Afloat #1, by Monica Angle

Elizabeth Bishop’s best friend, Robert Lowell, died of a heart attack in September 1977, at the age of sixty. For Bishop, it was a terrible blow. She had met Lowell thirty years earlier and had taken to him immediately. Over the years, while rarely living in the same place, they visited one another and kept close by writing letters—carrying on one of the great correspondences of the twentieth century. They had much in common: both only children; both prone to problems with alcohol and depression; both with complicated, often tragic, love lives; and both consumed by an incandescent love for poetry.

Although Bishop was not particularly attracted to men, their friendship always had a romantic tinge. As she recalled their first meeting, “I loved him at first sight.” He was very handsome, she said, “in an almost old-fashioned poetic way,” and she used to joke that although she would never marry him, she would like to have his child. Lowell, on at least two occasions, became convinced that he was in love with her. The first time was in 1948, when Bishop vacationed with him and his lover, Carly Dawson, in Stonington, Maine. During the trip, Lowell began experiencing severe symptoms of his bipolar disorder, broke up with Dawson, and decided that he would marry Bishop. Ten years later, when Bishop and her lover, Lota de Maceo Soares, visited Lowell in Maine, he again became manic and fixated on her, causing her to cut short the trip. He then wrote a long, beautiful letter of apology in which he reminisced about the 1948 visit, when he had almost asked her to marry him. He said that marrying her was “the might-have-been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.”

Bishop and Lowell supported and aided one another for decades. Although Lowell was six years younger, he was always the more famous poet. When they met, he had already won a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Library of Congress consultancy; and he had been featured in Life magazine, prompting a call from Hollywood to inquire whether the handsome young author was interested in acting. Lowell used his fame and connections to help Bishop win prizes and fellowships, which allowed her for many years to write without having to teach; and when she did start teaching, he arranged for her to fill in for him at Harvard. Lowell was always generous; when he sold his letters to Harvard, he gave Bishop some of the proceeds in recognition of her importance as a correspondent.

Bishop, who lived a far more isolated life, particularly during her Brazil years, depended on Lowell for intellectual—as well as emotional—company; he was the peer she most respected. She wrote to him, “I think of you every day of my life, I’m sure,” and told him, “Please never stop writing me letters. They always manage to make me feel like my higher self.” Bishop trusted Lowell’s taste, and he served as her ideal reader, spurring her to greatness. As she noted, “I suppose I still occasionally think that to myself when I know a poem is going bad, or re-reading it I spot lines that shouldn’t be there: ‘Shut up—remember the kid,’ he’d never let anything that weak get by him.”

Lowell, unlike Bishop, surrounded himself with writers. He married three of them: Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood. He was close friends with many more, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, and Seamus Heaney. But of all these friends, Bishop was the one who most influenced his writing. In fact, he achieved his signature style partly by imitating her. His great breakthrough happened in 1957, immediately after Bishop’s visit to Maine and his manic infatuation with her. He was reading and re-reading “The Armadillo,” which she had dedicated to him, and it helped him to write “Skunk Hour,” which he in turn dedicated to her. He had become disgusted with his earlier style, which now struck him as “distant, symbol-ridden, and willfully difficult.” Re-reading Bishop, he could not understand why his poetry was so “armored heavy and oldfashioned,” and imitating her helped him tear down his fortifications.

Bishop loved “Skunk Hour.” In 1963, she wrote him to say, “It’s still a wonderful poem, Cal. I feel happy all over again every time I read the astounding fact that it’s dedicated to me.” She disagreed with his claim that “The Armadillo” was better, saying “I am not being modest—how I wish I were! ‘The Armadillo’ is all right . . . but not that good, by a long shot. It’s only one fathom deep and ‘Skunk Hour’ is five.” In her unpublished reminiscences of Lowell she wrote, “Skunk Hour is one of the great sources of pride in my life.”

Bishop remained proud of Lowell and their friendship all her life. But upon his death in 1977, she felt a complex set of regrets. The last few years of the friendship were in many ways the most difficult. Filling in for Lowell at Harvard put her in an awkward position of being compared to him constantly, and generally not to her benefit (while he was a star professor, some considered her a minor-league eccentric). She also worried that Lowell would return and retake his position. When he came back in spring 1977, she kept her job, but tensions remained. According to her friend and student Jonathan Galassi, “She said that you couldn’t talk to him in the last years, that he became a monologue.” Moreover, she felt that she had not been adequately appreciated when compared with male peers like him.

Bishop also had mixed feelings about Lowell as a poet. Her own career had been one of consistent excellence and steadily growing strength. Her last collection, Geography III, published in 1976, was her finest. Lowell, in contrast, had peaked with Life Studies in 1958. Bishop was not enthusiastic about his recent work, and she disapproved of the way that he used the lives of family and friends as grist for his mill—especially the way he mixed exact, altered, and fabricated quotations from his ex-wife’s letters into his poems. 

Sadly, Bishop’s last letter to Lowell, in August 1977, was written to ask him not to come from Castine to visit her at North Haven—possibly because she had been sick, as she says in the letter, and possibly because he would have been coming with the writer Mary McCarthy, whom Bishop, for various reasons, did not want to see. She closes the letter, “Well, I’ll see you in Cambridge or New York . . .  and maybe in North Haven next summer if I can get back here again.” She did not see him or write to him again—until, a year after his death, back at North Haven, she wrote him an elegy.

Afloat #2, by Monica Angle

“North Haven” does not seem at first like a poem about Lowell. Except for the dedication, he does not appear until the fifth stanza of this six-stanza poem. If he had been doing the titling, he—author of poems such as “Delmore Schwartz,” “Robert Frost,” and “For Elizabeth Bishop”—might have called it “Robert Lowell.” But Bishop titles it after a place, not a person. This will be her kind of poem, the title announces, not his. (As she once said about Lowell, he was not interested in things and places—only people and books). What is more, she titles it after her place—not “Castine” or “Stonington,” where he summered, but “North Haven,” where she was staying with her lover, Alice Methfessel. Late in the poem, we learn that Lowell had spent time on North Haven as a youth, but, nonetheless, Bishop’s choice signifies that the poem is partly about her (not coincidentally, its first word is “I”). Yet, at the same time, she may be paying homage to “Skunk Hour,” which, like “North Haven,” starts as poem about an island in Maine only to end as a poem about Robert Lowell. Moreover, her technique ensures that Lowell’s delayed entrance, when it occurs, is all the more powerful.

The poem’s first four stanzas describe a landscape—ship, tree, water, sky, cloud, flowers, and birds—and Bishop’s vision of it. The opening lines convey the air’s clarity but also the poet’s sharp eyesight—as if boasting, “my eyes are so good I can count the new cones on that spruce.” Bishop was famous for her perception and her ability to evoke the visual world through words. Lowell often complimented her vision, as when he wrote to her, “No eye in the world has seen what yours has,” and, in another letter, “I spoke of your enormous powers of realistic observation and of something seldom found with observation, luminism (meaning radiance and compression etc).”  

In the third stanza, Bishop again highlights her vision—this time by describing seven different kinds of flowers, which have returned, she says, to “paint the meadows with delight,” quoting from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Lost. Interestingly, the key motif in that play is vision (the word “eye” occurs more than fifty times). The leading male, Berowne, has the revelation that scholarly study is nothing compared to the illumination found in a beloved woman’s eyes: “For where is there any author in the world/Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye.” Female vision offers more insight than men’s academic affectation. Women’s eyes sparkle with the “right Promethean fire,” and they are the “books, the arts, the academes,/That show, contain, and nourish all the world.” When Berowne vows to forswear “three-piled hyperboles,” “figures pedantical,” and “maggot ostentation,” one thinks of Lowell writing “Skunk Hour”—forswearing his high, pedantic style for something more Bishop-like, humble, observant—what Berowne calls “honest plain words” that “best pierce the ear of grief.”

There was nothing Lowell envied more than Bishop’s verisimilitude. Early on, in his second letter to her, praising “The Fish,” he wrote, “Anyway I felt very envious in reading it—I’m a fisherman myself, but all my fish turn into symbols, alas!” Part of Bishop’s secret is that her fish turn into symbols, too, but never prematurely. She evokes the natural world with great precision and yet freights each physical detail with metaphysical meaning. No one would read “The Fish” if it were just about catching an old, ugly fish that did not fight back. After Bishop makes sure we see and feel the fish’s presence in a way so physical it is almost alarming, she releases us into a symbolically charged space where everything is “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” (as if refashioning God’s covenant with Noah).

In “North Haven” Bishop endows every detail with symbolic meaning, starting with the seemingly plain title, which plays on the difference between “haven” and “heaven.” Lowell is not to be found in heaven (Bishop is an atheist) but in North Haven—her place, her poem. “Haven” means a harbor, a place of safety or asylum, or a place offering favorable opportunities. Lowell is safe now; after a life filled with suffering and commitments to asylums, he has found a final asylum. His death is tragic, but it—along with her summer in North Haven—offers Bishop favorable opportunities for writing a poem about him. Bishop is a master of having it both ways. She is a skeptical, Darwinian, materialist thinker who does not believe in miracles. The islands cannot shift; North Haven is “anchored in its rock.” And yet, North Haven is also heavenly (“afloat in mystic blue”), and she likes to pretend that the islands do drift, in a “dreamy sort of way.” 

The listing of flowers is both naturalistic and literary. In addition to quoting Shakespeare, Bishop echoes a long tradition of funerary laments that heap flowers upon the beloved—including the most famous elegy for a poet, John Milton’s “Lycidas.” By choosing “eyebright” as one of the flowers, she reinforces the theme of her bright vision. The birds, too, are more than birds. Bishop chooses ordinary, “unpoetic” birds—goldfinches and sparrows. She starts as the observant naturalist, specifying that the sparrow’s song has five notes, but then she introduces a note of literary pathos: the birdsong, “pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.” Something unusual is happening here: sparrows are not known for making people cry. Perhaps the sparrow is pleading for companionship—like the bird in another great ocean-side poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” in which Walt Whitman listens to a mockingbird pleading for its lost mate. Perhaps the sparrow reminds Bishop of herself, pining for her lost friend.

Bishop says: “Nature repeats herself, or almost does:/repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.” At first, one might think that she is rendering the sparrow’s song with her italicized line, as Whitman does the mockingbird’s song. But her line is not a “five-note” song; it has six words and only two notes: “repeat” and “revise.” This distinction makes us suspect that she is thinking less of birds than of poets. The word “revise” is a way to smuggle Lowell—a famous and endless reviser of his work—into the poem before describing him, and a way to reinforce the theme of Bishop’s eyesight, as to revise is to “look over again” (it shares the root vis with “vision”).

Afloat #3, by Monica Angle

Surprisingly, Bishop does not explicitly praise her subject—in contrast to Lowell, who in “Elizabeth Bishop 4” calls her the “unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect.” All she relates about him is that he discovered girls, learned to sail, and learned to kiss at North Haven; that fun always seemed to leave him at a loss; that he tended to derange, or rearrange, his poems; and that he was her “sad friend.” Why should Bishop emphasize Lowell as a teenage boy—chasing girls and kissing? Perhaps she is reflecting the fact that, especially in his manic phases, Lowell tended to pursue young women, to become “girl crazy.” Perhaps she is remembering that Maine is where Lowell twice became “girl crazy” about her and wanted to kiss her.

More importantly, though, the sailing, girls, and kissing lead Bishop to the fact that fun seemed to leave Lowell at a loss. She repeats the word “leave” three times, each time raising the intensity. First fun leaves Lowell at a loss, then he leaves the island, and then he leaves life. Similarly, she uses the word “loss” figuratively and seemingly casually in the last line of the fifth stanza to presage the loss of Lowell in the sixth. All the other last lines of the stanzas have twelve syllables. This one has only eleven, which, along with the ellipse that finishes the line, accentuates the sense of loss.

The seemingly slight word “fun” may seem odd in an elegy. But Bishop believes deeply in fun, and she regrets that Lowell did not have enough of it. Lowell could be witty, and he had a strong appetite for wine, women, and song; but he wanted to conquer the world, not to enjoy it. His nickname, Cal, came from two sources, Caligula and Caliban, and his personality had tyrannical and monstrous sides, as well as an abiding melancholy. “And how sad and serious we were,” writes Peter Taylor, recalling their high school days. While still in college, Lowell described himself as “modern and angry and puritanical.” In 1963, he wrote to Theodore Roethke about their generation of poets: “we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning.” 

Unlike earlier poets (such as the lawyer, Wallace Stevens; the doctor, William Carlos Williams; and the farmer, Robert Frost), Lowell and his peers rarely pursued careers outside of poetry, and they tended to treat their lives and writing as inseparable. As David Kalstone notes, Bishop found it disturbing that for Lowell “writing—never complete, always rearranged and rearrangeable—was by and large the only bearable way to experience life.” She also did not like the way that he—like T.S. Eliot, whom he so admired—tended to act world-weary, fatigued, and older than he was (while she was busy playing ping pong with Octavio Paz). As she wrote him,

Please, please don’t talk about old age so much, my dear old friend. You are giving me the creeps. The thing Lota admired so much about us North Americans was our determined youthfulness and energy, our “never-say-die” ness—and I think she was right!   . . .  Of course—it’s different for a writer, I know—of course I know!—nevertheless, in spite of aches & pains I really don’t feel much different than I did at 35—and I certainly am a great deal happier, most of the time . . .  I just won’t feel ancient—I wish Auden hadn’t gone on about it so his last years, and I hope you won’t.

The word “fun,” so ordinary and North American, indicates the kind of sane, worldly perspective that Bishop wished him to have. The word “classic,” introduced casually to modify “summer” is freighted with meaning as well. It calls to mind the ancient Greeks and Romans who fascinated Lowell and, even more importantly, it suggests his lifelong attempts to become a classic writer—an ambition that drained the fun out of his life.

Lowell was not funny, but he was, at times, mad. Which brings us to the harshest word in the poem: “derange.” To “derange” is to disturb, disarrange, or make insane. It is a remarkably negative word for an elegy about a great friend; and, inevitably, it recalls the fact that Lowell was deranged many times in his life. The poet William Merideth offers a moving description of what Lowell was like when he was mad: “Meanwhile he writes and revises translations furiously and with a kind [of] crooked brilliance, and talks about himself in connection with Achilles, Alexander, Hart Crane, Hitler and Christ, and breaks your heart.” Bishop had experienced his derangements firsthand on at least three occasions. She could empathize with him because she suffered breakdowns herself. After his disastrous visit to Brazil in 1962, when he had to be committed, she wrote to him, “I am just so glad you sound like yourself again—please forget everything except the good parts and [don’t] forget that I, too, have “spells” (very rarely, thank God). They are a lot like yours, on a modest scale, I think—in origin and results, even—But you have to do everything on the grand scale!”

In “North Haven,” Bishop accuses Lowell not of being deranged, but of deranging his poems. Perhaps she is referring to how he wrote openly about his derangements—something she never did. For all her admiration of Life Studies, she distrusted the confessional stream of poetry that Lowell inaugurated. As she wrote to him,

In general, I deplore the “confessional”—however, when you wrote Life Studies perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh, and immediate. But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & fathers & sex lives and so on. All that can be done—but at the same time one surely should have the feeling that one can trust the writer—not to distort, tell lies, etc.

Even worse, she felt that Lowell himself “distorted” his poems when he mixed fact and fiction: when he exploited his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick, or Bishop herself, by putting lines from their letters into poems, or putting words into their mouths.

Lowell also deranged his poems by endlessly re-arranging them. All his life, he could not re-read his old work without re-writing it. In his last decade he began writing fourteen-line, free verse “sonnets” compulsively—pouring into this form everything he wanted to say, and re-writing many of his old poems in the new format without poetic gain. He forced the words into a fixed shape, rather than listening to where they wanted to lead him. Lowell published his first round of sonnets in 1969 as Notebook 1967-1968. He revised them, added new ones, and published them as Notebook in 1970. He then revised most of them yet again and published them in History (1973), simultaneous with two other volumes of sonnets, The Dolphin (dedicated to his third wife, Caroline Blackwood) and For Lizzie and Harriet (addressed to the wife and child he was leaving for Blackwood). The mess he was making of his family life was hard to distinguish from the mess he was making of his poetry.

Lowell lacked Bishop’s skill at arranging a poem—her knack for knowing what to put in and what to leave out. Even “Skunk Hour,” with its tight, compressed, six-line stanzas, includes descriptions of island society that do not cohere. The fact that the hermit heiress has a son who’s a bishop seems fairly irrelevant, as does the demeaning description of the “fairy decorator.” For good reason, Lowell envied Bishop’s sense for how to make her poems feel finished; as he put it, “There’s a beautiful formal completeness to all of Elizabeth’s poetry.” 

Bishop returns to the sparrows, contrasting them to Lowell. The sparrows, she asserts, can still “derange,” or “rearrange” their song. This is odd because sparrows do not noticeably change their songs, much less derange them. Bishop knows this full well, and so the reader suspects that the sparrows are—in part—representing her, the living poet, who can still rearrange her poems. More broadly, the sparrows are nature and life. Lowell is dead, and his poems are now fixed forever as he wrote (or last revised) them, while nature and life continue to flow. “The words won’t change again,” she writes, making words the subject of the sentence, rather than the poet. This shift reflects the fact that the poet is dead, while the poems endure. But it also reflects Bishop’s more impersonal vision of poetry, in which the words are at the center, not the poet, and poetry consists of listening to the words and registering their changes rather than arranging or deranging them according to the poet’s will or willfulness.

Afloat #4, by Monica Angle

Bishop never explicitly praises Lowell’s writing in “North Haven,” but she pays him homage by making it her most “Lowellian” poem. When Lowell published Life Studies, she wrote him an explicit confession, envying the way that his famous family’s history helped him invest private details with public significance. As she said:

And here I must confess (and I imagine most of our contemporaries would confess the same thing) that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, spent most of his time fishing—and was ignorant as sin. It is sad; slightly more interesting than having an uncle practicing law in Schenectady, maybe, but that’s all. Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc. gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!

Gradually, over the years, Bishop imbibed some of Lowell’s ability to “put down the names.” Questions of Travel, her first book after Life Studies, included more present-tense poetry directly concerned with her life, as well as three remarkable poems about her childhood in Nova Scotia: “Manners,” “Sestina,” and “First Death in Nova Scotia.” In “First Death,” she proves that she, too, can write life studies of her uncles. The stuffed loon shot by Great Uncle Arthur is “significant” and “illustrative,” after all. Geography III features two great family memoirs in the Life Studies tradition, “In the Waiting Room,” about a trip to the dentist when she was seven years old; and “Poem,” about a tiny painting by her Great-Uncle George. 

But “North Haven” is Bishop’s ultimate life study—starting with the dedication: “In Memoriam: Robert Lowell.” Ironically, now it is Bishop who can use the Lowell name and count on it resonating with her readers. In the fifth stanza, as she turns from natural description to personal history, she imitates Lowell directly. She talks to him in the chatty tone of their letters, with a seemingly spontaneous parenthetical question, “(in 1932?),” as if he could answer it in a return letter. As he did—often to her dismay—she includes quotations from his conversation and intimate details of his life. The line, “(‘Fun’—it always seemed to leave you at a loss . . .),” is particularly Lowellian. Nowhere else in her poetry does Bishop address a friend in such personal terms or reveal so much about his personality—the way Lowell did in poems like “Ford Madox Ford,” “For George Santayana,” “To Delmore Schwartz,” and his four sonnets about Bishop. It sounds very conversational, but, like many lines in Lowell’s work (and hers), it is closer to traditional meter than it first appears. After the first accented syllable of “Fun,” it is straight iambic pentameter, with a strongly musical repetition of “l” and “s” sounds. 

Although Bishop never praises Lowell, she vividly conveys her love for him. To evoke the deepest emotion, she must employ the greatest formal precision. The last line has twelve syllables. It is iambic pentameter, but it breaks after six syllables with a period and then restarts with a spondee—two stressed syllables—“Sad friend.” The period and spondee stop the reader for the emotional center of the poem. By her careful understatement, her slow approach to her subject, her willingness to criticize him, and her formal music, Bishop has arranged things so that when she addresses him as “sad friend,” the reader feels the full weight of Lowell’s sadness, her sadness, and her love. 

The way that Bishop repeats the word “change” and revises “derange” into “rearrange” and “change” reflects the ways that nature (like the poet) repeats and revises. For Bishop, poetry combines a formal music that stops time—forces it to repeat itself—with a narrative flow in which time (evolution, history, mortality) cannot be stopped. At the close of “At the Fishhouses,” she comments on the taste of ocean water:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
Drawn from the cold hard mouth
Of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
Forever, flowing and drawn, and since
Our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

But that is Bishop at her coolest: alone by the ocean, singing to the seals, writing poetry “drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world.”  The end of “North Haven” is Bishop at her warmest, alone but involuntarily so, showing us humanity “at a loss” to arrest time. One of her friends, Ilse Barker, was with her at North Haven when she finished the poem. Barker reports:

While we were with her, she managed to finish “North Haven,” the poem for Lowell. She read it to us and walked about with it in her hand. I found it very moving that she felt she could hardly bear to put it down, that it was a part of her. She put it beside her plate at dinner.

There it was, Bishop’s last great poem: one last labor of love—a poem intimate and yet public—conveying, or making, a whole, small world: an enchanted island or, to use Wallace Steven’s phrase, a “planet on the table.”

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Sam Magavern is a public interest lawyer and writer. His publications include a non-fiction book, Primo Levi’s Universe, and two books of poetry, Noah’s Ark and Ovid’s Creek. He is the founder of the Calamus Project, which celebrates Walt Whitman’s poetry with films, songs, and performances. His website is sammagavern.com. Monica Angle is an artist whose solo exhibitions include shows at the Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Fralin Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in public spaces such as Minneapolis City Hall and the Massachusetts State House, and it is part of many collections, both public and private. Her website is monicaangle.com.

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