American poet (1911-1979)
Love is feathered like a bird
To keep him warm,
To keep him safe from harm,
And by what winds or drafts his nest is stirred
They chill not Love.
Warm lives he:
No warmth gives off,
Or none to me.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Three Valentines"
Close, close all night the lovers keep. They turn together in their sleep, Close as two pages in a book that read each other in the dark. Each knows all the other knows, learned by heart from head to toes.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Poems, Prose, and Letters
Sometimes it seems ... as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
This iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"The Imaginary Iceberg"
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn form the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"At the Fishhouses"
Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
North & South
Most of this tragic waste of life is due to malnutrition. But often the malnutrition is due not so much to actual lack of food as to ignorance, a vicious circle in which poverty creates ignorance which then creates more poverty.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Prose
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from undergrouns springs and pure enough to drink.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"The Man-Moth"
If after I read a poem, the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so, I'm sure it's a good one.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
I remember my mother taking me for a ride on the swan boats here in Boston. I think I was three then. It was before we went back to Canada. Mother was dressed all in black--widows were in those days. She had a box of mixed peanuts and raisins. There were real swans floating around. I don't think they have them anymore. A swan came up and she fed it and it bit her finger. Maybe she just told me this, but I believed it because she showed me her black kid glove and said, "See." The finger was split. Well, I was thrilled to death!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
The Paris Review, summer 1981
Her face is closed as a nut,
closed as a careful snail
or a thousand-year-old seed.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"House Guest"
I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Crusoe in England
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"In the Waiting Room"
I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"I Am in Need of Music"
Nature repeats herself, or almost does: repeat, repeat, repeat, revise, revise, revise.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
North Haven
Winter lives under a pigeon's wing, a dead wing with damp feathers.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
North & South
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Sestina"
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"One Art"
It's past midnight and very silent and I'm probably keeping the night doorman awake as well as Lota, and a mystery man across the garden who sits up all night with three bright lights on, as if giving himself a 3rd degree--only he always does seem to be awake & alone. Tonight he did something very strange for a while--and finally we saw that he was (silently) playing a cello.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
letter, September 29, 1957
On the unbreathing sides of hills
they play, a specklike girl and boy,
alone, but near a specklike house.
The sun's suspended eye
blinks casually, and then they wade
gigantic waves of light and shade.
A dancing yellow spot, a pup,
attends them.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"Squatter's Children"