To hold an object with an intensity of gaze that would reveal it, both as itself and yet more than itself, becomes a sacred act and a sacred art—embodying the mysteries— in the work of Elizabeth Bishop. In her poem, “The Moose”, she writes with an impersonal, distancing effect that so precisely articulates the natural world that it moves into dream, opening new dimensions of perception.

Bishop begins with a long, mesmerizing evocation of Nova Scotia, the land “of fish and bread and tea,/home of the long tides”, with a sinuous line that moves from stanza to stanza without a complete break, rising and falling like the tide itself to capture the feel of travelling through the late afternoon.

The music of quiet end rhymes breathes like a sigh, as of a distant, infinitely patient watcher moving with the snail’s pace of the bus that “journeys west …down hollows, up rises” along the south shore. We are drawn into a trance of seeing the landscape move past the bus windows as “the fog,/shifting, salty, thin,/comes closing in.” Everything is washed with it, “the sweet peas cling/to their wet white string/on the whitewashed fences;/bumblebees creep/inside the foxgloves,/and evening commences.”

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posted by Arc on January 31, 2008 permalink | comments (1)
cats: Features
tags: Catherine Joyce | Elizabeth Bishop | poetry | poets