know, we go through our lives and we don't even know. perhaps the people who are buoying us up. It also feels to me like it almost moves from the domestic particular...

to like a divine figure. In just one quick little movement, it goes from the oil cans to this sort of grand statement, somebody loves us all. And I'm obsessed with with punctuation. And so it's always significant when. You know, a sentence is given a whole line. It's a short sentence, so it should have the whole line. But there's no enjambment there. It's the two high-strung automobiles, period. Somebody loves us all, period. And the poem is done. And it feels like a big...

You know, it's a big grandiose statement, but it's gentle too. It's a super gentle, funny, cheeky, intimate poem. And she does all this stuff at one time and she can still end it with this sort of grand.

grand seeming proclamation, which I think is really, really awesome. Let's move to the last poem, Crusoe in England, which she worked on on and off for many years in the 60s, and it was eventually published in 1971. Excerpt from Crusoe in England. My island seemed to be a sort of cloud dump. all the hemispheres left over clouds arrived and hung above the craters their parched throats were hot to touch was that why it rained so much and why sometimes the whole place hissed

The turtles lumbered by, high-domed, hissing like tea kettles. And I'd have given years, or taken a few, for any sort of kettle, of course. The folds of lava running out to sea would hiss. I'd turn, and then they'd prove to be more turtles. The beaches were all lava, variegated, black, red, and white, and gray. Their marbled colors made a fine display.

And I had water spouts, oh, half a dozen at a time. Far out, they'd come and go, advancing and retreating, their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches of scuffed-up white. Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated, sacerdotal beings of glass. I watched the water spiral up in them like smoke. Beautiful, yes, but not much company. Do you want to start? I can try. It's a big, it's a big, chunky poem. It is, it has a lot of the stuff that we've, that we've talked about, right? Wistfulness.

grief, careful observation. It's Crusoe in England. And he starts out by...

telling us what's happening in the news. So this is Crusoe when he's already been rescued and he spends most of the poem The news that he's read about a new volcano and an island being named has reminded him of his past. And he goes back. And it's kind of an inventory, John. He says, well, I had 52 miserable small volcanoes I could climb. And then later...

Maybe the stanzas are a little irregular. I think it's the next stanza after that. He mentions, and I had water spouts. So. You know, you can track these points in the poem where he is thinking about the kind of... the kingdom right that he used to inhabit um that's what it feels like to me when he says i had these volcanoes and i had these water spouts um particularly as we get to the end of the poem and he's

And he's talking about the little room or the little apartment or the little house where he lives currently. And this is such a...

amazing landscape because it's very monochrome. He tells us that it's volcanic sand, volcanic beaches. So it's all black, red, white, and gray. And there's one kind of thing only. There's one kind of tree. There's one kind of snail. There's these turtles that go around hissing.

And the goats yell and the birds and the gulls shriek. And it's kind of, it feels a little bit like a madness, right? But it's... very lovingly told like there's a there's a fondness and a wistfulness and a homesickness for it um that we feel from this from how he describes his past. And...

So let me get back to the madness for a second. Because he also talks about kind of the craziness of like being isolated. And he's trying to remember something. from like his books at home because i didn't know enough why didn't i know enough of something greek drama or a strong or astronomy. The books I'd read were full of blanks. The poems, while I tried reciting to my iris beds, they flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss. The bliss of what?

So I love the way he's reaching for things. It feels very true to life. It feels like she knows about, she somehow knows about being stranded. Even though she has not been stranded, she has the poet's empathy to put herself into his place and to interpret it for us, which is... to me, wonderful. And again, with the parentheticals, Crusoe has asides to us as parentheticals in this poem.

I mean, the poem is fat. It covers a lot of ground. I don't feel like I'm doing it justice. But one thing, can I point out a sentence? Sure. So close to the end.

He's telling us, just when I thought I couldn't stand it another minute longer, Friday came. And then he's telling us about his relationship with Friday. He'd pet the baby goats sometimes and race with them or carry one around. Pretty to watch. He had a pretty body. Period. White space. And then one day they came and took us off. Period. white space. Now I live here, another island that doesn't seem like one, but who decides? And what I love about that is the way the poet guides us.

And it's this place of real pain in a way or tenderness or both. There's this kind of confession of Crusoe noticing Friday's body. And it feels sort of shocking. Like, I feel like this would be shocking at the time that it was that it was written. So we understand the love and the intimacy and maybe even the eroticism of.

their relationship. And then it closes with that period, and then it immediately diverts to the white space. So we, the reader, we take a breath. And then one day they came and took us off, period, white space. So all of that loss of his kingdom and the loss of Friday and probably the joy of rescue, but the pain of leaving this... where he kind of ruled the island is summed up in that one line. And now I live here, another island. So it's like...

Nothing has changed. But as we move through this stanza about England, we realize how diminished Crusoe's life has become. Because the things that were special on the island, like he calls. I'm bored to drinking my real tea surrounded by uninteresting lumber. And even the word lumber, it's heavy. Like lumber is a heavy movement and lumber is a heavy object. And I love that it's uninteresting to him because it's not, because it's dead, because it's, it doesn't have any soul.

Um, and his knife that he cherished on the island has kind of been sapped. He says, I knew each Nick and scratch by heart, the bluish. blade the broken tip the lines of wood grain on the handle now it won't look at me at all the living soul has dribbled away um do you want me to do you want me to Give away the ending? I don't think spoilers exist for 1971. So...

You know, then he's telling us more about his sort of relics of his past. And he gets to the very end of the poem. And this is the last two lines of the poem. And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles 17 years ago come March, period. End of poem. No editorializing. We know... I mean, the editorializing is there in the repetition, right? And Friday, my dear Friday. That's as much grief as Crusoe shows us. But just in the restraint, John.

is the grief it's so cool right like it's so cool um so this is why we go to bishop right to to see this enacted right this kind of human deep human pain but delivered with like all this control and all this care um it's just it's just really i love this poem so much

It's so sweet. Bishop based her depictions of Robinson Crusoe's island in this poem on Darwin's... descriptions of the Galapagos Islands, which were a source of fascination to Bishop. Those islands are, in fact, very monotonous and they are pretty much... only inhabited by the sea iguanas that were there and the various finches that he found.

The voyage of the Beagle and the depiction of the Galapagos Islands are really important to 19th century thought in that there was a fascination after those books were published. of people wanting to go to these what they thought were the remotest places in the world and that somehow going there and studying the flora and fauna there would either prove or disprove Darwin. Like there was a whole class of people, including expositions.

led by Andre Agassi, who was a biologist at Harvard, to try and disprove. Darwin's theory of evolution. And I don't know how they figured that was going to prove or disprove anything, but there was this sense of that as being the ends of the earth. And so that was the ends of the earth for that time. As far as Robinson Crusoe goes, that's a book that most people have one or two pictures in their heads from New Yorker cartoons. It's not a book that...

people generally read anymore. If people read Daniel Defoe, they might read Maul Flanders or something like that. But the thing about Robinson Crusoe is it's a book about... At its heart, it's a book about the contrast between civilization and lack of civilization. And it has a...

a much more complicated plot than you might think. Crusoe has a lot of adventures before he finds himself eventually shipwrecked on this island, including being captured by pirates and going through the destruction of another ship. And when he gets off the island with Friday, it's through a complicated sequence of events as well. He seems to be arranging to...

regroup with a bunch of Spanish sailors who have been shipwrecked and they're all going to get off together. But then this English ship shows up that is undergoing a mutiny and Crusoe helps the... captain take down the mutineers, you know, re-establishing. Of course, the hierarchy of civilization killing off the head of the mutineers and the other mutineers get stranded on the island, presumably to learn their lesson of how they have to.

become civilized themselves or whatever. It was a book written at a time of colonization for England. Crusoe in the book is a very religious figure. And it's very important to him that he convert Friday to Christianity. It's very important to him that he keeps a calendar so he knows. too, that he's observing the Sabbath correctly, that sort of thing. It's really, really interesting to compare that Crusoe to the Crusoe of this poem. Yeah, she upends that, doesn't she?

On the one hand, he seems terribly traumatized by being on the island. He talks ironically about it being his kingdom, but he also talks about feeling self-pity. and saying that, you know, pity begins at home. So the more pity I felt for myself, the more at home I felt. But getting back to England, he... He doesn't seem like he's any better off. Like everything, all the color has drained out of his life. You know, all of the things that he...

hated about the island when he was there are the things that he misses about it now. And that knife that just barely got him through the years of being... alone on that island now has lost its magic and its luster and it's because he doesn't depend on, his life does not depend upon it anymore. It's interesting this last line about about Friday. I agree. It's a marvelous bit of understatement. And I do think that the poem basically implies that Crusoe has romantic erotic feelings.

towards Friday, but he can't express those even to himself. The book of Robinson Crusoe actually ends with Robinson Crusoe and Friday going to Portugal to get the... fortune that Crusoe made in Brazil and pick it up at the port there. But because Crusoe does not ever want to be on a ship again, they travel over the Pyrenees and are almost eaten by wolves. their way to Portugal. So the book ends with Friday very much alive. You can make a chronology where that's the last thing that happens.

to Friday, and then he dies soon after and fit it into this poem. But ultimately, for me, what this poem reminds me of more than anything else is Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, Ulysses. which is a poem about Odysseus as an old man having come back. You know, the events of the Odyssey are done, long done, and he's aging, you know, back at home and in Ithaca. He longs for adventure again. And it's a poem that is often quoted for end-of-life inspiration.

of the poem Ulysses, there's a very famous sequence of lines where he talks about going back to sea with a new crew. And he says, It may be that the gulfs will wash us down. It may be we shall touch the happy isles and see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides. And though we are not now that strength, which in old days...

moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. And so I think a lot of people quote that last bit because it's very stirring. But it is, you know, ultimately it's a poem about the dissatisfaction that the hero feels upon having finished his quest. because Tennyson was basing his poem on a literary source on the Odyssey. It reminds me very much of Bishop.

basing her poem on this literary source of Daniel Defoe. But the endings are so different. The cure for Ulysses is... get up on that horse again or back on that ship again and get out there and have new adventures. There's no saving poor Crusoe at the end of this poem. No, but I think he's...

I mean, he's right, isn't he? He's kind of wiser. He knows that he can't go backward or make the knife live. I don't know. Maybe it is like a... I mean, he is incredibly traumatized. So maybe it's about the stasis that trauma leaves you in. I mean, not that it has to be, not that I'm saying it's a, you know, I don't want to say, oh, it's about this.

But, you know, maybe that's maybe that's some of it. After you've had some great momentous thing happen, like being shipwrecked for years, there's no fixing. the trajectory of your life. You know, it is, it will mark you for, for all time. And it changes who you are because it's changed the course of your life. But I think, yeah, just her using the material for her own aims is just really so great. And that's a...

really cool information about her basing it on the Galapagos. I didn't know that at all. I did not know that until I looked it up today. So as I said before we started this episode, I can edit it to make it sound like I'm a brilliant mind. But the truth is, I read that on Wikipedia like everybody else.

I think we've been going on for a while and we should probably wrap this up. I like giving my last words and then I invite you to give your last words. I just wanted to say that one thing that I one odd thing I like about Bishop is. In the second season of Breaking Bad, I don't know if you ever watched Breaking Bad, but it ends with the death of Jesse's girlfriend, Jane. And there's a scene at the end where Jane's father comes into her apartment.

to sort of clean things up after the removal of Jane's body. And the scene opens with the camera lingering on a photograph of Elizabeth Bishop. on Jane's wall and then pans over to Jane's father coming in. And I like that because I'm always fascinated in... literature or movies or whatever when we are told what a character likes to read because that's a that's a great window into that person's personality and the fact that

She had a picture of Elizabeth Bishop means a lot to me as a viewer, even. I mean... It doesn't probably mean a lot to most viewers who don't know who Elizabeth Bishop is, but it means a lot to me. And I always compare that. There was a sequence in Gilmore Girls where. And the bad boyfriend, Jess, of Rory's kind of like hipster boyfriend who is kind of on and off again, is reading Jack Kerouac. And I always thought, that's really.

lazy writing like every everybody everybody's reading on the road and that's the the shorthand for oh this is this guy this kid's uh you know a bad boy i mean it may be lazy but it sounds

accurate it sounds um true to life shall we say um yeah i i don't know that i have um much more to say than i've already said i think um Bishop is a great under maybe underappreciated poet. And if you've not read her, you should you should definitely visit her works, especially if you're a. young and or aspiring poet for sure. And thank you, John. This was great. This was a wonderful conversation for me to have. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Thanks again to guest host Rosalind Vastias. The poetry selections were read by Marina McCoy. If you have an idea for a book, story, poem, or any other reading to cover, on a future episode or a suggestion for a guest host, or if you just want to say hi and talk about the weather, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. The Sophomore Lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard. This podcast is brought to you by The Incomparable Network.

I'm trying to kind of stretch out beyond the... the widely accepted uh canon yeah that's exciting though i hope well i'll keep this going as long as i can someday i'm just gonna get uh too too tired to to continue but we'll see Well, we all will eventually get too tired. We'll all eventually be Crusos in England. The Incomparable Podcast Network. Become a member and support this show today. TheIncomparable.com slash members.