Elizabeth Bishop by Jonathan F. S. Post

Author:Jonathan F. S. Post [Post, Jonathan F. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192592217
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Colour

Still, Bishop’s practice as a painter, as well as her painterly eye for detail, is borne out in any number of ways in the poems, especially in her attention to the materiality of the artistic medium. We’ve already noted in Chapter 3 the ‘simple web, | backing for feathery detail’ of tapestry in ‘Brazil, January 1, 1502’. But we’ve said little about the rich effects of colour and their patterns that make her poems, in their vividness, seem to defy the fact that we’re only reading words on a page. ‘Tilted above me’, says the speaker in ‘Manuelzinho’, ‘your gardens | ravish my eyes. You edge | the beds of silver cabbages with red carnations, and lettuces | mix with alyssum.’ And so with the poems, not just those of the warm floral south but of the cold monochromatic north. Here are a few memorable lines from ‘At the Fishhouses’, awash in the cool silvery light of a single colour and crucial to establishing the sombre mood of the poem:

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

among the wild jagged rocks,

is of an apparent translucence

like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

growing on their shoreward walls.

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