Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030331801
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

“Love should be put into action!”

  screamed the old hermit.

Across the pond an echo

  tried and tried to confirm it.

This apparent dialogue is really a deluded monologue, the hermit’s scream answered by its own echo. Beyond the skepticism condensed in her vainly repetitive phrase, “tried and tried,” this speaker keeps her ambivalent silence; she refuses to choose between beckoning, alongside the hermit, that “Love should be put into action!,” and seconding that dissenting “echo,” shun, shun, shun. That chook-chook-ing “pet hen,” of all creatures, emerges as the scene’s second-most assertive vocal presence—even if Bishop’s colloquial verb, “went chook-chook,” makes the hen’s noises seem as mechanical, as purely physical, as the echoing ripple that “went” over the pond.

Animals, in fact, may have the loudest voices in Bishop’s early career, none of them quite as raucous as her first book’s “Roosters.” In a 1940 letter to Marianne Moore, Bishop rebuffed her mentor’s drastic revisions to a draft of “Roosters” and defended the poem’s extremes: “I can’t bring myself to sacrifice what (I think) is a very important ‘violence’ of tone” (One Art 96). To muster that “violence” in the poem’s cacophonous first half, she centers every sentence on a word or phrase characterizing the roosters’ harsh voices: “the first crow,” “echo,” “grates,” “cries galore,” “the uncontrolled, traditional cries,” “a senseless order,” “gloats” (PPL 27). Then, surreally, the roosters’ uncontrolled cries coagulate into articulate English speech. Each rooster, “each one,” amounts to       an active

displacement in perspective;

each screaming, “This is where I live!”

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