Secrets of Elizabeth Bishop’s Natural Style
What Makes Elizabeth Bishop Style Seem Natural: Syntax and Rhyme in Her Poems
Last fall, when a reading group decided to read the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, I immersed myself in her poems. I use the word “immerse” because it felt as if I were diving deep into her unique poetic style. I swam into one poem after another trying to discern what it was that makes her poems so accessible and yet so mysterious, but, the harder I swam, the less I understood. It reminded me of when I used to swim up the Presumpscot River in Maine at low tide when, no matter how hard I swam, I barely made headway. I read different critics, three of her recent biographies. But none seemed to pinpoint what it was that made her poems so accessible yet formal, so conversational yet poetic.
Some critics called her a predominantly descriptive poet, one who could draw out an image with such dexterity that by the time the poem was completed it felt as if one had been there, moment by moment, with her, observing it, feeling it, being a part of it. Of course, she was a master of form. Her deft rhymes seemed effortless. They happened in such a way that the rhyming was secondary to the language, to the larger meaning of the sentence, so, as a reader, one glided over a rhyme toward the next part of the sentence, pulled toward its end not stopped at the sound of the rhyme itself. She could vary the meter in a poem, skipping from short to long lines effortlessly. But that wasn’t, at least for me, what made her poems powerful. It was something I sensed was there, embedded in them, I couldn’t quite name.
Bishop admitted that getting a poem to work right wasn’t easy. She said,
“Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural. Most of the poet’s energies are really directed towards this goal: to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some reader) that what he’s up to and what he’s saying is really inevitable, only natural way of behaving under the circumstances.” Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected poems, Drafts, and Fragments edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, 207)
As a poet, I wanted to know not only what she was doing in her poems that most other formal poets do, but how she made what she did seem so natural. I began to look more carefully at her sentences. Another master of the natural style, Robert Frost, stressed that the sentence was the core of a poem. If you wanted to understand how a poem worked, he argued, look at the sentences in a poem. He said the poetic sentence “conveys one meaning by word and syntax, another by the tone of the voice it indicates.” For example, he said, “In irony, the tone indicated contradicts the words. . . .” The tension in a poem often comes from its “saying one thing and meaning another—a form of duplicity.” To write a poem is, for Frost, to go “a-sentencing.” (Reginald L. Cook: The Dimensions of Robert Frost: New York: Rinehart and Company Inc,1958, page 68, 58)
Frost was also conscious that, if he rhymed a poem, he had to test whether the rhyme would deflect the poem from its intention or would govern the poem, letting its sounds effects emulate what he wanted to say. He advised poets to inspect the rhyming pairs. It’s like checking if a suit jacket fits well, if the sleeves are too long, if it rides correctly on the shoulders, if the pant cuffs fall properly on the shoes. When the rhymes fit, just as a well- fitted suit, the whole looks right, nothing stands out, nothing distracts from the whole. There is no sound for sound’s sake. The sound has meaning in context, only in association with the other words and, most of all, with the sentence. The syntax of a sentence—how the clauses and dependent clauses interact, how the free modifiers and relative clauses appear, how the noun and verb phrases modify the nouns and verbs—impact the effectiveness and weight of the rhyme.
Frost was also sensitive to how a sentence moved, the energy it created in a poem, when it was juxtaposed with another sentence. He believed it was the poet’s job to sing “a sentence into the form.” He knew that if a poet tipped the bottle of rhyme too far, it would come out with a glug, glug sound. However, if a poet could tip the bottle carefully, the rhyme flowed smoothly. If the poet could measure out the sentence, not squeezing it too tightly nor letting it sag, he could enrich it with the triumph of association using metaphor. He insisted that metaphors cut “across one another and (make) a connection in the mind,” which gives a fresh vista to experience, surprising and delighting the reader. This careful measuring of a sentence is what makes a poem “a renewal of words.” (Ibid, page 58, 51)
Although Bishop didn’t speak much about her craft, she would certainly agree with Frost. She wanted her poems to unfold naturally, relying on the keenness of her observations to lead her to what the poem needed to say. She rarely made-up what she hadn’t seen or experienced. With her poems, regardless of the form, what emerges is a deep sense of how the sentence evolves, broken as it is by line breaks, that allow it to scroll down the page, unraveling at its own pace, following her observations of the seen-world.
To understand the craft of Bishop, what’s often overlooked in her craft is the way she arranges sentences and, as such, how the rhythmic patterns, including end rhymes fall in the sentences.
To help visually see what she does, I’ve taken four of her poems, each from a different book, and broken them down into sentence units, spacing between them to highlight how each sentence unit in itself holds together and creates its own pacing and timing. Some sentences roll out in long, visual, descriptive pictures. Some snap to a close quickly. Some veer backward, hesitating, questioning what has gone before. Each sentence creates its own tonal quality, which invite the reader to dwell on it, to savor its feeling tone and, by the end of the poem, with a shifting of sentences, to leave the poem with an entirely different tone. It’s what Frost spoke about starting a poem with delight and ending with wisdom.
In her book Elizabeth Bishop at Work, Eleanor Cook said, “Writers and especially poets would do well to study Bishop’s crafting of her sentences. . . .” (page Cook, 124) She goes on to describe how Bishop interweaves her sentences with four and five beat lines in her longer poems. “The sentences lie so artfully over the steady but varied metrical beat that they sound entirely natural, only tightening when Bishop wants a certain tension.” Cook draws on “Frost comments that a poet “must learn to get cadence by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the meter.” (to Bartlett, 4 July, 1913, 665) She discusses how Bishop uses different types of sentences from indicative with a large number of coordinative clauses in some poems and to ones with a predicative syntax with a number of subordinate clauses, varying, as she does, the number of verbs and adverbs as well as the number of nouns and adjectives in different poems. She notes how a Bishop critic, Bonnie Castello observed in Bishop’s poems that “the rhythm of long sentences against short, the parentheses, dashes, ellipses, all these impersonal devices (largely ignored by the critics) give a personal inflection to the speaker, create an effect of immediate voice.” Bishop was in “command of sentence structure in relation to the poetic line.” “Cook, Ibid, 124)
That’s what interests me, what has been the invisible quality of her poem—the syntax and sentences—that make them seem so natural. Cook’s invitation “to study Bishop’s crafting of her sentences,” brought me to consider just how different poems use different variations of sentences to create the natural yet poetic tone in her poems. My quest to find out how her poems work by looking at syntax came from several recent books on the use of sentences in artful writing.
Ten years ago, I picked up Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style at a national teacher’s conference. (See footnote) Overwhelmed with grading hundreds of student papers, I set her book aside simply because it was so dense, so filled with different examples of different types of sentences with distinctly different effects such that I couldn’t see how to teach it to high school students. When I recently went back to it, I regretted not reading it through the first time. It is a treasure trove of insights about how different sentences can create specific effects much as a pitcher, adept at maneuvering a baseball, can spin a ball in such a way to look as it it’s going inside when it’s going outside. She argues that if a writer knows how sentences work, they can use them to create different moods, tones, and dramatic effects that, for most readers, is invisible, hardly noticeable but is the art of effective writing. She says, “syntax . . .gives words the power to relate to each other in a sequence, to create rhythms and emphasis, to carry meaning—of whatever kind—as well as glow individually in just the right places.” She goes on for almost three hundred pages to show how short sentences work in one way, while longer sentences work in another; how left-branching (cumulative) and right-branching (periodic) sentences build on the main clause differently, how free-modifiers interrupt and elaborate, extending what’s being said much as a painter adds texture to a painting. Throughout the book, the sentence is the focus of her attention. She quotes from poets, essayists, novelists, and politicians, showing how the artful sentence breathes life into what they are saying.
Since I’ve been mystified about how Bishop creates poems that seem to fit together seamlessly and never lose their energy, even if they’re long and descriptive, I thought that looking at how she pieces together sentences might help me better understand her craft. I realize that, as I look at her poems, I have taken them apart in ways that might have infuriated her. I’m not saying that she consciously wrote her poems with the sentence in mind, but I am arguing that the flow of sentences is what makes her style seem so natural.
(Footnote: At the time, I was teaching high school English and thought the book might help me teach high school students how to write good sentences. But, when I read the book, it proved to be too much for me to incorporate in my classes. Instead I relied on several books written for teachers that captured much of what she did and, additionally, offered activities and directions of how to teach it, books I highly recommend to any English teacher, books that incorporate Tufte’s ideas and reframe them for practical use—Harry R. Noden, Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth: Heinnman, 1999; Imagine Grammar Activity Book, Logan, Perfection Learning Corporation, 2007; Jeff Anderson: Mechanically Incline: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop, Portland: Stenhouse Publishers, 2005.)
Some contemporary poets like Jessica Jacobs are very conscious as they do draft after draft of poems of how the sentences are working in the poem. In a class I took with her, she described how, after doing initial drafts, she broke her poem out into sentences, noticing the patterns of long/short, left-branching, right-branching, and how, in turn, that affects what she’s wanting to say. She works on her sentences as separate units until she feels that they are right. Then she goes back to work on her line and stanza breaks. There’s no evidence that Bishop did that in her drafts, which, even in her more complex forms, come out, quite early on, in a poetic structure. ( See Guinn, Ibid for drafts of poems) But she did talk about the sentence, the pace of the poem, the use of meter, so it’s natural to look more carefully of how she did that, how her poems unravel as she teases out different syntactical skeins in her sentences. She admired sixteenth and seventh century poets as well as Gerard Manly Hopkins, Henry James, and Charles Baudelaire for how they composed artful sentences, so it seems natural to look at how her sentences unfold in a poem. (Guinn, Ibid. 207-212)
In an early poem from her first book North & South, “Roosters,” the variation in sentences is already present in her writing. I’ve taken the liberty of formatting the poem as sentences with demarcations showing where she breaks a line (/) as well as a stanza (//). If you scan down the page, looking at the whole poem, it’s evident that the poem starts off with four long sentences. Then there are two short sentences, some only one line, followed by one more long sentence, and, after that, eleven short sentences, which lead to two long and two short sentences to conclude the poem.
To show how Bishop uses different sentences, I’ve broken the poem up into three distinct parts. The first is her first four sentences, all of them long and complex. The next is the section of short sentences in the middle part of the poem. Finally, the last section, broken into two long and two short sentences, that concludes the poem.
Here are her first four sentences of “Roosters.” I have highlighted in bold the rhymes, which, for this poem, play a large part. Before I discuss them, take a moment to read them aloud, noticing how the sentences work, how they build, how they rhyme, and how the descriptive detail is compressed into them.
At four o’clock/ in the gun-metal blue dark/ we hear the first crow of the first cock// just below/ the gun-metal blue window/ and immediately there is an echo// off in the distance,/ then one from the backyard fence,/ then one, with horrible insistence,//grates like a wet match/ from the broccoli patch,/ flares, and all over town begins to catch.
Cries galore/ come from the water-closet door,/ from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,/ where in the blue blur/ their rustling wives admire,/ the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare// with stupid eyes/ while from their beaks there rise/ the uncontrolled, traditional cries.//
Deep from protruding chests/ in green-gold medals dressed,/planned to command and terrorize the rest,// the many wives/ who lead hens’ lives/ of being courted and despised; //deep from raw throats/ a senseless order floats/ all over town.
A rooster gloats// over our beds/from rusty iron sheds/ and fences made from old bedsteads,// over our churches/ where the tin rooster perches,/over our little wooden northern houses,// making sallies/ from all the muddy alleys,/ marking out maps like Rand McNally’s:// glass-headed pins,/ oil-golds and copper greens,/ anthracite blues, alizarins,// each one an active/displacement in perspective;/each screaming, “This is where I live!”//
If you look at the first sentences, which begins with two prepositional phrases—
what Tufte calls a left-branching (periodic) sentence— you can see how Bishop loads descriptive information into a sentence before the main clause is introduced. She admired how other poets, particularly Hopkins had done that, wasting no time before diving into a scene. Yet she limits the left branch to two prepositional phrases, just enough to immerse us into the time and color of the scene before being introduced to the main clause.
The sentence, however, doesn’t stop with the main clause. It continues to build. She adds sonic imagery, the “echo/ off in the distance,” and includes even more auditory detail in the right-branching (culminative) sentence. The right-branch is designed to elaborate on the subject or verb, adding more detail, elaborating on it.
Tufte notes that when we read a sentence, we don’t focus “on one word at a time. . .we read by making sense of the segmented patterns. Segmentation is the basic resource of English syntax, often achieved by nonrestrictive, or free modifiers . . which are set off from the base clause, usually by commas or dashes.” (Tufte, 171) By using free modifiers Bishop extends the sonic imagery, teasing it out, so it “flares, and all over town begins to catch.” Of course, if she was using the modern journalistic style, she could have broken this sentence into component parts. But that would have cut off the expansive flow of the images.
I know that I’m often told by editors to simplify my sentences, to shorten them, to have them in more manageable segments. That seems to be the trend in modern prose style.
Why doesn’t she break this sentence into smaller units? The reason is simple: There’s a momentum in a culminative sentence; the information is carried along much as rafting tubes in a river. The flow of modifiers drives the sentence forward. Brooks Landon in his book Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read, invites writers to
Say things directly, the subject first and then what the subject is doing.
Then trail the modifiers, putting the modifying phrases at the end of the straightforward declarations, expand and contracting them, adjusting their rhythm as you need to, creating texture, refining detail.
Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences Your Love to Read (New York: Penguin Books, 2013, 48)
He explains that the right-branching sentence that modifies the main clause is the most direct and efficient way to add texture, teasing out an image, adding sensual detail. The advantage of the free modifiers is that they “point back to the base clause and shift down to a greater level of detail and specifics. They backtrack by picking up and expanding on the same aspect of the base clause, giving the sentence, as Christensen points out, “A flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it.” Brandon, Ibid. 56-7)
Clearly, Bishop knew how to make culminative sentences. The extent to which she consciously parsed them out, choosing how to pattern long and short sentence is not known.
There’s no evidence that Bishop did that in her drafts, which, even in her more complex forms, come out, quite early on, in a poetic structure. But she did talk about the sentence, the pace of the poem, the use of meter, so it’s natural to look more carefully of how she did that, how her poems unravel as she teases out different skeins of sentences. She admired sixteenth and seventeenh century poets as well as Gerard Manly Hopkins, Charles Baudelaire and Henry James for how they composed artful sentences, so it seems natural to look at how her sentences unfold in a poem.
The next sentence, even more complex than the first, continues to push the poem at us with more and more sensual detail. It starts with a main clause—“Cries galore/comes from the water-closet door”— that, in turn, continues with more description, adding on another prepositional phrase, that is followed by an adverbial clause (“where in the blue blur. . .the roosters. . .”), followed by another preposition and another verb subordinate clause. These toppling descriptions lean into one another, building upon one another, seemingly grabbing us by the collar and saying, “Look, look what is here.” If they were broken into four simple sentences or, for that matter, two complex sentences with one subordinate clause paired with one main clause, as, say, separating the “where” and the “while” clauses, it would force us, as periods do, to pause, to hesitate, to group the rooster’s eyes and “uncontrolled, traditional cries,” as distinct from one another. But, as she has it, they are part of one whole, seamless, indivisible. They immerse us in the roosters, their eyes, their cries. Bishop makes sentences sing; it is the type of sentence that separates the amateur and professional writer. Professional writers know how to extend a sentence, build on an image or a verb, extending it, refining it, elaborating on it so that it sings just as Bishop has done.
While the first two sentences are mostly right-branching, the third is left-branching, giving us detail after detail, “Deep from protruding chests/in green-gold medals dress. . .” before the subject “wives.” Left-branching sentences, by their design, create suspense. The subject, the core of the sentence, is delayed. You have description but you don’t know as yet what’s happening, what the subject is. This reversal is another move that Bishop makes. She continues to offer description, but she puts most of it at the beginning of the sentence rather than the end. In fact, she joins two left-branching sentences into one complex sentence, adding to the delay in the first part of the sentence with the last part. When we read this sentence, broken as it is into lines, we don’t see what is happening, but we feel it, we know there’s a pattern, a delay, carefully orchestrated line by line.
The last big sentence in the beginning is confounding, using an elaborate use of free modifiers—prepositional phrases, participial phrases, adjectival lists—along with parallelism, each building off another, to place us distinctly in a setting. The series of preposition phrases—“over,” “from,” and “over”—do what prepositional phrases do: they place us, showing where we are. Throughout the sentence, they continue like a jazz riff, coming back again and again, detail on detail, culminating, focusing, enhancing the descriptive scene.
The first four sentences are packed with description. If they were in a prose piece, they’d be way too busy. An editor would tell her to break the sentences up, make them shorter, clear of the clutter. But this is a poem. She can make them work because she has as a tool her adept use of line break, parsing out the description line by line, carving up the sentence piece by piece. She also uses stanzas to gather the description into distinct units. That’s the art as syntax. Yet that’s invisible to most readers of her poems.
But what is also extraordinary in the poem is that it has a very strict rhyme pattern that seems entirely invisible since it’s buried in the complex syntax. I have highlighted in bold the end rhymes. I also note where she is using parallelism with italics. As Elenore Cook explained “Roosters” has forty-eight stanzas based on the format of the sixteenth century poet Richard Crashaw’s poem, “Wishes To His (Supposed) Mistress,” which is not only rhymed aaa but is complicated by the shortening of the lines in each tercet. Cook describes how it works: the first line is shortened “to two beats, with few variations. The second line has three beats and the final line has four beats.” (Cook, 104-5) Bishop is able to sustain such a pattern because “where the same part of speech is used, the rhyming is by no means all with nouns; it includes other parts of speech, past and present participles for example.” (Cook, 106) Bishop manages such rhyming because she’s varied her sentences, letting them drive the poem with the flow of left and right branching sentences that, if she had used a pattern of simple declarative sentences, would have caused the rhymes to stand out and become intrusive. In her critical work, Cook focuses on the success of Bishop’s rhyming but only hints how the flow of sentence makes this possible that is, for me, the magic of her poems, the craft element that’s overlooked as critics pay attention to other elements such as rhyme, meter, diction, and tone, all important elements to observe, yet often observed without noting how the sentences work.
In this next section of the poem, she reverses her pattern of long sentences by using a series of short ones, followed by a medium length one, and then eleven short ones. If you look at them, you can see immediately that they move quickly. If you read them aloud, they ride quickly off the tongue. They make definite statements, one after another, each qualifying what’s been said before each lending itself to the basic pattern of the tercets with the lines going from two beats, to three, and four.
Here is the second part of the poem:
Each screaming/ “Get up! Stop dreaming!”/
Roosters, what are you projecting?//
You, whom the Greeks elected/ to shoot at on a post, who struggled/ when sacrificed, you whom they labeled// “Very combative …”/ what right have you to give/ commands and tell us how to live,/ /cry “Here!” and “Here!”/ and wake us here where are/ unwanted love, conceit and war?//
The crown of red/ set on your little head/ is charged with all your fighting blood.//
Yes, that excrescence/ makes a most virile presence,/ plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence.//
Now in mid-air/ by twos they fight each other./
Down comes a first flame-feather,// and one is flying,/ with raging heroism defying/ even the sensation of dying.//
And one has fallen,/but still above the town/ his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down;// and what he sung/ no matter.
He is flung/ on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung// with his dead wives/with open, bloody eyes, /while those metallic feathers oxidize.//
St. Peter’s sin/was worse than that of Magdalen/ whose sin was of the flesh alone; //of spirit, Peter’s,/ falling, beneath the flares,/ among the “servants and officers.”//
Old holy sculpture/ could set it all together/ in one small scene, past and future:// Christ stands amazed,/Peter, two fingers raised/ to surprised lips, both as if dazed.//
But in between/ a little cock is seen/ carved on a dim column in the travertine,//explained by gallus canit;/ flet Petrus underneath it./
There is inescapable hope, the pivot;// yes, and there Peter’s tears/ run down our chanticleer’s/ sides and gem his spurs.//
Tear-encrusted thick/ as a medieval relic/ he waits.
Poor Peter, heart-sick,// still cannot guess/ those cock-a-doodles yet might bless,/ his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness,// a new weathervane/ on basilica and barn,/ and that outside the Lateran// there would always be/ a bronze cock on a porphyry/ pillar so the people and the Pope might see// that even the Prince/ of the Apostles long since/ had been forgiven, and to convince// all the assembly/ that “Deny deny deny”/ is not all the roosters cry.//
In the morning/ a low light is floating/ in the backyard, and gilding// from underneath/ the broccoli, leaf by leaf;/how could the night have come to grief?// gilding the tiny/ floating swallow’s belly/ and lines of pink cloud in the sky,// the day’s preamble/ like wandering lines in marble./
The cocks are now almost inaudible.//
The sun climbs in,/ following “to see the end,”/ faithful as enemy, or friend.
The poem shifts in tone and pace with the shorter sentences. It’s more personal, almost conversational. Bishop asks a question, “What are you projecting?” followed by another question, shifting from descriptive to interrogative. She’s more engaged, speaking of roosters, since this is a poem written during WWII about roosters as emblems for the French resistance, as being combative, as having an almost heroic quality. Yet she has an ironic tone, asking how they have the right to give commands. The sentences don’t accumulate. The sentences don’t delay. With a simpler syntax, the pace is more staccato, direct, discursive. Each sentence does its job. Stops. The next sentence picks up with different topic. Each is different type of sentence. Exclamatory. Interrogative. Exclamatory. Declarative combine with interrogative. Although the three rhymes continue, the variety and length of the sentences relieves the monotony. The rhymes also bleed into other sentences and stanzas. Often the rhyming words are distinct parts of speech or vary in diction as in “dung” and “flung.”
This middle section increases its pace. As Wallace Stevens said of Ernest Hemingway’s chiseled prose with its short or compound sentences, its use of short active sentences, as being masculine, forceful, lashing out like fighter’s punches, not giving us time to think before the next sentence slams into us, Bishop keep punching out her sentences in this section.
Even when Bishop shifts to theological concerns with St. Peter, the pace is relentless, using a declarative sentence with nominal phrases ( “whose”) modifying it followed by prepositional phrases (‘of”), participial phrases (“falling”)—all free modifiers—ending with a adverbial clause (“while”). The next sentence continues using same syntax with a colon, pushing forward the action with strong verbs (“amazed,” “raised,” and “dazed’). It slows down in the next left-branching sentence with its initial prepositional phrase. But picks up after the subject and verb with another right-branching set of modifiers, this time prepositional phrases. With each new sentence, taut and streamlined, she keeps up the pace, using in the last one an adjective out of order (“tear-encrusted thick”) to begin one sentence, ending with verb (“waits”).
As she closes the poem, she applies the brakes, reeling out two enormous sentences filled with nominal phrases, infinitives, and prepositional phrases along with three nominal declarative clauses (“that’) which modify the subject, St. Peter who cannot guess what’s happening. The second sentence is even slower than the first. With its left-branching content (“in the morning”), and the series of prepositional phrases, which, as a rule are slow because they have two words of little use—the preposition and article—taking up space, the sentence is also interrogative. It asks a question, asks us to pause and ask, before concluding with two participial phrases and an appositive. It’s densely packed with detail. It feels like a car coming to a stop sign, applying its brakes, ready to stop.
But she surprises us. She ends with two short declarative sentences. They jump out at us. Blam. Blam. Leaving us as a conclusion the sun climbing in, “Faithful as enemy, or friend.”
The poem succeeds because Bishop knows how to use a sentence to sing, to vary its pace and rhythm. Even with the strict rhyme scheme and line lengths, the sentences like a well-orchestrated musical score, keep us engaged.
If we skip to her next book, A Cold Spring, the poem “At the Fishhouses” doesn’t start with the long, extended sentences in “Roosters.” But it intersperses the mix of long, medium, and long sentences, all with a strong predicative syntax that have a number of subordinate clauses. Since this poem doesn’t have a set rhyme scheme but, instead, has an irregular three and four beat line, it provides an opportunity to see how she uses free verse and sentence variation to construct the poem. The poem is broken into three parts, the first and last stanzas being quite long, the middle stanza only seven lines long.
Here is the first section. Read it aloud and notice how the sentences, elaborate, carefully set up, keep the focus on sensual details, using quick line breaks to break up the syntax and carry the description forward.
At The Fishhouse
Although it is a cold evening,/ down by one of the fishhouses an/ old man sits netting,/ his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,/ a dark purple-brown,/ and his shuttle worn and polished./
The air smells so strong of codfish/ it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water./
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs/and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up/to storerooms in the gables/ for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on./
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,/ swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,/is opaque, but the silver of the benches,/ the lobster pots, and masts, scattered/among the wild jagged rocks,/ is of an apparent translucence/ like the small old buildings with an/ emerald moss/ growing on their shoreward walls./
The big fish tubs are completely lined/ with layers of beautiful herring scales/ and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered/ with creamy iridescent coats of mail,/ with small iridescent flies crawling on them./
Up on the little slope behind the houses,/ set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,/is an ancient wooden capstan,/ cracked, with two long bleached handles/ and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,/ where the ironwork has rusted./
The initial six sentences, focused on an old man and the fishhouses, are visually and sensually rich in detail. Using a similar strategy as she did in “Roosters,” she starts with a subordinate clause (“Although it is a cold evening”) followed by a preposition phrase, (“down by”) which allow her to place the poem in time and space before introducing the subject, the old man who is described using two absolutes, (“his net. . .dark purple-brown and his shuttle worn and polished”). The next sentences gallop along with smells and visual descriptions. The sentences are declarative, adding to the nature of the scene. The fourth sentences is more elaborate. It starts with two compound sentences (“the heavy surface. . .is opaque” and “but the silver. . .is. . .translucence) ending with an extended simile coloring in more details. The sixth sentence uses a prepositional phrase (“Up on the little slope behind the house”) as the subject of the sentence; it embeds us in the scene.
Although each sentence’s job is to describe, they vary in how they left and right-branch as well as how enjambment carries one part of a sentence into the next line. In the first stanza, an article (“an”) sits at the end of the line, a slight hesitation, before joining with its noun, “the old man.” These quirky line breaks disrupt the flow of the sentence and keep the poem moving. All the sentences, however, conclude with an end stop. It’s as if they’ve done their job and can rest.
The seventh line starkly introduces a series of short sentences that flag a dramatic shift in action and pace. Five declarative sentences in a row, each limited to one subject, leap one to another, accelerating the poem. Information comes in quick takes: The old man accepts a cigarette. He’s related to the narrator’s grandfather. They speak of fish decline. She sees sequins on his vest. He scrapes the scales with a knife. It happens quickly. We’re engaged with her. The pace increases just as Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods On a Snowy Evening” quickens when the horse “gives his harness bells a shake.” Frost used this shift to action to turn a poem, drive it in another direction. In “The Hired Hand,” the immediacy of the encounter between the farmer and his wife, and the husband with the hired hand, immerses the reader in the moment just as Bishop does in this poem:
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population/ and of codfish and herring/ while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,/ from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,/ the blade of which is almost worn away.//
From this encounter, she observes the larger scene again, using heavily left-branching sentences to describe the water’s edge. These carefully wrought sentences lead us down to the shore, down to the stones. When critics praise Bishop for her natural word order or her everyday diction, they often fail to see that the naturalness came with the painstaking work of mixing the word order, changing up and repeating, as she does here, a mix of prepositional phrases. As Bishop said too her friend Isa Baker, who had sent her a manuscript of a story, “I think I could make it read a bit more naturally.” What she meant by ‘naturally’ “was a matter of the details like repetition, sounds, place of adverbs, etc.” (Cook, Ibid. 119) Paying attention to every sentence, and how it could be broken into lines and stanzas, is the art of poetry, an artform she mastered. Look at how she does it with one sentence:
Down at the water’s edge, at the place/ where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp/ descending into the water, thin silver/ tree trunks are laid horizontally/ across the gray stones, down and down/ at intervals of four or five feet.//
Variation keeps a poem moving by offering the unexpected. But repetition, particularly of a line or phrase, provide the poem with cohesion. As she moves into the last section of the poem, we hear several times how repetition the adjectival phrase, “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear” creates a liturgical tone, almost as if we’re at a church service. We meet a seal who engages with the narrator, fascinated with her. It’s a playful scene. The sentences trip along tit for tat. The seal is curious; he likes music; she sings a song; he stands; he dives. The action is swift. The sentences short, crisp, most beginning with subject and verb, letting the nouns and verbs do their work. Then she repeats the phrase, the tone and focus shifts again. It’s as if she has pulled back the camera, drifted to a pan shot of the whole scene. She observes it all: the water, firs, bluish shadows, “the same sea, the same. . .swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones,” and the repeated s-sounds, mimicking the water over rocks. With the use of two conditional sentences, left-branching (“If you. . .” “If you tasted. . .”), she invokes the participation of the reader with a second person pronoun, inviting them to feel the cold water and to taste it in their mouth. This evocation of the senses that compare the water to fire, using a vivid simile (“as if the water were a transmutation of fire/that feeds on stones,”) adds a dramatic shift in tone from the more conversational passages to this more elegiac passage that lead to an ending that at once surprises and reaffirms the power of the sea that carries throughout the poem. In a final gesture, she reaches down to put her hand in the water, to taste the salty quality of it, as she ends with lovely lyric right-branching sentences that pull and pull on all of what she has said before, drawing on the “clear, moving utterly free. . .flowing and drawn. . .flowing and flown.” The intensity of the final verbal variations, one after another, makes it seem as if the poem hasn’t concluded but is continuing to act, to be as the sea always is: acting upon the shore, coming, going, changing shape, which is what Bishop imagines knowledge to be.
Here is the ending of the poem. Note the last four sentences and how they build to the conclusion:
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,/ element bearable to no mortal,/to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly/ I have seen here evening after evening./
He was curious about me.
He was interested in music;/ like me a believer in total immersion,/so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me/ steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge/ almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug/ as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,/ the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,/ the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,/ a million Christmas trees stand/waiting for Christmas.
The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
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 from 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.
In her third book, Questions of Travel, she wrote many poems about Brazil. One of them, “The Armadillo,” uses an abab ballad form with lines varying from three to five stresses. Because it’s a shorter poem with shorter lines and because of the rhyme scheme, it’s easier to see how the sentence variety allows her to vary where she breaks the lines in sentences and divert attention from individual word pairs to the larger landscape and dramatic movement of the poem.
In the first two three sentences, the rhymes divvied up in different sentences. The second sentence is broken at the left-branching participial phrase (“Climbing the mountain. . .”), leaving the remaining sentence in another stanza. Varying the sentences, the second starting with two conditional phrases, places more emphasis on the verbal units (“Climbing,” “rising,” “flush,” and “fill,” “comes” and “goes”) none of which are rhymed, that drive the sentence forward. The rhyming words thereby don’t call attention to themselves. They’re there. They’re nouns. But they’re shoved along by the power of the active voice and vivid descriptions in the sentence.
The first longer, compound sentence keeps the rhyming words off center stage. The sentence is broken midway into another stanza, but the break comes before the second main clause right branches into a series of participles and prepositional phrases. She doesn’t have the rhymes always coming at the end of a sentence, so they end with a thunk. They float in and out of the sentence, sometimes near the beginning, sometimes near the end, sometimes smack in the middle.
Read this aloud and note how she works in the rhyme naturally with a mix of nouns, verbs, and adjectives:
This is the time of year/ when almost every night/the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,//rising toward a saint/still honored in these parts,/the paper chambers flush and fill with light/that comes and goes, like hearts.//
Once up against the sky it’s hard/to tell them from the stars—/planets, that is—the tinted ones:/Venus going down, or Mars,//or the pale green one.
With a wind,/they flare and falter, wobble and toss;/but if it’s still they steer between/the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,//receding, dwindling, solemnly/and steadily forsaking us,/ or, in the downdraft from a peak,/ suddenly turning dangerous.//
After four medium-sized sentences, she repeats a pattern that I’ve noted in her earlier poems. She picks up the pace by rolling out a series of short sentences. They’re empathic, quick. She shifts to the fire that burns the hillside. She ends this description with a fierce line break, having joined the last sentence (“The flame ran down.”) with the start of the next (“We saw a pair”), so that, from this point in the poem, we witness, image by image, the increasing havoc of the fire. She rhymes seemingly unimportant words like “up” and “until,” that calls attention to the insignificance of anything in the path of the fire down the hill.
Last night another big one fell./
It splattered like an egg of fire/ against the cliff behind the house./
The flame ran down.
We saw the pair//of owls who nest there flying up/and up, their whirling black-and-white/stained bright pink underneath, until/they shrieked up out of sight.//
The next short, matter-of-fact sentence, left on a line by itself, paints a picture of an owl’s burned nest. Nothing more. We pause to take it in. Then, with an adverb leaping into a sentence, she describes the armadillo and a baby rabbit with a left and right-branching sentence, using free-modifiers, a series of absolutes (“head down,” “tail down,”) and adjectives “rose-flecked,” “short-eared”) to enhance the description. It’s as if the fire is moving too quickly for her to keep up. Her eye is trying to take in the devastation. Yet in the midst the effects, she stops again. She offers with a sentence fragment the exclamatory statement—“So soft!—a handful of intangible ash, with fixed, ignited eyes.” A gruesome image of terror. Another vivid image that arrests our attention before the conclusion.
The ancient owls’ nest must have burned./
Hastily, all alone,/ a glistening armadillo left the scene,/rose-flecked, head down, tail down,//
and then a baby rabbit jumped out,/short-eared, to our surprise./
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash/with fixed, ignited eyes.//
Her concluding exclamatory lines in italics turns the poem back on herself and on us.
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!/
O falling fire and piercing cry/ and panic, and a weak mailed fist/clenched ignorant against the sky!
In these last lines, we’re no longer cool observers of the fire. We’re crying out as she is against the conflagration. Two quick sentences, the rhymes of nouns that sound out the cry, cry, fist, and sky punch these final lines. Penelope Laurans in her essay “Old Correspondences: Prosodic Transformations in Elizbeth Bishop,” noted how Bishop, “controls the reader’s response to the main event by choosing, just at this point (when the animal is threatened), to reserve intensities and to begin patiently to describe the animals. The exactness of the description determines the final meaning of the poem: it forces the reader to slow down and to visualize the particular vulnerability of each of these creatures when faced with this incendiary accident.” (Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, Elizabeth and Her Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 8)
How does she do this? She modulates her sentences, allowing some to accumulate, add descriptions with free modifiers, while contrasting them with short declarative sentences to drive the action. In this poem, we can see how Bishop is able at once to control the pace of the poem along with the rhyming of it. The forward thrust of the sentences are so engaging that the rhymes happen without their catching our attention. Instead, we’re focused on what is happening, the action and content of the sentence. That’s how she makes her poems see so natural. By the end of the poem, the elegiac cries stop us in our tracks.
In her last book, Geography III, Bishop has a poem that she worked on for twenty years. “The Moose” is like “The Fish” and “One Art” one of her most anthologized poems. As Frances Donavan explains, “starts out with a regular rhyme scheme (abcbdb) that then varies slightly in the fifth stanza (abcdcd) and loosens more and more as the poem continues and the narrative takes hold.” Donavan goes on to define what she means about rhyme and then speaks about how rhyme is central to Bishop’s poetry:
rhyme within the context of repetition . . .goes far beyond the end-stopped pure rhymes (mop/top) most people associate with poetry. Rhyme can be any kind of repetition of sound: slant rhymes (month/up); internal rhymes. . .; repetition of words, or repetition of entire lines. Elizabeth Bishop uses all these techniques. Rhyme runs through her poetry like a subtle thread: always there, but not often when or how it’s expected. Rhyme ties together a poem, giving it a structure through interlocking sounds that amplifies its meaning.” (Frances Donavan, Garden of Words Website, “Craft Annotation: Elizabeth Bishop’s Use of Rhyme.” Posted, February 15, 2017.)
But more than just rhyme “The Moose” is emblematic of Bishops use of a range of sentences, some so convoluted that, if they were used to do a sentence diagram, they would win a prize. For example, her first sentence goes on for 36 lines and six stanzas. Cook examines how this first sentence works and how it contrasts with the rest of the poem, which, as you can see by looking at the sentences, is a stark contrast:
The opening sentence is a virtual study of prepositions and conjunctions. . .It build like a Latin sentence, with the main clause deferred until line 26 and the preceding lines all dependent phrases and clauses (from A, where B, where C. . . to line 26: “a bus journey west”). Each of the six stanzas of this sentence opens with a preposition or a conjunction: “From,” “where,” “on,” “through”, “down.” The rest of the main clause follows line 32. By contrast, the next stanza contains three short sentences. Of the remaining twenty-two stanzas, only three open with prepositions, none with conjunctions. Prepositions and conjunctions. . .are (related) grammatically, (both being) dependent on the main clause. . .(mapping) relations.” (Cook, Ibid, 230)
By scanning the poem visually, it’s evident that Bishop has packed an enormous amount of detail into the first sentence, something, as noted earlier, she is fond of doing in her poems. She uses parallelism (note in bold italics) to weave the adverbial clauses (“where”) together. The rhymes, as noted, dissipate, but do not stop, after the first sentence concludes. She parses out her irregularly in the shorter lines, mixing various parts of speech, to avoid monotony,
In the next section, much more prose-like and narrative in form with careful character development and bits of dialogue, rhyme plays less of a role. Perhaps, she knew that the long sentence needed more grammatical and poetic stitching to bind it together. For in this sentence, she also repeats words (“the bay,” “red,”) to weave them into a pattern.
Since this poem has a visual trajectory, almost darting with little ins and outs, short and longs much as bus stopping to pick up passengers, I will leave it as a whole, not breaking it into sections. (see below)
The second part of poem after the initial sentence, uses fragments, short sentences, bits of dialogue, observations, isolated verbs, a prepositional phrase to mimic how, as a passenger, the landscape rushes by, first the fog, then the river, the islands, the houses, come into view and are gone. Then another list, one thing after another. The line breaks are mixed, some end stop, some enjambed. A conversation is overheard and is drawn out in a long series of colons, each elaborating on what was said, heard or half-heard. The list of events—the deaths, the sicknesses, the remarriage, the childbirth, the son lost, the schooner foundered—come in short staccato sentences as if they were floating up like a bubble and burst. The narrator lets the conversations drift her toward sleep when the poem makes a startling shift with the almost cliché-like “Suddenly.” The bus stops. A moose parks itself in front of the bus. People talk. A man assures everyone it is harmless. It’s described as “Towering,” “high,” “homely as a house (or safe as houses,”) harkening back to the houses mentioned in the first sentence, the sense of having to say goodbye to that familiar world that, with the moose, comes back to welcome us.
Having lived in Maine, I can attest to the fantastic, phlegmatic, and curious nature of a moose. I was once driving seventy miles an hour on interstate 95 when a moose, stepping lightly over thee center guard rail, proceeded to walk in front of me as if that’s what a moose should do. She wasn’t hurried. Not even skittish about the traffic. The car in front me veered to the right, accelerating to speed by him, and I veered to the left, getting past him as he went into the right lane. She was huge. Her legs only visible as she passed. For Bishop, such encounters in Nova Scotia would have been commonplace. They could be dangerous. If a bus or car hit a moose, it could be a disaster for the vehicle. Fatalities are not uncommon. In this poem, the moose halts the poem, gives the bus a once over, and moves on. After it steps off the road, Bishop uses a left- branching compound sentence to set up the ending, leaving us with “the smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.” Since smells often stimulate some of our most vivid memories, she concludes the poem with the scents that offer a relief that the encounter is over yet lingers with us like a long goodbye.
Here is the poem. Again, read it aloud and see how the rhyme, the mix of sentences, drive the poem down the page and keep it dramatically engaging.
From narrow provinces/ of fish and bread and tea,/home of the long tides/ where the bay leaves the sea/ twice a day and takes/ the herrings long rides,// where if the river/ enters or retreats/ in a wall of brown foam/ depends on if it meets/ the bay coming in,/ the bay not at home;// where, silted red,/ sometimes the sun sets/ facing ared sea,/ and others, veins the flats’/ lavender, rich mud/ in burning rivulets;// onred, gravelly roads,/ down rows of sugar maples,/ past clapboard farmhouses/ and neat, clapboard churches,/ bleached, ridged as clamshells,/ past twin silver birches,// through late afternoon/ a bus journeys west,/ the windshield flashing pink,/ pink glancing off of metal,/ brushing the dented flank/of blue, beat-up enamel;//down hollows, up rises,/ and waits, patient, while/ a lone traveller gives/ kisses and embraces/ to seven relatives/ and a collie supervises.//
Goodbye to the elms,/ to the farm, to the dog./
The bus starts.
The light/ grows richer; the fog,/
shifting, salty, thin,/ comes closing in.
Its cold, round crystals/ form and slide and settle/ in the white hens’ feathers,/ in gray glazed cabbages,/on the cabbage roses/ and lupins like apostles;// the sweet peas cling/ to their wet white string/ on the whitewashed fences;/ bumblebees creep/ inside the foxgloves,/ and evening commences.//
One stop at Bass River./
Then the Economies—/Lower, Middle, Upper;/ Five Islands, Five Houses/ ,wherea woman shakes a tablecloth/ out after supper./
A pale flickering.
Gone. /
The Tantramar marshes/ and the smell of salt hay. /
An iron bridge trembles/and a loose plank rattles/ but doesn’t give way.//
On the left, a red light/ swims through the dark a ship’s port lantern./
Two rubber boots show,/ illuminated, solemn./
A dog gives one bark.//
A woman climbs in/ with two market bags,/ brisk, freckled, elderly. /
“A grand night. Yes, sir,/ all the way to Boston.” /
She regards us amicably.//
Moonlight as we enter /the New Brunswick woods,/ hairy, scratchy, splintery;/ moonlight and mist/ caught in them like lamb’s wool/on bushes in a pasture.//
The passengers lie back./
Snores.
Some long sighs./
A dreamy divagation/ begins in the night,/ a gentle, auditory,/ slow hallucination…./
In the creakings and noises,/ an old conversation—/not concerning us, /but recognizable, somewhere,/ back in the bus Grandparents’ voices// uninterruptedly/ talking, in Eternity names being mentioned,/ things cleared up finally;/ what he said, what she said,/ who got pensioned;// deaths, deaths and sicknesses;/ the year he remarried;/ the year (something) happened./
She died in childbirth./
That was the son lost/ when the schooner foundered.//
He took to drink.
Yes./
She went to the bad./
When Amos began to pray/ even in the store and/ finally the family had/ to put him away.//
“Yes …” that peculiar/ affirmative.
“Yes …”/
A sharp, indrawn breath,/half groan, half acceptance,/ that means “Life’s like that./ We know it (also death).”//
Talking the way they talked/ in the old featherbed,/ peacefully, on and on,/ dim lamplight in the hall,/ down in the kitchen, the dog/ tucked in her shawl.//
Now, it’s all right now/ even to fall asleep/ just as on all those nights. /
—Suddenly the bus driver/ stops with a jolt,/ turns off his lights.//
A moose has come out of /the impenetrable wood/ and stands there, looms, rather,/ in the middle of the road./
It approaches; it sniffs at/ the bus’s hot hood.//
Towering, antlerless,/ high as a church,/ homely as a house/ (or, safe as houses)./
A man’s voice assures us /“Perfectly harmless….”//
Some of the passengers/ exclaim in whispers,/ childishly, softly,/“Sure are big creatures.”/
“It’s awful plain.” /
“Look! It’s a she!”//
Taking her time,/ she looks the bus over,/ grand, otherworldly./
Why, why do we feel/ (we all feel) this sweet/ sensation of joy?//
“Curious creatures,”/ says our quiet driver,/ rolling his r’s./
“Look at that, would you.”/
Then he shifts gears./
For a moment longer,// by craning backward,/the moose can be seen/ on the moonlit macadam;/ then there’s a dim/ smell of moose, an acrid/ smell of gasoline.
Although Bishop didn’t necessarily draft her poems consciously focusing on the sentences as the contemporary poet Jessica Jacobs does, she was aware of their effect. In an incomplete essay, “Writing Poetry is an unnatural act. . .” she spoke about what she admired in other poets: “The three qualities I admire in poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery.” She quotes from a Hopkins and Auden poem and goes on to say, “It’s accurate, like something seen in a documentary movie. It is spontaneous, natural sounding—helped considerably by the break between adjective and noun in the first two lines.” (Guinn, Ibid, 208) It’s evident that parts of speech, the break between them, is something she notices and is what gives the poem qualities she admires. By paying more attention to the sentence unit and how it interacts with other sentences, and how those sentences, as they build, can shape and inform a poem, poets can better craft their poems, making them sing as Bishop does and, in doing so, make them read as naturally as her poems read.
Bibliography
Bishop, Elizabeth, Prose. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2011)
The Compete Poems, 1927-1979. (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980)
Edgar Allan Poe and The Juke-box, Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Edited and Annotated by Alice Quinn. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)
Cook, Elizabeth. Elizabeth At Work. (Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 2016)
Cook, Reginald L. The Dimensions of Robert Frost. (New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc, 1948)
Landon, Brooks Great Sentences: How to write the kinds of sentences you love to read.(New York: Penguin Group, 2013)
Miller, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993)
Richardson, Mark The Ordeal of Robert Frost. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
Schwartz, Lloyd and Estess, Sybil P. Under Discussion: Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002)
Travisano, Thomas. Love Unknown: the Life and World of Elizabeth Bishop. (New York: Viking, 2019)
Tufle, Virginia. Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. (Cheshire: Graphic Press, 2006)
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 2001
