H.L. Hix | February 2017

NOTES

Ambiguity can sometimes make things murky. “Her recommendation letter was ambiguous,” I might grouse. “I couldn’t tell whether she was praising him or sending us a warning signal.” But ambiguity includes “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language,”¹ and sometimes presenting alternatives makes things clearer, not murkier. In literary writing in all genres, that giving room for alternative reactions can clarify instead of blurring; it can make things more specific, not less. The ambiguities in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry perform that clarifying, specifying function well, and in this exploration I will draw attention to five of her poems (“The Bight,” “Filling Station,” “The Fish,” “First Death in Nova Scotia,” and “One Art”), adding one type of ambiguity with each poem (lexical ambiguity, syntactical ambiguity, temporal ambiguity, perspectival ambiguity, and tonal ambiguity), to observe ambiguity at work making things clearer and more specific.

Before introducing the first poem and with it the first form of ambiguity, though, let me say why I think this matters. Customarily, we think of our world as a world of things. Asked “What is this world made of?,” a person might respond by listing things. “Look around you,” she might suggest. “Our world is made of chairs and coffee mugs and windows and shirts and trees and people and such.” This commonsense view is sanctioned by the grammar of the English language, which stocks our sentences with things: subjects and objects. The horse galloped across the field, we might say. The things there, the horse and the field, are the “substantives.” We say that “galloped” gives information about the horse, but it would sound awkward and odd to say that the horse gives information about “galloped.” The horse and the field are the realities. Even that word, “realities,” embodies the commonsense notion: “reality” comes from the Latin word res, meaning thing. What is real has thingness; it is real because it is a thing.

But what if the commonsense view (that the world is made of things) is misleading? We easily recognize it as misleading in certain contexts. If I’m trying to account for the earth’s apparent stability, I’ll soon err if I can appeal only to things. Atlas is holding up the world, I might postulate. And what about Atlas? Ummm, he’s standing on top of… a turtle. And the turtle? You get the problem. For a satisfying account, what we need is not a thing but a force: gravity. We need, that is to say, a relationship. “Gravity” does not name a thing that occupies the space between the earth and the sun: it names a relationship that holds between the earth and the sun. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein gave a succinct characterization of the matter: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”²

If the world were made, first and foremost, of things, then in our language uses (our poems, our stories, our essays) we would want always to disambiguate. We’d want to analyze, to take things apart so we could see each thing on its own, separated from the rest, taken out of its relationships. So we would want our words to pick out one thing at a time, and ambiguity would impede and corrupt our analysis. If, however, our world consists not so much of things as of relationships, then we want ambiguity. We need it. Only ambiguity, itself a relationship between meanings, could hope to signify relationship in a manner adequate to its purpose. We can’t say what holds between things if we’re too exclusively intent on separating things. What we’re after is, ultimately, not analysis but synthesis: not taking things apart but putting them together. We don’t want to eliminate ambiguity, we want to get good at it. And Elizabeth Bishop is very good. My ambition in this essay is simply to watch her work, on the premise that her ambiguities are a form of truth-telling, a very rich and very apt means toward better understanding ourselves and our world. The various forms of ambiguity in Elizabeth Bishop’s work matter, because they enable her poetry to reveal—to clarify—a truth about Being (about the world and human experience in the world) that the very grammar of our language works actively and continually to distort and conceal.

Lexical Ambiguity

The first form of ambiguity I’d like to note is lexical ambiguity. By lexical ambiguity I just mean double entendre, using a word (or words) in a way that enables it (or them) to sustain more than one meaning. One interesting example of this kind of ambiguity occurs near the end of Bishop’s poem “The Bight,”³ with her use of the word “correspondences.” A bight is a curve or recess in a coastline, something like a bay but not quite so enclosed. Bishop’s poem presents itself as little more than a quiet (if quirky) description of the bight at a particular moment, identified by its being at low tide. The speaker simply observes the bight with all her senses. She sees the colors of “the little white boats” and the “[b]lack-and-white man-of-war birds” and the “[w]hite, crumbling ribs of marl”; she hears the “little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock” as it noisily “plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves”; she smells the water “turning to gas,” as if to match its visual resemblance to “the gas flame turned as low as possible”; by identification with the birds, she feels the crash of diving “unnecessarily hard” into the water, and (despite her declaring them “impalpable”) the drafts of rising air above it; and indirectly, by extension from “the blue-gray shark tails” that “are hung up to dry” on the “fence of chicken wire along the dock,” she tastes the shark-tail soup in a Chinese restaurant. But the very first line of the poem alerts us not to think that the water’s surface exhausts the bight. “At low tide like this” we can see into the water, under its surface, because it is so sheer, and of course at low tide we can see a great deal that at high tide is submerged. An astute, attentive reader will recognize that if there is much going on beneath the surface of the water, there may be much going on beneath the surface of the poem, too.

Lexical ambiguity creates some of that sub-surface activity. When the poem declares that “the bight is littered with old correspondences,” the word “correspondences” can be taken in at least two ways. Bishop has just introduced the metaphor of letters: the previous line describes the piled-up, unsalvaged white boats as resembling “torn-open, unanswered letters,” so the most obvious meaning of “correspondences” is letters with various people. (As in, “For years I have maintained regular correspondences with two old friends from school.”) The bight at low tide, strewn with all those white boats on their sides, resembles, Bishop suggests, a desktop strewn with letters.

But “correspondences” are also ways in which things resemble or reflect one another. (As in “There are many correspondences between poetry and film.”) Both those meanings of the word are “live” in the poem. And the double entendre is not just a gimmick, a way for Bishop to flaunt her verbal dexterity. It inflects the rest of the poem: the fact that this word has two meanings entails that the whole poem does, also. This instance of lexical ambiguity, in other words, draws out two “layers” of the poem. In one layer, the unsalvaged, stove-in boats alone are the correspondences: they litter the bight as unanswered letters litter a desktop. We could specify this meaning by rewriting Bishop’s sentence to read, “Some of the little white boats are still piled up… like torn-open, unanswered letters. / The bight is littered with these old correspondences.” On this reading, we are told what the correspondences are. In another layer, though, the boats are representative correspondences. Not only are they themselves correspondences; they also suggest the presence of additional correspondences. We could specify this meaning by rewriting Bishop’s sentence to read, “Some of the little white boats are still piled up… like torn-open, unanswered letters. / The bight is littered with old correspondences like these.” On this reading, we are told that the correspondences are numerous, but not told what they are. We must discern for ourselves what items participate in correspondences, and what they correspond with or correspond to. The poem is both closed (in the sense that it tells us what to think) and open (in the sense that it leaves us to decide for ourselves what to think).

Although I have focused on the lexical ambiguity in “correspondences,” I’d like briefly to mention that I think there is additional lexical ambiguity at work in this poem, as for example the pun in that same line. “The bight is littered with old correspondences” sounds very like “The bight is literate with old correspondences.” That light-handed homophonic resonance adds to the poem’s presentation of the bight as a place full of information and story, to be read. Or, again, notice that in the last line the words “awful” and “cheerful” have a very subtle duplicity to them. They seem to impute qualities to the activity itself: the activity is awful, and the activity is also cheerful. Since the poem has been talking about things, not about people, it is natural to extend the awe and cheer to those things. What is the awful and cheerful activity filling with awe and cheer? The dredge that is performing the activity. But the states that correspond to those qualities, awe and cheer, are human states. Humans experience awe and cheer, but dredges and sponge boats do not. So the more plausible extension is to the nearest human. Who is the awful and cheerful activity filling with awe and cheer? The speaker. This ambiguity, the dissonance between the more natural extension and the more plausible one (or, to put it differently, the location of the awe and cheer in the dredge and in me), establishes a relationship between the human observer and the things observed. It litters the poem with correspondences.

Syntactical Ambiguity

Bishop creates ambiguities with her words, then, but she does so with her sentences as well. A beautiful example of her use of syntactical ambiguity occurs in her poem “Filling Station.”⁴ The poem gives a bemused description of a very dirty filling station, so “oil-soaked, oil-permeated” that it elicits from the speaker the warning, “Be careful with that match!” The family members who staff the station all are dirty, the wickerwork furniture on the station’s porch is dirty, the doily atop the wicker taboret is dirty, the potted plant beside it is dirty. Yet, the speaker marvels, that all-pervading oiliness notwithstanding, somebody embroidered the doily, somebody waters the plant, and somebody “arranges the rows of cans / so that they softly say: / esso—so—so—so / to high-strung automobiles.” The last line, with its summation of the speaker’s surprise, contains the syntactical ambiguity I want to highlight. “Somebody loves us all” might mean that each of us has at least one somebody who loves us, though the somebody who loves me will not be the same somebody as the somebody who loves you; or instead it might mean that there is one somebody, the same somebody for everyone, who loves each of us. Those two meanings are very different. The first is a social and existential reassurance; the second, a spiritual and metaphysical reassurance. As with the lexical ambiguity in “The Bight,” the two meanings created by the syntactical ambiguity here also cast themselves back over the poem very differently, giving the whole poem a double meaning. The first meaning, that each of us is loved by our own somebody, takes the filling station as evidence that we humans can and do offer one another consolation no matter how otherwise uncaring and unkempt our circumstances. I may be poor and shabby, but somebody loves me nevertheless, and in this regard the life of the wealthy and tidy is no whit superior to my messier and less opulent life. You may drive a more high-strung automobile than I do, but so what? I’ve got just as much love as you. The second meaning, that we are all of us loved by the same somebody, makes the filling station into an instance (a humble instance, but an instance nonetheless) of that formidable theological bastion, the argument from design, which contends that the whole world and everything in it, we ourselves included, has its origin and fulfillment in, and is suffused with, care.

Because of the ambiguity, “Filling Station” is able to portray as complementary, or perhaps even equivalent, two forms of understanding and hope that typically are construed as diametrically opposed to one another. The poem embodies as equal possibilities and equal presences two very different integrities, just as the Nekker cube and the duck-rabbit do:

Is the right-hand square the closer face of the cube? Yes. Is it the farther? Yes. Is the figure a duck? Yes. Is it a rabbit? Yes. Both aspects, both integrities, remain “live.” In “Filling Station,” reading the ambiguous last sentence in one way foregrounds in the whole poem one presence; reading it the other way foregrounds the other. In the first reading, in which there are as many somebodies who love us as there are us who are loved, our human love is the consolation we can—and do—give one another in the face of the world’s entropy and ugliness. All is “quite thoroughly dirty.” Against this ultimate dirtiness, we ourselves can, and others in fact do, embroider doilies, water plants, and arrange rows of cans into symmetrical order. Love is a form of resistance to, or mitigation of, or compensation for, the world’s “disturbing, over-all / black translucency.”

In the second reading, in which there is one somebody (it has to be Somebody with a capital S) who does the loving, the same somebody in every case, the situation is reversed. The embroidering and watering and arranging are not done against the ultimate dirtiness; they are ultimate. The dirtiness is the mere appearance, and they are the reality underneath that appearance. Love does not contest a disorder that is ultimate; it manifests an order that is ultimate. Love is not something we do for one another to contest the world, but instead is what the world itself does for us. We are used to thinking of these as mutually exclusive possibilities: if we must console ourselves for the dirty world’s indifference, then the world can’t care for us and arrange things on our behalf. Yet in the poem both of those worldviews are equally present, just as the duck and the rabbit are equally present in the one figure.

Although I am attending primarily to one form of ambiguity in each example poem, my doing so does not entail that Bishop limits herself to one form of ambiguity per poem. “Filling Station” offers an especially vivid instance of syntactical ambiguity, to be sure, but it also employs lexical ambiguity, as for instance with the word “certain,” which suggests simultaneously that the color itself is certain, and that I am certain of the color, an ambiguity which, as with the others being noted here, highlights relationship over things.

Temporal Ambiguity

Yet a third kind of ambiguity in Bishop’s poetry, temporal ambiguity, is an important element of “The Fish.”⁵ One of Bishop’s most widely anthologized poems, “The Fish” narrates the speaker’s having “caught a tremendous fish.” She “held him beside the boat / half out of water,” and considered him, surprised that he “hadn’t fought at all” and respectful toward his being so “battered and venerable / and homely.” She looked him up and down, remarking on his skin that resembled “ancient wallpaper,” on his “frightening gills, / fresh and crisp with blood,” on his shallow, yellowed eyes, their “irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil / seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass,” and so on. She “stared and stared” until “victory filled up / the little rented boat,” but in the end, she reports, “I let the fish go.”

Everything in the poem happens in past tense: I caught a fish, I held him up, I looked at him, and so on. Notice, though, that the verb in the last line, let, is conjugated differently from the others in the poem. “Caught,” for example, is only the past tense of “catch,” not also the present tense; or, again, “held” is only the past tense of “hold,” not also the present tense; and so on. “Let,” though, is not only the past tense of “let,” as in “She was running late, so yesterday at lunch I let Susie cut in line.” As that past tense form, “let” describes a one-time event. But “let” is also the perpetual present tense, as in “My little brother is ten years younger than me, so whenever we play ping-pong, I let him win.” As this perpetual present tense form, “let” describes a recurring or continuing event. Context typically chooses one tense for us. If I say, “I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I might mean I did it once, or I might mean I do it always. Context chooses. If I say, “We had a fight yesterday before he left for work, so when he got home I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I mean to describe a one-time event that occurred in the past and has been completed. If I say, “His parole officer says it’s best not to upset him, so I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I mean to describe a recurring event, still going on, not yet complete. In Bishop’s poem, though, the context does not enforce a choice between the two readings, but allows either: at the past moment I have been describing, I allowed the fish to go, or as an ongoing condition I continue to allow the fish to go.

The result of this ambiguity is that I simultaneously occupy two different relationships to the release of the fish: I did it once, on that day I am recalling from the past, and I am always releasing the fish. The event happened once, and the event is always happening. It was with me then, and it is with me always. To make the point again about why all of this matters: if “let” were not ambiguous, if it were only the past tense form, it would refer to an event and a thing, the release of the fish. Because it is ambiguous, because it is also the perpetual present tense form, it designates also a relationship between the self I was at a moment in the past and the self I am now.

To confirm the recognition that Bishop does not restrict herself to one form of ambiguity per poem, notice that the temporal ambiguity of the line is complemented by syntactical ambiguity. “I let the fish go” can mean “I let go of the fish” or “I allowed the fish to go.” In one case I perform the action, and in the other I authorize the action. In one the fish got his way, in the other I got my way. Thus is the relationship between myself and the fish made more nuanced. Notice also the lexical ambiguity of the key adjectives, “a tremendous fish” and “the terrible oxygen.” Both have double-edged connotations, and the poem keeps the contrasting combinations in play. “Tremendous” comes from the Latin tremere, meaning “to tremble,” and can have very positive connotations in English (as in “I got tremendous critique on my story last module”), or very negative (as in “a tremendous earthquake in Peru has caused deadly landslides”). “Terrible” comes from the Latin terrere, meaning “to frighten,” and can mean actually causing harm (as in “the earthquake was a terrible disaster”) or only threatening to cause harm (as in “the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws”).

Perspectival Ambiguity

Another type of ambiguity at which Bishop excels is perspectival ambiguity, by which I mean the simultaneous presence of more than one point of view. A perfect example occurs in “First Death in Nova Scotia.”⁶ Does the poem offer the point of view of the child experiencing the funeral, limited to her child’s understanding, or the point of view of the adult looking back with an adult’s understanding on the child’s experience? It seems to me the poem offers both at once.

In “First Death in Nova Scotia,” an adult speaker recalls an event from her childhood, the funeral of her infant cousin Arthur. In describing the setting, the speaker emphasizes the pervasive coldness: the funeral takes place in “the cold, cold parlor” of Arthur’s family home in Nova Scotia; near Arthur stands a stuffed loon, keeping “his own counsel / on his white, frozen lake, / the marble-topped table”; and outside, the roads are “deep in snow.” Little Arthur is even described as like a doll belonging to, but neglected by, Jack Frost, who “had started to paint him” but then “had dropped the brush / and left him white.”

Perspectival ambiguity—a doubled point of view—is very important to the working of the poem. On the one hand, the descriptions all are calculated to place us in the child’s head, so that we look out on this domestic interior through the child’s eyes. As the reader, I see the stuffed loon as the child sees it, and from the position of the child. I experience being lifted up, so that I see the coffin from below at first, and then from above after I have been lifted up. And so on. Yet at the same time I see the whole space and the whole experience from the point of view of the adult narrator, looking onto the scene through her eyes. I look at the child being lifted up, I look at the child looking at the coffin, and so on. Duck and rabbit both are present in one figure, and similarly the child’s point of view and the adult’s point of view both are present in this poem.

As with the other forms of ambiguity, so too with perspectival ambiguity: it matters. Perspectival ambiguity is a condition for morality. If I cannot imagine myself in the way Bishop imagines herself in this poem, as both an interested agent and an impartial spectator, then I cannot assess the moral worth of a decision or action. Neither perspective by itself is enough. If I can see myself only as an agent, then I can only act out of greed. If I can see myself only as a spectator, I cannot act at all. Only the dynamic tension of both perspectives together—the relationship between my agent and spectator selves—enables me to think and act morally.

The particular perspectival ambiguity in this poem, the simultaneous presence of a child’s point of view and an adult’s point of view, may resonate especially strongly for readers steeped from childhood, as Bishop herself was, in the language of Christianity. It might call to mind, for instance, these words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them. And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (18:1-4). Or, again, these words of Paul, “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known” (I Cor. 13:9–12). Whatever credence one does or does not accord those texts from that particular religious tradition, and whatever interpretation one puts upon them, they at least involve some form of interaction, some dynamic tension, between the perspective of a child and the perspective of an adult, and they seem to advise at the very least some form of attention to both perspectives. As does the conclusion of another of Bishop’s poems, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” which seeks a similar adult/child perspectival ambiguity. In that poem, the speaker, reflecting on a grave presented to her by her tourist guide as having been the tomb of Christ, wishes she could have been shown also the birthplace of Christ. “Why couldn’t we have seen / this old Nativity while we were at it? /—the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,”… “and, lulled within, a family with pets, /—and looked and looked our infant sight away.”

This doubling of perspective, child and adult at once, can be an aim in other genres, too, not only in poetry. For example, the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, is a type of narrative the point of which is to make present both the point of view of the child and that of the adult. The perspectival ambiguity in “First Death in Nova Scotia” achieves this very compactly, realizing both the point of view of the child and the point of view of an adult. In the combination of the two—in their relationship—resides one essential of humanity.

Tonal Ambiguity

“One Art,”⁷ arguably Bishop’s most widely read poem, compactly and perfectly illustrates all the forms of ambiguity I have enumerated. In it, the speaker declares that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” a proposition she expands on by enumerating things one might lose, from door keys to places and names and intentions, and by then enumerating things that she herself has lost: “my mother’s watch,” “my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses,” “two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.” The list of losses, possible and actual, culminates in “you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love).”

Lexical ambiguity is at work in the word “master,” which can mean “get good at” or “overcome.” This gives two very different readings to the first line and its variants. “The art of losing isn’t hard to get good at” establishes one aim, but “the art of losing isn’t hard to overcome” establishes an opposite aim. In the former reading, I am trying to do more and better losing; in the latter, I am trying to stop losing. Syntactical ambiguity occurs in the penultimate line, itself one of those variants of the first line. The line might be read to mean, “the art of losing is not so difficult that it cannot be overcome,” or “it is not difficult to get good at the art of losing.” In the one case, what is not too hard is the art of losing, and in the other what is not too hard is the mastering of it. As with the lexical ambiguity, this syntactical ambiguity creates two very different readings.

Temporal ambiguity, too, is present in the last stanza. Has the losing of you already occurred, or is it inevitably going to occur? I lost my mother’s watch, and I lost two cities, so the first reading of “Even losing you” would be that it has happened already, in the past. But then the next verb tense is in the future: “I shan’t have lied…” That makes “Even losing you” read as “Even when I have lost you” (i.e., even in the future when I lose you), I will not have lied. As in the last line of “The Fish,” this temporal ambiguity establishes a relationship between a self I was and a self I am or might be. Finally, there is perspectival ambiguity in the use of the second person: in the third stanza, the “you” in “where it was you meant / to travel” seems to be the reader. But in the last stanza, the “you” in “Even losing you” is the beloved. So, as in “First Death in Nova Scotia,” I the reader am given both points of view, that of the beloved and that of the neutral bystander.

The additional form of ambiguity I’d like to note in “One Art,” tonal ambiguity, arises from the poem’s use of a form of understatement particular enough that I think it deserves its own name, so I’ll call it “parastatement.” Even though I have never seen it identified before in quite this way, it is very familiar. We all of us have encountered instances of it, and know what to do with it. It is familiar from literary classics such as Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, the octave of which reads,

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

This string of insults to the beloved constitutes a listing of ways in which she fails to live up to the standards of feminine beauty prevalent at the time and place of the poem: her eyes are dim, rather than bright; her lips are not red; her breasts are not white; her hair is like wires; her cheeks are not rosy; and she has bad breath. But we know that this is a form of praise whether or not we ourselves embrace those standards of beauty, and we know it even before the “And yet” that signals the speaker’s making the praise explicit by declaring, “I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.”

It is not only highfalutin literary masterpieces, though, that use parastatement. Shakespeare’s poem merely inverts the familiar rhetorical device we call “faint praise.” I’ll know what she means if I ask a friend what she thinks of my latest poetry book and she says, “The cover is really beautifully designed.” She will have communicated quite clearly something she didn’t say. Or, for a different kind of example, here’s parastatement at work in a country song, Lucinda Williams’ “Jackson”: “All the way to Jackson / I don’t think I’ll miss you much”; “Once I get to Baton Rouge / I won’t cry a tear for you”; and so on. We know the speaker in Lucinda Williams’s song means something other than what she says. She is going to miss her ex all the way to Jackson; she is going to cry a tear for that ex when she gets to Baton Rouge; and so on. Similarly, we know in “One Art” that all the losses the speaker repeatedly insists are not disasters really are disasters, especially the “losing you” that the speaker introduces, with true parastatement, as “even losing you.”

Parastatement is understatement in the form of protesting too much: declaring something known not to be true, in order to persuade oneself it is true. It is a form of ambiguity because it presents two aspects at once: the explicit statement and its tacit negation, which is the real affirmation. I call it tonal ambiguity because each aspect carries with it a tone: the Shakespeare sonnet has a tone of dismissal and a tone of admiration; the Lucinda Williams song has a tone of resolve and a tone of despair; and “One Art” has a tone of flippant lack of concern and a tone of inconsolable grief.

Parastatement plays on a first-order / second-order distinction, of the sort Lynne McFall makes in distinguishing second-order from first-order volitions. A second-order volition, she says, “is a complex desire: a second-order desire to have a certain first-order desire be one’s will: to be the desire that moves one to action.” McFall illustrates the distinction with smoking: “I want to want not to smoke, and I want this desire, rather than the desire to smoke, to be the one that is effective.”⁸ The dissonance between the first- and second-order desires enables me to make one desire present by stating the other. To state the second-order desire—“I wish I didn’t want a cigarette right now”—is to express forcefully, but without actually stating it, the first-order desire: I want a cigarette right now. That same dissonance is at work in “One Art.” The second-order desire, I wish I wouldn’t get upset over losing things I love, is the one that gets stated, but the first-order desire, I wish I hadn’t lost so many things I love, is forcefully expressed without being stated. More forcefully expressed, in fact, because it is not stated.

Parastatement is particularly useful as a strategy for circumventing censorship. It is a way of saying the unsayable. Elizabeth Bishop, with her privileged economic background and powerful connections, may seem an unlikely victim of censorship, but some information about her personal life bears on this poem. The “I” and the “you” in the poem are very open, and we as readers may fill in the poem’s “you” with whom we will. “One Art” reads beautifully and effectively if I know nothing about Elizabeth Bishop, and read myself as the “I” and my long-lost one true love as the “you,” regardless of my gender or that of my beloved. But Bishop lived during a time when the social pressure directed against homosexuality was so active and pervasive that her loves could not be named in her poems, nor her love affairs described explicitly. At least two of those loves, though, seem clearly to be among the losses lamented in “One Art.” Bishop lived in Brazil for more than a decade with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares; in 1967 Soares committed suicide by overdosing on tranquilizers. They lived in Petrópolis, at the convergence of the Quitandinha and Piabanha rivers. Even if Lota cannot be named in the poem, “two rivers” and “a continent” make her present in it. And the “you” addressed in the last stanza is apparently Alice Methfessel, a much younger woman whom Bishop met when she returned to Boston after her years in Brazil. Though at the time of Bishop’s death they were reunited, and were living together, “One Art” was written during a period when Methfessel was engaged, apparently soon to be lost to Bishop. Societally imposed sanction forbade Bishop direct expression of grief over her same-sex beloveds, so Bishop chose a way to express that grief without stating it.

As a conclusion, let me note one last ambiguity, in this case lexical. The exclamation “Write it!” of course has a homophone, “Right it!” And we write disasters only when and because we cannot right them. It seems plausible to extend to some others of Bishop’s poems what might be said of “One Art,” and to many others’ poems what might be said of Bishop’s: that those disasters she could not right, she wrote.                                    

H.L. Hix’s most recent poetry collection is American Anger (Etruscan Press, 2016). He lives in the mountain west with his partner, the poet Kate Northrop, and writes in a studio that was once a barn. His website is www.hlhix.com. 

Notes

1. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2^nd ed. (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 1.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), § 1.1.
3. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983), pp. 60–61.
4. Bishop, pp. 127–28.
5. Bishop, pp. 42–44.
6. Bishop, pp. 125–26.
7. Bishop, p. 178.
8. Lynne McFall, Happiness (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), p. 37.