by
kendrive
@ 2006-08-22 - 11:01:40
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachuesetts in 1911 and is considered to be one of the finest 20th century poets to have written in English.
She had rather a sad life. Her father died when she was eight months old and, in the wake of that event, her mother descended into mental illness and was institutionalized in 1916, when Elizabeth was five.
She was taken to live with her grandmother in Nova Scotia and, although her mother lived until 1934, she saw her for the last time in 1916.
Elizabeth planned to enter Cornell Medical School after graduating, but in New York she met the poet Marianne Moore, twenty-four years her senior, and a friendship quickly flourished. Marianne persuaded her to become a writer and she wrote her first mature poems, including "The Map" and "The Man-Moth."
Her earliest work was influenced by George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and, of course, Marianne Moore. The friendship between the two women, memorialized by an extensive correspondence, endured until Moore's death in 1972.
From 1935 Elizabeth lived intermittently in Europe before purchasing a house in Key West, Florida. After being rejected by several New York publishers, the first of her four volumes of poetry, "North and South", was finally published in 1946.
For the next fifteen years, she was a virtual nomad, travelling in Canada, Europe, and North and South America.
In 1951 she decided to see the Amazon but, before she could leave for the dreamed-of voyage, she ate a cashew fruit to which she had a violent allergic reaction that kept her bedridden. As Bishop recovered her health, she fell in love, both with Lota de Macedo Soares, her friend and nurse, and with the landscape and culture of Brazil, which became the setting for many of her poems.
Her lesbian relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares gave her life stability and love, and they established residences in Rio de Janeiro and nearby Petrópolis. She wrote that she was "extremely happy for the first time in my life".
However, it was not to last. Throughout the mid-1960s, life in Brazil grew difficult. Lota de Macedo Soares, involved in the politics of Rio, had taken charge of a public parks project that absorbed her time and attention. As the political situation worsened, Bishop felt more uncomfortable in her Brazilian home and in 1966 she returned to the United States and spent two semesters as poet in residence at the University of Washington. She went back to Rio in the hope of reestablishing her life there.
Both Bishop and Soares suffered physical and psychological distress and were hospitalized in Brazil. When Bishop grew stronger, she left for New York with the expectation that Soares, as soon as she was well enough, would join her. Soares arrived in New York on the afternoon of 19 September 1967 and later that evening took an overdose of tranquilizers and died at age fifty-seven.
This loss proved terribly difficult for Bishop personally, although she continued to write and publish. In 1969 she published "Complete Poems", a volume that included all of her previously published poems and several new pieces. This book won the National Book Award for 1970. When the ceremony took place, Bishop was once again trying to reestablish a Brazilian life. However, the politics, along with Bishop's inability to negotiate the culture without Soares's help, finally convinced her that a Brazilian life was impossible.
In 1970 she returned to the United States to teach at Harvard. There she met the woman who became a source of strength and love for the rest of her life, Alice Methfessel.
Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979 at Lewis Wharf, Boston, Massachusetts. She was buried at Hope Cemetery in Worcester.
Currently her poetry continues to gain recognition and, although balanced by wit and humour, she speaks eloquently of pain and loss.
LOVE LIES SLEEPING
Earliest morning, switching all the tracks
that cross the sky from cinder star to star,
coupling the ends of streets
to trains of light.
now draw us into daylight in our beds;
and clear away what presses on the brain:
put out the neon shapes
that float and swell and glare
down the gray avenue between the eyes
in pinks and yellows, letters and twitching signs.
Hang-over moons, wane, wane!
From the window I see
an immense city, carefully revealed,
made delicate by over-workmanship,
detail upon detail,
cornice upon facade,
reaching up so languidly up into
a weak white sky, it seems to waver there.
(Where it has slowly grown
in skies of water-glass
from fused beads of iron and copper crystals,
the little chemical "garden" in a jar
trembles and stands again,
pale blue, blue-green, and brick.)
The sparrows hurriedly begin their play.
Then, in the West, "Boom!" and a cloud of smoke.
"Boom!" and the exploding ball
of blossom blooms again.
(And all the employees who work in a plants
where such a sound says "Danger," or once said "Death,"
turn in their sleep and feel
the short hairs bristling
on backs of necks.) The cloud of smoke moves off.
A shirt is taken off a threadlike clothes-line.
Along the street below
the water-wagon comes
throwing its hissing, snowy fan across
peelings and newspapers. The water dries
light-dry, dark-wet, the pattern
of the cool watermelon.
I hear the day-springs of the morning strike
from stony walls and halls and iron beds,
scattered or grouped cascades,
alarms for the expected:
queer cupids of all persons getting up,
whose evening meal they will prepare all day,
you will dine well
on his heart, on his, and his,
so send them about your business affectionately,
dragging in the streets their unique loves.
Scourge them with roses only,
be light as helium,
for always to one, or several, morning comes
whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed,
whose face is turned
so that the image of
the city grows down into his open eyes
inverted and distorted. No. I mean
distorted and revealed,
if he sees it at all.
Elizabeth Bishop
