Love Unknown by Thomas Travisano

Author:Thomas Travisano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;

here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:

impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,

sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one.

Self-pity, uncertainty, meagerness, impracticality. Are these features inherent to this harbor and its surrounding buildings and promontories, or are they characteristics the poet fears she might harbor in herself?

The speaker, addressing herself in the second person, makes no claims of being a bardic wayfarer—as a male poet might do—asking herself instead, “Oh tourist, / is this how this country is going to answer you // and your immodest demands for a different world, / and a better life, and complete comprehension / of both at last, and immediately, / after eighteen days of suspension?”24 “A different world,” “a better life,” “complete comprehension”? Immodest demands indeed—but claims that keenly pressed on Bishop at her moment of entry. Abruptly, though, the time for musing is over and the moment of debarkation has arrived. “Finish your breakfast,” the speaker curtly directs herself. As the poem segues from meditation into action, its pronouns slide from the distancing second person into a more colloquial first person—beginning with the plural “we” and then the singular “myself” (though never the simple “I”). So, “gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward, / myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen.” Then, as she and the fellow passenger brought to life in her letters confront a transient peril, Bishop’s powers of observation switch to full alert:

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