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Gabriela Laureano
ENGD59: American Poetry
Prof. Andrew DuBois
Bishop Essay
Imagery, Identity and Post-modern Representation in Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South
In her essay “Elizabeth Bishop: An Active Displacement in Perspective,” Diane Mehta
argues: “Bishop has a way of making us slow down. She lets us experience her poems, rather
than simply understand them” (Mehta 73). As Mehta suggests, Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry seeks
to convey visual experience and emotion through imagery. Through a variety of forms and
literary devices, Bishop’s lyrical poetry is able to represent her strong appeal for observation. In
her letter to Anne Stevenson, Bishop herself writes: “…I’m often thunderstruck by the
helplessness, ignorance, ghastly taste, lack of worldly knowledge, and lack of observation of
writers who are much more talented than I am…Lack of observation seems to me one of the
cardinal sins, responsible for so much cruelty, ugliness, dullness, bad manners—and general
unhappiness, too” (Bishop 860). Bishop compensates for this ‘lack of observation’ by displaying
a myriad of visual and auditory imagery that rely on the speaker’s observations and perception of
the world. Bishop’s North and South collection in particular, exemplifies the poet’s fascination
with visual perception of space and the materials found in this space. As such her poetry carries
elements of surrealism as distortions and blends, and cubism through superimposed collages of
places, colors, and structures. Bishop’s poetry utilizes visual imagery as the foundation and
medium in her poems: personification, similes, extended metaphors, multiple perspectives and
fragmentation are used throughout North and South to immerse the speaker and reader in a world
of heightened sensory, dreamlike experience. Bishop herself speaks of her dependence on the
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‘surrealism of everyday life’ in her letter to Anne: “I mentioned that the “surrealism of everyday
life” was always more successful, —or more amazing—than any they can think up, —that is for
those who have eyes to see” (Bishop 864). Bishop translates this everyday surrealism into
images, colors, structures, and sounds that exemplify the construction and deconstruction of the
postmodern identity. Her poems depict the individual and social selves as intrinsically and
inseparably linked to space, to their surroundings and the environment. This space, the
superstructures delineated in the individual collections as maps, cardinal directions, or even the
smaller elemental materials such as the land and ocean, provide the visual means for
representation. Thus, Bishop is able to express experience and imagination through this interplay
of imagery and life.
“Bishop’s images gain force from single words,” suggests Thomas Travisano, “…each of
which compels the imagination to produce a picture” (Travisano 60). Elizabeth Bishop’s North
and South illustrates this use of words or more so personified elements as the frameworks for her
pictures. As Travisano suggests, Bishop’s poetry begins and flows through the representation of
imagery. Thus, personification becomes one of the leading devices developed throughout North
and South. Bishop utilizes the personified land in “The Map” to unify the flow of visual imagery
as the land “lies in the water,” “lean[s] down to lift the sea from under,” “tugging at the sea”
(Bishop 1, 5, 8). The poem divided into three stanzas, the first and last following Petrarchan end
rhymes abbacddc, is structured around the merge and division of land and sea: “Land lies in the
water; it is shadowed green/ Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges/ showing the line of long
sea-weeded ledges/ where weeds hang to the simple blue from green” (Bishop 1-4). The contrast
between the land and sea is drawn by the personification of the land and emphasized through the
blend of green and blue. The opening of “The Map” delineates the poet’s emphasis on the
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personification and the superimposition of visual imagery. “For Bishop, particular categories
became crucial constituents of experience: absorption, weight, density, diffusion, condensation,
saturation, fragility, solidity, and lightness,” suggests Peggy Samuels, “—all the ways that one
material brushes past, hovers over, or sinks into another. These qualities became crucial mode of
the materiality of verse, serving as the site of encounter between the materials of mind and the
materials of world.” Samuels goes on to argue that these relations between “surface and depth”
limit Bishop’s lyric speaker into a “discursiveness of metaphor and meaning,” building on an
idea that can emerge from and “sink back into the material of the sensory world” (Samuels 11).
Like Samuels suggests, the embodiment of personification that begins in “The Map” as the
speaker’s consciousness emerges from the sea, towards Newfoundland, over the names of the
seashores, the cities, and the peninsulas which “take the water between thumb and finger,”
moving through the quiet “mapped waters” and the “map-maker’s colors” (Bishop 1-27),
transitions to render the unmovable and “stock still” iceberg, which “rises and sinks again,”
“spar[s] with the sun,” “adorns…itself,” and “behoove[s] the soul” in Bishop’s “The Imaginary
Iceberg” (Bishop 3, 13-14, 21, 26, 32). Similar to “The Map” where land, sea, shore, cities,
North, and West are personified to embody the absorption and diffusion of elements in the first
stanza, the construction of identity through the named seashores and cities in the second, and
finally the condensation and saturation, the universality of all these pieces brought together in the
third stanza, Bishop’s “The Imaginary Iceberg” plays on the personified juxtapositions of
solidity and lightness—an immovable iceberg which lightly adorns the sea, while solidly
remaining “fleshed, fair, and erected indivisible” (Bishop 34). Although, as Samuels suggests,
Bishop’s poetry is engaged in the “intricate interplay of infinitely variant materials and densities
as they [touch] one another,” the poet represents various forms of personification –that is Bishop
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displays not only a relation between the thematic subjects but also alters the way in which they
“touch one another”(Samuels 11). Where Bishop utilizes personification to link together the flow
of imagery in “The Map,” the poet begins to alter this form of personification in “The Imaginary
Iceberg,” delineating the distinctions between materials—the iceberg’s shape, density, and
purpose are shown to be characteristically independent from the ship, snow, sun, waves, and
clouds in the poem. Through “The Imaginary Iceberg” Bishop goes further to shape
individualism within the uniform plane of collective identity that is first introduced in “The
Map.”
Elizabeth Bishop further develops personification and the elements in the material world
of North and South, within the space of this map through the characterization of the winter
huntress in “The Colder the Air.” The personification utilized to depict the almost human-like
seas, land, seashore and cities in “The Map” and the more distinctive iceberg in “The Imaginary
Iceberg,” is taken further to render a vivid, singular individual as the subject of “The Colder the
Air.” In his book “Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development,” Thomas Travisano argues that
“…Bishop’s verse, at its vivid, impersonal, mysterious best, represents a significant an
influential development of imagism’s stress on the clear-eyed observation of fact…Her new
stylistic approach…allowed her to capture transient moments in all their unlikeliness and bring
them back alive” (Travisano 56-57). These “transient moments” are at the forefront of Bishop’s
personified huntress: time is suspended in the moment to illustrate winter’s “hunt:” “We must
admire her perfect aim, /this huntress of the winter air” (Bishop 1-2). In “The Colder the Air,”
Bishop introduces the huntress as an embodiment of the winter air; the poem is structured around
her actions as an individual: “her perfect aim,” “her game” and “her shot” in the opening stanza,
and “her glance,” “her eye,” and “her…will” in the second stanza. The personification of this
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winter huntress is solidified by this transition of action as she takes aim at her prey: “The targetcenter in her eye/ is equally her aim and will” (Bishop 11-12). The third stanza further reinforces
her personified identity as the huntress is characterized not just by her actions but also through
her possessions: “Time’s in her pocket…”(Bishop 13). Finally, the speaker acknowledges her
individual existence as the poet moves from “her” object to “she” subject: “She’ll consult,” and
“She calls” in the final, third stanza. The object of observation, the huntress, transitions to a
subject with individual agency; the huntress herself is capable of thought and action—
characteristics that move towards a discrete consciousness separate from that of the speaker, the
poet, or even the reader. The individual consciousness that is formed in “The Colder the Air” is
broadened and epitomized in “Seascape.” Where personification permeates the lines and
juxtaposition of imagery throughout “The Map,” “The Imaginary Iceberg,” and even “The
Colder the Air,” similes and extended metaphors form the “celestial seascape” and the “skeletal
lighthouse” in “Seascape” (Bishop 1, 15). The “tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections” that
reflect the seascape, the flying white herons, the “weightless mangroves” and the “bright green
leaves” “like illumination in silver;” the “Gothic arches of the mangrove roots,” “pea-green
back-pasture,” and the “fish jumps” “like a wild flower in an ornamental spray of spray” stand in
contrast to the “skeletal lighthouse.” The opening lines of the poem are riddled with descriptive
adjectives and “tiers and tiers” of images; Bishop utilizes similes to group together the extensive
imagery, half being like reflections of silver, and the other half like ornamental flowers and
further connects these images to a point of origin: “…this cartoon by Raphael for a tapestry for a
Pope/ it does look like heaven” (Bishop 13-14). This tapestry of images is contrasted to the
“skeletal lighthouse” that denies them: “Heaven is not like flying or swimming” (Bishop 21).
The poet shifts from simile to personification, rendering the embodiment of the lighthouse “in
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black and white clerical dress” (Bishop 16). The personified lighthouse, like the huntress, is
portrayed with a sense of consciousness: “…who lives on his nerves, thinks he knows better”
(Bishop 17). However, unlike the huntress, this lighthouse is able to pass judgment, to think,
observe and consider the seascape—he is not only an individual identity or a consciousness with
some agency of action, but has, to an extent, the freedom to form an opinion and to impose that
opinion on others. In describing the thought process of this personified individual, Bishop’s
metaphor reappears as a sort of chremamorphism; the lighthouse, having been personified to
represent religion, is later objectified as an individual: “He thinks that hell rages below his iron
feet, / that that is why the shallow water is so warm, / and he knows that heaven is not like this”
(Bishop 18-20). Personification is left behind as this lighthouse is completely replaced by the
individual persona; the “iron feet” are objectified to display the cleric’s resolute belief in his
convictions. This cleric extends even further than the winter huntress as Bishop grants him the
ability to speak: “…when it gets dark he will remember something/ strongly worded to say on
the subject” (Bishop 23-24). The transition of identity that was first formed and foreshadowed in
“The Map,” separated and individualized through “The Imaginary Iceberg,” and further
conceptualized into a distinctly aware character in “The Colder the Air,” is finally realized
through the embodiment of a self-expressing, autonomous personality in the “Seascape.”
Moreover, Bishop’s use of surrealist elements and fragmentation in “The Gentleman of
Shalott” and “The Man-Moth” further exemplify the dimensionalities and characterization of
identity and the self throughout North and South. In his argument for a surrealist form of poetry,
Charles Glicksberg suggests: “This is the futuristic poetry of dreams, the poetry of the
unconscious desire, the poetry of Surrealism…Images are supposed to arise spontaneously in the
mind of the poet, without any conscious effort or interference on his part—images that go back
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to a remote, primordial past. They appear unsought, unbidden, because they have their roots in
the magic soul of the unconscious” (303). Glicksberg’s “magic soul of the unconscious” seems
to emerge as a dream-like reality in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Gentleman of Shalott.” The
distortion of identity that accompanies the physical fragmentation of limbs, the conscious and
unconscious juxtaposition exemplified through the mirrored reflection, and the rearrangement of
the self create a foundation for the poem’s visual, surrealist imagery. “From one perspective, the
visual imagery in her poetry is grounded in exact and precise observation of natural detail,”
argues Richard Mullen, “yet the uninterrupted accumulation of those details often forms settings
which seem to emerge from a dream as well as to encompass the external world” (65). Bishop’s
“The Gentleman of Shalott” which alludes to Alfred Lord Tennyson’ “The Lady of Shalott,” is
structured, as Charles Sanders suggests, around “… paired runic couplets and…quatrains.” The
poem portrays near rhymes and half line enjambments that exemplify the ‘doubled’ reflection of
the mirror (Sanders 55). Tennyson’s Lady finds herself surrounded by Camelot’s reflection in
her own mirror: “Before her hangs a mirror clear,/ Reflecting tower’d Camelot./ And as the mazy
web she whirls,/ She sees the surly village churls,/ And the red cloaks of market girls/ Pass
onward from Shalott/…in her web she still delights/ To weave the mirror’s magic sights…”
(Tennyson 49- 54, 64-65). Like Tennyson’s lady, Bishop’s gentleman is also trapped in a sort of
mirrored curse: “Which eye’s his eye? / Which limb lies/ next the mirror?”(Bishop 1-3).
However, unlike the lady, the Gentleman’s dilemma lies in the distortion of his own reflection.
The eye that is not his eye and the limbs, which are deceitfully reflected in the mirror, externalize
the subject’s contention with his unconscious identity, his perception of self, and his own
existence. The confrontation with the ‘otherness’ shaped by the developed awareness of a self is
further depicted through this interaction between the surreal and the real: “For neither is clearer/
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nor a different color/ than the other,/ nor meets a stranger/ in this arrangement/ of leg and leg
and/ arm and so on./ To his mind it’s the indication of a mirrored reflection somewhere along the
line of what we call the spine” (Bishop 4-15). Tennyson presents a “mirror clear” reflecting
Camelot; contrastingly, Bishop represents a reflection that is neither “clearer nor a different
color” and yet lacks the clarity, the distinction the lady possesses in her reflection. Bishop’s
gentleman is portrayed as a fragmentation of identity between the conscious and unconscious—
the reflection is revealed only “to his mind.” However, the gentleman himself only
acknowledges his physical distortion as his strangeness: “He felt in modesty/ his person/ was half
looking-glass,/ for why should he/ be doubled? (Bishop 16-20). The reality that is accepted as a
reflection unconsciously is somehow mistranslated into a conscious certainty when the
gentleman assumes “his person” is “half looking-glass.” In the opening lines Bishop addresses
the gentleman’s mirrored identity, however, in the second and third stanza this reflected other is
indecipherable from the gentleman’s self; the dream-like surrealism glimpsed in the first lines is
fully developed and assimilated as reality in the second stanza. In his definition of surrealism,
Charles Glicksberg suggests that it is precisely the adoption of strangeness that defines surrealist
poetry:
Beauty is to be achieved by the frantic fusion of incompatible elements, by the
disintegration of the laws of syntax, by forcing images out of shape into something new
and strange, by resorting as often as possible to the private, unintelligible symbolism of
dreams. By elliptical twists and darts, by exploiting a purely subjective vocabulary of the
emotions, by cultivation the perverse, the scatological, the abnormal, the Surrealist
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produces work that reads like extracts torn from the case histories of a practicing
psychoanalyst…(Glicksberg 304).
Although Bishop’s representation of the “everyday surrealism” differs somewhat from
Glicksberg’s definition, in intensity and the “disintegration of syntax,” there are still elements the
poet employs such as shaping and cultivating the strangeness and abnormality that are
characteristically predominant in “The Gentleman of Shalott.” The gentleman becomes a blend
of fragments, a distortion of sorts, as he cannot discern “which side’s in or out of the mirror”
(Bishop 25-26). Richard Mullen suggests this sense of surrealism defines much of Bishop’s
poetry: “Sometimes it is proportion which seems somehow out of balance…Sometimes it is the
incongruity of an entire scene which is emphasized…Sometimes the oddity of contiguous details
is emphasized, creating the impression that displacement occurs in routing ways throughout the
scenes she observes…(78). In this case, Bishop emphasizes the oddity of the self and identity in
light of the reflected other; however, the poet ironically displays a sense of symmetry within the
structure of this strangeness, as the half/doubled gentleman becomes the materialization of the
near-rhymed, half-lined stanzas. The oddity arises from a too balanced disproportion in form,
subject, and imagery. The gentleman accepts all these as characteristics of his own identity: “But
he’s resigned/ to such economical design…He loves/ that sense of constant re-adjustment…
“Half is enough”” (Bishop 31-32, 41-44). Bishop’s representation of identity becomes
exponentially more complex as the subject is faced with the unconscious and the other: the
simple forms that take shape in “The Map” and “The Imaginative Iceberg,” and realized through
the individualization found in both “The Colder the Air” and “Seascape,” morphs into a kind of
solipsistic fragmentation that introduces an inner other; self-awareness is “stretch[ed]/ down
[the] middle” until “…half his head’s reflected,/ thought, he thinks, might be affected” (Bishop
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21-22, 29-10). The individual, the gentleman develops into a blend of halves: half mind, half
lines, half thoughts, half glass—a halved and enjambed, doubled poem that depicts the duality of
the self.
Having constructed, shaped, developed, and further deconstructed the self throughout
North and South, Elizabeth Bishop once again revisits the associations she first establishes in
“The Map” through the cubist superimpositions of individualized identities, material space and
multiple perspectives in “Anaphora.” Abraham Davidson, paraphrasing Winthrop Judkins’
“Toward a Re-interpretation of Cubism,” gives a definition of the defining elements in cubist
interpretations:
…planes which are at once transparent and opaque; tones of objects which “bleed” out
and become background tones so that the object is part of, and at the same time in front
of, the background; outlines which coincide with other outlines so that the continuity may
be read around either or across both; surfaces which recede behind other surfaces and
project over them simultaneously; shadows, mutually excluded by each other’s light
sources, standing side by side…(Davidson 122)
As Davidson further emphasizes, Winthrop Judkins, in “Toward a Re-interpretation of Cubism,”
concludes in four characteristics that describe cubism across the “unending variety of
manifestations:” “…A deliberate oscillation of appearances; a studied multiplicity of readings; a
conscious compounding of identities; an iridescence of form” (Judkins 276). These are also the
characteristics that make up space and the interplay of identity in Bishop’s “Anaphora.” The
imagery in “Anaphora” is constructed upon the layering of images; the speaker becomes aware
of each day as it “begins, with birds, with bells,/ with whistles from a factory…” (Bishop 2-3).
The eclectic range of auditory imagery is then superimposed by the visual “white-gold skies” and
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the “brilliant walls,” which introduce the “ineffable creature” that in turn finds himself “instantly
fall[ing]” to “memory and mortal/ mortal fatigue” (Bishop 4-17). These images, sounds, and
actions are represented in succession to one another without pause in the first stanza; the poet
emphasizes the interrelation of these images, of this space, to the individual. The birds, whistles,
factories, skies, walls “bleed” into and out of the day, following this “ineffable creature.” As
Davison and Judkins suggest, Bishop adopts the cubist representation of superimposition and
association to instill a sense of continuity and repetition as part of the anaphoric nature of the
poem. The repetition and interlacing of the self, other, and space is further represented through
the flow of one consciousness into another in the second, and final stanza: “More slowly falling
into sight/…showering into stippled faces,/ darkening, condensing all his light” (Bishop 15-17).
The flow of imagery continues to envelop “our uses and abuses,” “sink[ing] through the drifts of
bodies” and “the drifts of classes” to the “beggar in the park” (Bishop 20-23). As the images and
identities shift from one to the other, from light to dark, and the falling creature to the stippled
faces, us, the speaker, the intended reader, and finally the beggar in the park, the shadow of
repetition and the darkening of emotion continue to expand “side by side.” “For the handling of
space and the arrangement of detail are referable, now, not to the workings of the human visual
apparatus, but to the resorts of a master manipulator, whose structuring of reality depends upon
his unique mode of apperception,” argues Davidson, “the distinction is no longer between the
clear and the unclear, but between the object and the non-object. We question not whether we
discern, but what it is that we do discern, and in so doing, we the observers, have ceased to
become the frame of reference. And it is in this enforced detachment of the observer that the
classical essence in …Cubist structure may be said to reside” (127). The cubist superstructure
upholds the foundation of imagery in “Anaphora.” The textual self and identity Bishop develops
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throughout North and South concludes in a poem that blurs the lines between space,
consciousness, and even the observer and the one observed—the reader becomes part of the
subject as the poet includes “our eyes,” our “wonder,” and “our uses and abuses” (Bishop 4, 6,
20). The reader is immersed in this superimposition of self-identity, actively judging, shaping
and influencing the development of this “him” throughout the poem. Moreover, the first stanza
which gives rise to the construction of the ineffable creature is displaced by the deconstruction
and fragmentation of his identity in the second stanza and these are repeated “every day in
endless/ endless assent (Bishop 27-28). In this way, the title “Anaphora” transcends form and
device to encompass the construction, reconstruction, and redefining of the public and private
selves through the apperception of experience, encounters with others, and the readaptation of
space.
Elizabeth Bishop explores the dimensionalities and boundaries of identity and visual
imagery throughout North and South. The glimpses of individualism that begin in “The Map”
and “The Imaginary Iceberg” are further contextualized through the poet’s expansion of form,
devices, and perspective in “The Colder the Air,” “The Gentleman of Shalott,” and finally
“Anaphora.” Bishop utilizes surrealist and cubist elements to assist in displaying the interplay of
nature, and the environment in constructing and deconstructing the self. Bishop’s North and
South depicts the fundamental interrelation between the material world and ideologies that shape
public and private life, framing the poetic imagination. Elizabeth Bishop demonstrates that the
construction of space and imagery is as significant as the use of complex metrical and literary
devices in the representation of identity.
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Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. North and South. “Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letter.” Literary Classics of the
United States, Inc.: New York (2008). Print.
Davidson, Abraham A. “Cubism and the Early American Modernist.” Art Journal; Winter 19661967; 26, 2; College Art Association; Jstor Article.
< http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/775035>
Glicksberg, Charles I. “The Poetry of Surrealism.” Prairie Schooner; 1949; Vol. 23, 3. University
of Nebraska Press; Jstor Article.
<http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/40624153>
Judkins, Winthrop. “Toward a Reinterpretation of Cubism.” The Art Bulletin; Dec. 1948. Vol.
30, 4. College Art Association. Jstor Article.
< http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/3047200>
Lord Tennyson, Alfred. “The Lady of Shalott (1832).” Poetry Foundation. Web.
< http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174626>
Mullen, Richard. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Surrealist Inheritance.” American Literature; Mar. 1982.
Vol 54, 1. Duke University Press; Jstor Article.
< http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/2925721>
Samuels, Peggy. Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art. Ithaca: Cornell U, 2010. Print.
Sanders, Charles. “Bishop's The Gentleman of Shalott.” Explicator, (1983). 42(1), 55. ProQuest.
<http://search.proquest.com/docview/1290252539?accountid=14771>
Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: U of Virginia,
1988. Print.