American poet (1911-1979)
What the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
North & South
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"One Art"
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones--
and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Cape Breton"
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Questions of Travel
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art
I had a theory at that time that one should write down all one's dreams. That that was the way to write poetry. So I kept a notebook of my dreams and thought if you ate a lot of awful cheese at bedtime you'd have interesting dreams. I went to Vassar with a pot about this big--it did have a cover!--of Roquefort cheese that I kept in the bottom of my bookcase . . . I think everyone's given to eccentricities at that age. I've heard that at Oxford Auden slept with a revolver under his pillow.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
The Paris Review, summer 1981
To the sagging wharf
few ships could come.
The population numbered
two giants, an idiot, a dwarf.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"A Summer's Dream"
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
North & South
The armored cars of dreams contrived to let us do
so many a dangerous thing.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Sleeping Standing Up"
The tumult in the heart
keeps asking questions
And then it stops and undertakes to answer
In the same tone of voice.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Conversation"
Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous;
gray light streaking each bare branch,
each single twig, along one side,
making another tree, of glassy veins.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Five Flights Up"
Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music ... some intimate, low-voiced and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
ELIZABETH BISHOP
attributed, The Accidental Collector: Art
From a magician's midnight sleeve
the radio-singers
distribute all their love-songs
over the dew-wet lawns.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Late Air"
And if we Severinos
are all the same in life,
we die the same death,
the same Severino death.
The death of those who die
of old age before thirty,
of an ambuscade before twenty,
of hunger a little daily.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
The Death and Life of a Severino
All my life i have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
acceptance speech for Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1976
I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrove roots.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Florida"
At night the grackle Love will start
To shriek and shrill,
Nor will he once be still
Till he has wide awake the backward heart.
So selfish Love,
Go hush;
Feathers and claws take off
Or seek some bush.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Three Valentines"
I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Poems
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters