The Iowa Review
Volume 10
Issue 1 Winter
1979
On a Villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop
David Shapiro
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Shapiro, David. "On a Villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop." The Iowa Review 10.1 (1979): 77-81. Web.
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Article 23
On aVillanelle
by Elizabeth Bishop
David Shapiro
To Paul
THE
NEW
Silverman
on April 26,
M A G A ZIN E published amasterpiece
"One
later
in
her Geography HI,
Art,"
reproduced
Bishop's
drastic approach to the archaic French form. It shows what
do for an all-too-golden
repetitive form. It is superior to the
YORKER
1976. Elizabeth
is a convincingly
drabness may
manias
of Thomas,
finer than the cerebrations of Empson
and still
severe, and takes its place along with those of Auden, James Schuyler, and a
few other premonitory
specimen stanzas.
practitioners'
The title is "One Art," and it identifies for us the integrity and lack of
tensions of the poem.
It is indeed a
that remain the polarizing
integrity
maudlin
The poem reminds us,
poem of explicit art, of many-minded
cunningness.
as Freud does in his chapters upon the theme of forgetting
in The Psycho
most
the
that
buried
life
in its
of Everyday Life,
pathology
corresponds
to
to
The
is
self
poem
aspects
dynamic
expression.
writing,
necessarily
it never gives up its bitter burden of
whilst
referential and self-reflexive
referentiality. The art of losing seems amere theme, but it is also the central
and active theme of themelessness,
affording such a space of absence to the
In a poem which
is
reserved and masterful.
conceives
of
poem. The title
most
in the
mastery
negatively
thrilling terms, it stands as a Keatsian "lone
over the poem. The title is an unadorned
star" of hermitage
handle and
forgets nothing.
A villanelle may
Like Kierkegaard,
be said to be the classic form of repetition and persistence.
broods
about the possible
repetitions
Bishop
possible
tribe" Keats brooded
earth. She is part of the "dreaming
upon this mortal
in his "Fall of Hyperion"
about and nearly deposes
and she persists
in
an
a
to
The
is
both
of
and
defense
poem
poetry,
poetry,
brooding.
homage
a terrifying
in relation to mortalia
lament about the weaknesses
of poetry
sense. Each repetition furnishes a new twist of
that touch us in the Virgilian
a stream of repetitions
to remind us of
than producing
suffering. Rather
voice
or
consciousness
in
Stein's
explicit
meanderings,
she
composes
and
to give us a very palpable
and persistence
decomposes
repetition
thickness (in Jakobson's
senses) of attention.
The poem
is filled with
of off-rhymes
that link
palpable dissonances
with
the
tradition
of
in
and
Dickinson
desire,
dissonance,
Bishop
orality,
and Moore:
These dissonances
each lead to
fluster/master;
gesture/master.
master
the incongruous
of
and
It
IS
disaster.
disaster
that
congruent
rhyme
with
so Bishop
is the large fate of the master. As Heidegger
has it of Nietzsche,
of herself,
the topoi are the circle and suffering. The poem is a circle from
can escape from Odin's disk
which we cannot escape anymore
than Borges
in his phantasmal
a
The
its
and
form are themselves
archaistic
story.
poem
to dissonance,
fine and almost comical fate. One modulates
from dissonance
as in Charles Rosen's
sense of the "classical style," too often perceived
as a
77
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constant
towards
turning
The
harmonies.
are
harmonies
small
interpola
tions in a prose world of suffering.
has said, "The false poet speaks."
Bishop never speaks too much. M?ntale
one of utterance. But her diction
Her poetry is not the falsely deceived
is
never
a
too
low
in
rises
Wordsworthian
she
humiliated
and
sense;
properly
is sublimated magic.
She
though the whole
high or aspires too magically,
....
art
art
"The
of
with
with
and
ends
art,
(Write it!)" and
losing
begins
so the whole poem is an essay as much as it is, in Ong's
slightly too mystical
and
is involved
Bishop
with
and she draws
palpable,
Russian
a cry.
sense,
logocentric
never
formalists
an absence
The art is one of making
difficulty.
to her poem constantly
in the way
attention
the
tired
of
She
presenting.
a
is, moreover,
presenta
and thus, she is even more filled with pathos at the theme of
in Ashbery's
the poem,
absence. Within
presenting,
phrase, a fundamental
as a battered self
she offers advice, but as Frost does in "Provide, Provide,"
demands. When
she asks us to
small invectives out of the world's
making
we
as
a
"Lose something
this
understand
every day,"
soliloquy
collapsed
and, along with Jarrell on Frost, we are most moved
by her very lack of
a
in the injunction. The whole
confidence
poem does throughout make
tionalist;
confidence out of a failure of Mnemosyne.
of losing is a form of anti-poetry which
the
To
poem.
displacement
shapes.
forget
and
in
metaphor
It is Bishop's
Bishop
is
is concerned
triumph
with
a Freudian
than
even
sense
a memory.
to write
mastery,
the art
Since poetry ismemory,
into
she transmutes most naturally
more
a
symptom
our
traces
Forgetting
it out in such disappearing
self-mastery
too
as
a
and
own
ink.
for
metaphor
mastery within form, not over and above form. She plays upon the versions
in those
of the word
of Andrewes
"loss" too with
the erotic playfulness
sermons that so charmed Eliot. The whole poem is one of drastic advice to
the
ephebe,
as
Stevens
reminds
us
that writer
and
reader
are
in an
essential
of rapport and disrupted
Socratic relationship
rapport. The poem repro
of the hysteria that precedes the desire for mastery,
duces something
just as
to
in
noted
the
"Ode
has
that
Keats'
Melancholy"
negatives
Empson
remind us how much the poet was tempted to go there. "...
practice losing
and by the spatial and temporal
farther,
Bishop,
losing faster," writes
modifiers
she reminds us that we are going into the hallucinatory modality
of the ephebe's first negative way.
Indeed, the poem as sacrifice is part of Bishop's
traditio, and
puritanical
we
are
must
must
We
of
the verbs
sacrifice.
verbs
lose,
offer, but along with
man we must never ask for unhappiness,
but wish for more.
Kierkegaardian
some
a
names
time the poem
Every
public thing, but a
thing, it is not
care
or
or
two
if public, like
treasure,
cities, the public seen privately
private
as
a
Like Heidegger,
she is the homeless one seeking
and treasured
dwelling.
a home and understanding
to
to
dwell is
that
be, to be is to build. The little
a
a
on
to
to inhabit, an empti
which
villanelle
is "mirror
dwell,"
building
78
built upon emptiness. We are reminded
always
as she shatters
bias, her architectural gifts, as it were,
ness
of her constructivist
the form
it
and fuses
simultaneously.
in Derrida's
A reading of the poem shows it as a grammatology
sense, a
an
us
as
to
scene of writing
of
with
all the
itself,
analysis
writing
given
one
an
must
remember
is to
of
whims
almost absolute negativity. What
one
one
must
will
is that
remember
write. What
else, that
forget everything
not
one will lose everything
to
in
write. Writing
is
but the faculty
negative
unex
or
most
to
to
in the
voice. Writing
relation
sound
precedes everything
In
there is a
there
is
the
without
the
art,
way;
writing
nothing.
pected
beginning.
Thus, we
are watching
an almost
of the magic
seientiftic
unfolding
a
to
of
the
writer
dedicated
is
writing
fitting proportions
pad. Bishop
She has separated herself, like Auden,
consciousness
and unconsciousness.
from the French tradition of automatism
and surrealism. Yet both no doubt
an interp?n?tration
with
that system of thought
and
undergone
to
Perse
and
One
Auden's
debt
of
thinks
thoughtlessness.
Bishop's
St.-John
own relations to Val?ry and even Laforgue
through Auden and Eliot. She is
us against b?tise and sottises, but her
us, and warning
constantly warning
have
interest in the
therefore and nevertheless
bespeaks an extraordinary
life and the drunken boat of possibility.
"So many
things seem filled
seems
to
a
out of the
intent/to
be
lost"
is
have
wandered
with the
phrase that
of Baudelaire's
We
haunted wood
and
correspond
"Correspondences."
to objects and subjects that seem to
respond indeed in a haunted universe
poetry
buried
have no other object but to haunt us. Bishop
is all too often
in the pays des
merveilles.
text
between
the poem, one imagines a certain congruence
Throughout
and psyche, until what we are astonished by is that this has indeed become a
text of transgression
The poem has not at its coda but at its
and madness.
the art of losing a self,
heart the art of losing oneself,
very non-Aristotelian
a
art
of losing the shifty shifter "you."
the art of almost losing
text, the
theme of solipsism and she shows us
is involved with the dangerous
Bishop
asides that are a tribute to
the horror of private language in her parenthetical
to keep these
a
her reticence, "(the joking voice,
gesture/I love.)" She tries
as
as Proustian delays, as suspenses,
but what they
adornments,
parentheses
seem
to
come
to mean
are
multiplicities,
transversals,
to Deleuze's
as
argued
recently
upon the multi
concerning
master.
At
her parentheses
of
in
the
desires
ofthat
rate,
any
plicities
writings
as breakdowns
of the syntax and as rhetorical abun
function paradoxically
Proust
dance
and
and in relation
meditations
advantage.
is appalling in the poem is that one comes to see indeed the facility
is
of mastery. The art of remembering
of mortality,
the easiness of oblivion,
is the natural one of any ephebe. Of course, the
hard; the art of forgetting
is one which a Kierkegaardian
critique might depose. But
irony throughout
What
79
one is not able to use here any ethical critique as a check against Bishop,
just
as Bloom
that the ethical will not check Keats unless it
argues elsewhere
comes from a poet who equally honors the earth.
This is a poem that is not tied down to things nor morbidly
dependent
upon the earth, though it is filled with a tension created by the feeling-tone
of dependency and passivity
and self-doubt, recently
called by no less a
of
New
"The
York
Times"
the attribute
clich?s
than
purveyor
journalistic
of
the
of an addict. Like Emily Dickinson,
indeed
tradition
is
part
Bishop
to
The
addicted
"a fairer house than prose."
poem, however,
possibility,
must be argued as abstract, a poem of sullen surfaces, a poem of shattered
not because as Graves would
have it as regards the
facets. It is a villanelle,
into the sonnet and woke
it was half
sonnet, Bishop wandered
up when
It is a villanelle,
that most
and
formal
of
finished.
plotted
probabilistic
gardens, because suffering could demand no other strategy than the abstract
It is not a dance of tensions along Cleanth
of the villanelle.
choreography
urn, but a kind of well-wrought
lines, it is not a well-made
statement
It
with
the
"The art of losing isn't hard
abstract
emptiness.
begins
to master"
art
and it concludes with the force of syllogism:
"It's evident/the
of losing's not too hard to master."
The little difference of the colloquial
in the world.
It's not too hard, one reads,
"not too hard" is all the difference
Brooksian
and why
this significant difference?
The poem
is about falling away, disaster,
and as we fall towards
the
we realise that poetry
conclusion
itself affords us a mastery. While we
cannot handle anything within
the poem but imaginary
door keys and
or anguishing
we
uncomfortable
the
within
hours,
may keep these
poem
them.
things by naming
this poem there is neither unmastered
irony nor mastered
Throughout
of
There
is
the
the
of
process
irony.
presentation
irony.
trying to master
tense
of
The
the
this
is
poem.
poem is a series of
present
Masteringllrony
is still oneself,
and to the text of
brilliantly
tragic asides to the ephebe who
the eternal ephebe. The poem is not the poem of an aesthete but it is the
one. The poet like Hyperion
bitter novel of the self-poisoned
has lost not
a
a
a
a
a
was
but
and
self
that
realm
and
that
realm
self,
you
just
guaranteed
the poignant sweetness of this realm. All this is gone before the poem starts.
The disaster of the poem
is a self-reflexive
one, like the self-reflexive
art
at
breakdown
of syntax
the end: "the
of losing's not too hard to
it may
look like (Write it!) like disaster." The
immense
master/though
at the end bespeaks
all trouble, all dreads, all stutterings
that
repetition
Here
is the level of ambiguity
contradiction.
said speak of mental
shied away from when he spoke of mental
in the
contradiction
Stein. The disaster is seen and grasped in the speaking
poetics of Gertrude
statute
music of the poem. Beyond
the appearance of mastery
is a Goethean
as an erotic transgression
of limitations. The poem is perceived
that com
Freud
Empson
mits
80
the poet
to the poem.
In the imaginary,
in the construct,
is a poignant
that redeems
redemption
is a poetry of parenthesis
all losing whilst forgetting nothing: "(Write it!)" It
and pathos, of exclamation
and the exaltations of
falling.
inHarold Bloom's
is strong enough, and not necessarily
Elizabeth Bishop
sense, to accept the canonic and the arbitrary and the given. She accepts the
given of the form in the way that Jasper Johns accepts the dark given of the
is nothing more
arbitrary and almost
flag. There
design of the American
the
villanelle.
Whitehead
than
says that tragedy and
arbitrary
stupidly
science grew hand in hand. We may be killed by rules that loom out of the
dark; they make us and mar us, not the other way around. In such a way,
the invisible rules of form the more we doubt and yet
the more we discover
in self-encouraged,
self-acknow
insure our only form of human mastery
as
as
to
to
is
To
write
much
failure.
Socratic
die,
poetry
philosophize
ledged
is to learn how to die. This little poem is a little death, as erotic, as vital as
of a new
and as vast as a glimpse
any death, as filled with
suffering
It is no longer a travel
continent.
It is a glimpse of the oldest continent.
but
poem in any easy exotic way; it is not a translation from any Portuguese
brooded on
the psyche. "There is no frigate like a book." Just asMallarm?
broods upon the
the other, the burnt breast of the old Amazon,
Bishop
other, the text, the furthest and the fastest text. The funniest rhymes (last
the Imaginary. The
or/master) remind us of the friction of experience within
are
the
vital
admissions
miss
but it wasn't a
within
them,
poem
("I
changes
It is the anti-theatrical,
of the confessional.
disaster") but never melodramas
a wordless
the stanzas. The poem has its ethos
theatre played between
"I shan't have lied." Within
its opacities,
its
against any easy deception
a
overcomes
to
all
obstacles
achieve
the
final
poem
labyrinths,
pathos.
Mastery must always be mastery of disaster. There is no need for mastery
the
except on the horizon of dread and death. All of the things lost within
in Keats'
for this death, this final divorcer,
villanelle are indeed metaphors
to
it is dedicated
itself seems like a separation,
great phrase. While writing
a pathos
the most final of separations. The poem achieves amastery within
:pathei mathos. Here wisdom
of Aeschylus
in the classical framework
is not
too.
from
alone
but
from
Oblivion
is a
wrought
suffering
forgetting,
and Elizabeth Bishop
She
puts her cunning against oblivion.
temptation
to
to
to
Are
lose?
die?
afraid
afraid
afraid
Then,
says, wittily,
you
forget?
with Frankl and his marvellous
theories of paradoxical
she mur
intention,
murs,
Then
you will
and then
lose, then lose door keys, lose hours, lose everything,
become amaster. Hard advice, but "how witty's
ruine."
81