Elizabeth Bishop by Megan Marshall

Author:Megan Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A few years later I would discover in Professor Fitzgerald’s new translation that he had made a bold alteration in the Aeneid ’s famous opening line, “Arms and the man I sing.” His version began, “I sing of warfare and a man at war.” He had rendered the epic personal by telling the story of “a man” rather than “the man.” In 1977, making my weekly visits to his office, where I found him looking out on an all-too-near prospect, the unlovely courtyard, into shafts of sunlight from the living world above us, I could think only of what it must have cost this small, quiet man, a devout Catholic whose forehead I’d seen marked with ashes on a Wednesday in late February, to cause a rift in the family he had made: the battles that must have preceded and ensued, internal as well as familial. Had he cut himself out of his wife and children’s lives “as by a razor” to set up housekeeping with his new, young Penelope? I was grateful I had no part in this drama, and thankful for each afternoon he walked from Fernald Drive to Pusey Library to nod his head over my slight efforts in verse.

I scanned his memoir for clues to his present state of mind. Of long summer days at play with his brother, he’d written, “Imagination like a mercurial fluid ran where it would.” And was this sentence, in a passage following the account of his father’s drunkenness, a bid for his own forgiveness? “No general view of things would ever seem just to me unless it comprehended Heaven and Hell—a range in experience at least as great as that between my exaltations as a child and my glimpses of anguish and evil.” Perhaps the answer lay in his poems: given longer to live than his father, he would not rest content to be a “ghostbody in the sun.”

I wrote a love poem for my boyfriend on his birthday in early May and turned it in as the last week’s assignment. I called it “The Swing.” He was an athlete, adept at racket sports I didn’t play, but we’d spent idle hours that spring tossing a softball, joining pickup games on the quad. I admired his form at bat. The poem played with the elements of grammar in the simple sentence so often used as an example in grade school English classes—“the boy hit the ball.”

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