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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral 1 “Roosters”: juxtaposition and adjustment 2 “The Shampoo”: metrical choice as crux 3 “Five Flights Up”: metre as figure Works cited Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Elizabeth Bishop

    Ce livre est recensé par

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    Table des matières

    A Prosody of Doubt and Satisfaction: Aspects of Meaning and Form in Elizabeth Bishop

    Lacy Rumsey

    p. 131-152

    Résumés

    A potential paradox of Elizabeth Bishop’s use of form is that the predominance of metre in her poetry may be seen as introducing a rhetorical device based in equivalence and order into a poetics that is largely sceptical of such values. This study seeks to analyse, for the first time, ways in which the risk of such a paradox’s being experienced as a contradiction is evaded by Bishop’s poetry, via the creation of rhythmically ambiguous passages in which the reader is given a significant amount of liberty in determining the metre of particular lines. It is argued, via close readings grounded in beat-based metrics, that the reader’s difficult choice of metre will itself be experienced as a significant source of meaning within certain of Bishop’s poems. Such poems construct semantic associations for the particular metres between which the reader must choose, and dramatize situations or narratives which describe choices or constructions analogous to those made by the reader. Poems discussed are “Roosters,” in which the pleasures attendant on the four-beat metre associated with the roosters are shown to counteract the poem’s ostensible condemnation of the traits with which they are identified; “The Shampoo,” where certain of the reader’s metrical choices draw on emotions comparable to those felt by the poem’s speaker; and “Five Flights Up,” in which finely crafted nonmetrical language may be experienced as an ideal but fragile vehicle for the relation of the human self to the world.

    L’emploi de la forme poétique chez Elizabeth Bishop peut apparaître paradoxal, dans la mesure où la place prédominante que cette poésie accorde au mètre semblerait introduire des procédés rhétoriques relevant de l’équivalence et de l’ordre au sein d’une poétique elle-même très sceptique à l’égard de telles valeurs. Cette étude se propose d’examiner pour la première fois l’une des méthodes qui permettent à la poésie de Bishop de pallier le risque que ce paradoxe ne soit perçu comme une contradiction : la présence de passages rythmiquement ambigus, pour la lecture desquels le lecteur jouit d’une certaine liberté dans le choix d’un mètre. S’appuyant sur des microlectures construites à la lumière d’un modèle métrique axé sur les beats (temps forts), l’article suggère que dans certains poèmes de Bishop le choix difficile d’un mètre sera vécu par le lecteur comme étant en soi une source importante de signification. Ce sont des poèmes qui créent des associations sémantiques autour des cadres métriques entre lesquels le lecteur doit choisir, et qui mettent en scène des situations qui décrivent des choix analogues à ceux auxquels le lecteur est confronté. Dans « Roosters », les plaisirs produits par le tetramètre auquel les coqs sont associés font contrepoids à l’apparente condamnation par le poème des traits qui les caractérisent ; dans « The Shampoo », certains des choix auxquels le lecteur est confronté mettent en jeu des émotions qui font écho à celles éprouvées par le sujet lyrique du poème ; dans « Five Flights Up », un langage non métrique bien construit semble représenter la possibilité d’une relation idéale entre le sujet et le monde.

    Texte intégral 1 “Roosters”: juxtaposition and adjustment 2 “The Shampoo”: metrical choice as crux 3 “Five Flights Up”: metre as figure Works cited Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1Lorrie Goldensohn reports Elizabeth Bishop as writing, in the Nemer notebooks found in Brazil, a note on rhyme: “Rhyme is mystical […] a method, of magically interlocking ideas, making associations” (154). If this is true of rhyme—and following New Critical and subsequent work on “semantic rhyme,” it has become a commonplace—it is also true of other patterning devices, such as rhythm and metre; anything that makes vertical connections between the different elements of a poem has semantic possibilities. Bishop’s own poems are, as has often been stated, extremely carefully patterned; many are rhymed, most are metrical, and poets from Marianne Moore to John Ashbery have testified to the fineness of Bishop’s ear. This means, in turn, that the form of her poems possesses an unusually rich semantic potential, from the local phenomena of rhyme or rhythmic repetition, to the creation of a generalised sense in the reader that meaningful patterns can be derived from the contemplation of the world. The challenge for Bishop criticism is to understand how this potential may be deployed within a poetics that in many respects works actively to counter that sense.

    2The analysis proposed in this study seeks to contribute to that understanding. It proceeds on the basis of four premises, whose validity it explores through the close reading of individual poems. These premises are as follows. Firstly, that Bishop’s poetry contains an unusually high frequency of passages whose form is ambiguous, as well as of passages in which that form is rendered unpredictable through the repeated juxtaposition of different metres. The formal ambiguity of such passages is greater than that encountered in more regular metrical poetry, where metrical constraints are strong enough to nullify the formal implications of phonological uncertainty. That is to say, whereas in dealing with more regular metre, readers have freedom over the execution of the local detail of rhythm within a fixed metrical frame, readers of Bishop sometimes have relative freedom over the metrical frame itself. Secondly, that this combination of ambiguity and unpredictability works to make the reader unusually aware of the mechanisms by which the form of any given Bishop poem develops, be they phonological, perceptual or performative. Thirdly, that a central component of that awareness consists in the reader’s consciousness of his or her own role in the realisation of poetic form, and in particular of his or her capacity to explore the different interpretations and performances made possible through phonological and metrical ambiguity. Fourthly, that the reader’s awareness both of the contingency of poetic form and of his or her role in its construction entertains a complex relationship with the profound formal satisfactions that the poetry nonetheless offers. This relationship in turn has important implications for that form’s semantic potential, and the way in which that potential is recuperated into the experience of reading.

    3The discussion is structured around three close analyses: of the opening stanzas of “Roosters” (CP 35), where the reader is confronted with an ambiguous rhyme scheme and a continually varying metre; of “The Shampoo” (CP 84) whose final lines constitute a crux in which the reader’s choice of metre has dramatic implications for meaning; and of “Five Flights Up” (CP 181) where the form-creating capacity is experienced as unreliable and in danger of collapse. These poems represent a sample of the many ways in which Bishop turns to poetic and epistemological profit the variability of interpretations to which her rhythmically and metrically ambiguous poetry can give rise.

    4Implicit in this analysis is, it should be made clear, the assumption that the forms of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry are valuable in and of themselves; that the patterns created by the interaction of reader and text are profoundly aesthetically satisfying, whether or not attention is paid to their semantic potential. The semantic emphasis of this study should not be interpreted as implying that form should be read only, or even primarily, for meaning. Nevertheless, the complex nature of the aesthetic satisfaction made available by Bishop’s poetry deserves attention; and this must include a consideration of the relationship between the two terms.

    1 “Roosters”: juxtaposition and adjustment

    5“Roosters” (CP 35) is a poem whose form has provoked a certain amount of disagreement among readers; for one critic, it is written in “controlled free verse” (Travisano 74), while for another it is, rather, in “irregular trimeter” (Costello 66). While this disagreement is a helpful gauge of the rhythmic difficulty of the poem, it is one that can, I suggest, be resolved, via an account of the poem as an assemblage of several different metres whose occurrence is, although patterned, never predictable. As such, it can be compared to other many-metred poems such as “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (CP 82) and “The Armadillo” (CP 103)—the latter described by Laurans as a poem which “keeps the reader constantly readjusting the meter in his head” (78).1 However, the compressed nature of the three-line stanza used in “Roosters,” and the fact that that stanza seems to promise a regularity which is repeatedly deviated from, is uniquely destabilising to the reader in search of a formal principle in which to ground interpretation and performance; at the same time, this destabilisation is mitigated through the rewards of phonetic and prosodic patterning. The self-consciousness that such a strategy of destabilisation and reward induces in the reader may well have implications for the overall interpretation of a poem whose theme would seem to be the need to be wary of, but open to, the multiplicity of interpretations to which apparently natural symbols can give rise.

    6That the poem is an assemblage of metres can be demonstrated via a scansion of its first seven stanzas. I have argued previously (Rumsey, “Exhilarating uncertainty” 127-30) that Bishop’s poetry is particularly well suited to a mode of prosodic analysis that draws on the beat-based metrics developed by Derek Attridge, rather than on traditional foot-scansion, and such an approach is followed here. This suitability derives in large measure from the separation of the phonological and perceptual components of rhythm upon which that metrics insists; Bishop’s poetry exploits variety and ambiguity in both.2 The scansion below reproduces the interpretation of the lines that I find best suited to the interpretative constraints of phonology and metre, and can certainly be challenged on those grounds; the prosodic analysis of free verse and the freer metrical styles must necessarily be conducted via suggestion and dialogue.

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    7The reader of these stanzas quickly learns to look for and expect metre in the poem; the first line’s simple alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables is a clear signal in that direction. However, s/he will also learn to expect the unexpected, and this as early as line 2, in which not only does the metre change—from two-beat to three-beat—but the realisation of that metre in language is of a wholly different order of complexity, since the line includes two double offbeats (xx) and an implied offbeat (//).3 One effect of the great syntactic and lexical precision of Bishop’s writing is precisely that it encourages readers to rise to this kind of formal challenge; in l. 2, the reader is likely to want to give each new lexical item its accentual due, articulating evenly and stressing all the stressable material and pausing between “blue” and “dark” in order that both adjective and noun sound clearly. If this is done, the three-beat metre will emerge of its own accord. The same is true of l. 3, which the reader is likely to want to time in such a way that the echoing precision of “first crow” and “first cock” can be felt; again, the metre has changed, this time to a five-beat. Having emerged from the negotiation of a highly challenging piece of language, the 2.3.5 pattern may stand as the reader’s first hypothesis as to the poem’s basic stanza form.

    8The second stanza both strengthens and destabilises the expectations of pattern elicited by the first. In ll. 4-5, the reader has the satisfaction of recognising the expanding rhythm, two beats then three, carried over from the first stanza, and of seeing that of the two possible rhyme schemes derivable from stanza 1—aba or a slant-rhyme aaa—it is the simpler, aaa, which seems to win out. At the same time, however, this recognition does not allow for relaxation; there is variety in the linguistic realisation of the metres—for example, l. 4 is headless, lacking the initial offbeat found in l. 1—while the rhyme scheme, for all that is satisfyingly coherent, commits the unorthodoxy of rhyming a masculine with a feminine ending— “below”/ “window”—a fact which means that the rhyme is likely to be experienced as a pleasant but slightly unnerving surprise. In terms of rhythm, any expectation that the 2.3.5 pattern can be relied upon is exploded by l. 6, which, although it has the ten syllables associated with pentameter, cannot be read satisfactorily with more than three accents. In consequence, the stanza falls into a 2.3.3 pattern, departing from the expected 2.3.5 at the very first opportunity.

    9Whether or not the reader is aware of the detail of these changes, a feeling of rhythmic disorientation seems probable. However, this disorientation at the level of rhythm is counteracted at the level of rhyme, since a rhyme on the word “echo” is necessarily foregrounded, and that foregrounding sets off an obvious semantic implication feeding back into the perception of the rhythm; what is being described is an echo that is surprising in its rapidity and immediacy; and this is what the line enacts in its quickened pace: a three-beat line simply takes less time to say than a five-beat one, and when realised over ten syllables necessitates a skimming over unstressed syllables such as those, appropriately of “and imm-.” The meaning of the line is reinforced, the pleasure of the unusual rhyme strategy is recalled and reinforced; and the reader’s participation in this process, via his or her attentiveness to a potentially disorientating change of metre, is foregrounded and rewarded.

    10One might also suggest that this superposition of satisfaction at the level of rhyme on disorientation at that of metre takes on a further semantic function at this point, and one which adds further complexity to the reading experience. The poem’s first sentence stretches over four stanzas, whose lines are sometimes coincident with a syntactic unit, sometimes not; in addition to the intonational complexity which will result from this fact, the reader must confront metrical complexity within the line, metrical variation between lines, and stanzaic variation between stanzas—in the scansion proposed above, the opening four are 2.3.5, 2.3.3, 2.3.3, 3.2.5. For all its pleasures, therefore, the negotiation of these stanzas’ deployment of form requires significant effort. In consequence, local instances of semantically recuperable rhyme—where the effort is felt to pay off in terms of form and interpretation simultaneously—are likely to be experienced as moments of relief. In the case of l. 6’s “echo,” this relief will, in turn, add depth and interpretative complexity to the cry of the roosters to which it refers; for if the poem on one level presents this cry as a violent intrusion onto a peaceful night, the fact that the repetition of the cry adds structure to a laborious rhythmic sequence valorises it even as it is deprecated.

    11On this interpretation, the reader’s experience of the rhythms and rhymes of “Roosters”—more precisely, his/her experience of participating in the creation of the perceptual patterns that they form—materially alters his/her interpretation of the poem’s central symbolic relationship: that between the rooster and the poetic voice. Where a “prose” interpretation of the lines might present the roosters as wholly negative, the effect of the poetic form into which they are cast is to associate them with, at times, a welcome relief from the nervy precision of the poem’s syntax and metre. The same is true of l. 12’s reinstatement of the five-beat pattern in its final line:

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    12The reassuring recognisability of the stanza-final pentameter—seen previously for the first and only time in stanza 1—is reinforced here by its cooccurrence with the ending of the sentence, and the bringing to a close of this phase of the poem’s action; the tentative sentence is drawing to a close, and the poem, like the roosters’ cries, has begun to “catch.” Despite the deprecatory descriptions and analogies so far associated with the roosters’ cry, therefore— “horrible insistence,” “grates like a wet match”—the reader will once more associate that cry with a moment of performative relief and satisfaction; and once more, therefore, be led via the identification of poetic form with the vicissitudes and pleasures of performance to take a view of the roosters which is significantly less unequivocal than would otherwise be the case.

    13Stanza five does something new: departing from the round of two-, three-and five-beats, the lines describing water-closet and chicken droppings bring in a four-beat for the first time. As Attridge and others have noted, four-beat is a more insistent rhythm than five-beat, with an extremely powerful capacity to marshal both phonology and perception in its service; its set of generic associations (e.g. ballad, song, march) are, when compared to those of the five-beat (notably iambic pentameter) suggestive of the subordination of the nuance of the individual speaking voice; several of Bishop’s poems, most notably “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” (CP 69), draw on these facts for the purposes of irony (Rumsey, “Exhilarating uncertainty,” 134-35). Here, the surprising shift of metre is coupled with one of content; the scatological content of the fifth stanza of “Roosters” was, as is well known, objected to by Marianne Moore precisely on the grounds of its indelicacy, an objection which Bishop firmly parried through reference to her desire to represent what she called “the essential baseness of militarism” (One Art, 96). By virtue of this double departure—to a new metre and a new kind of content—the stanza sets in motion an association between the four-beat metre and the roosters’ capacity to intrude onto the world of the speaker with a violent otherness. This association will be re-activated in several subsequent passages—for example, in stanza 9: “the many wives who lead hens’ lives/of being courted and despised,” and stanza 16, “Each screaming/get up! stop dreaming! Roosters, what are you projecting?.” Both of these are in the 2.2.4 pattern, and thus even more under the sway of the four-beat; their opening couplets can be assimilated to a four-beat line with internal rhyme. This is a sharp, snappy, powerful metre, a world away from the delicate combinations and variations of the opening, and a measure of the transformations through which the poem’s mood and subject pass.

    14Yet these associations are never allowed to become fixed; snappy power has its compensations, and one of the subtleties of “Roosters” is to make these compensations available. They are epitomised by stanza 13, which is also in the 2.2.4 pattern:

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    15Camille Roman’s recent account of this poem, which locates it firmly in the wartime context of its composition, interprets this stanza as an evocation of the dispiriting and unethical use to which maps may be put in such a context (60). However, the rhythm of the stanza works strongly against such an interpretation. For, if the above reading is followed, the lines are intensely satisfying to read aloud; a highly attractive construction of alliteration, rhyme, and throwaway cultural reference, all wrapped up in that four-beat metre.4 This satisfaction, this pleasure, must affect our response to the lines; prosody is not a separate dimension of the reading experience, but an integral part of it.

    16How does this awareness of the potential pleasures of the metre affect the associations noted above—those between the four-beat and the violence of the roosters? In the first place, it prevents them from becoming monodimensional or trite; one could go on to say that the setting up of small-scale patterns of resonance that construct meanings, but not master narratives, is characteristic of Bishop’s poetics as a whole, and of this poem in particular. In the stanzas following those just discussed, the four-beat is further entrenched in the metrical repertoire of the poem; it crops up in passages that evoke violence (such as stanza 19), but also in the very lyrical lines that close the poem; and the pentameter, on which the poem seemed at its outset to rely, is, in comparison, much less present.

    17The interpretation and value of “Roosters” has caused a great deal of debate, not all of it favourable; Willard Spiegelman, for example, found that “the studied symmetry, the juxtaposition of opposing views which augment one another seems too easy” (158). More recently, however, the poem’s open-endedness has been better appreciated; the forgiveness of Peter does not erase the human capacity for baseness, and the daily arrival of the sun, for all its beauty, leaves both forgiveness and baseness in place. Costello, from whose analysis these terms are drawn, is representative and, I think, correct to describe the rooster as “an icon which resists idolatry to provide an open, dynamic response to the world” (65). Interpretation cannot fix a meaning on the rooster, nor on the poem as a whole; nor, finally, on its metre, which sets up, via its varied satisfactions, little eddies of meaning that add complexity and richness to the reading experience without determining its limits, and in which the reader is made aware of both the effortfulness and the contingency of such satisfactions.

    2 “The Shampoo”: metrical choice as crux

    18In contrast to that of “Roosters,” the thematic complexity of “The Shampoo” (CP 84) is lesser, and most published readings of the poem are relatively straightforward; that which may best capture its spirit is Peter Robinson’s, for whom it is “an after-the-fact poem by a coy mistress feeling pushed into something, yet glad to have been pushed” (105). Robinson draws on a knowledge of the poem’s drafts; its first title was “Gray Hair,” an awareness of which lends a very concrete interpretation to the image of “shooting stars” that are “flocking so soon,” especially given a further awareness of the fact that Bishop’s partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, went grey comparatively early in life (109). To readers who lack such knowledge, the greyness of the lover’s hair is not, I think, apparent; the “shooting stars” function as an effective image of bedazzlement, and the characterisation of the lover as “precipitate and pragmatical”—which Robinson interprets in the light of an earlier draft’s “demanding and too voluble”—is a positive one within the paired contexts of the poem’s evocation of the slowness of geological, botanical time—a slowness which can include and, presumably, muffle, human experience—and of the rapidity with which individual experience can be liberated from this scheme through a human agency which responds to the immediate and the sexual. The aim of the analysis which follows is to illustrate the extent to which such a celebratory response to the poem derives from its metrical realisation by the reader; in particular, from a pivotal point in that realisation, where the reader is invited to act with a precipitation comparable to the lovers’, and to experience that precipitation as a moment of liberty.

    19The poem’s opposition of a steady, slow, non-human timeframe, and a quick, passionate one of which humans are capable, is reflected in the poem’s negotiation of two different underlying rhythms: five-beat and four-beat. In stanza 1, the two are in a certain equilibrium; there is a stateliness to this equilibrium which arises from both the form and the meaning of these lines:

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    20The 4.2.4.2 is balanced by the pentameter couplet that closes the stanzas; the enjambment and mid-line intonation group boundary in l. 2 prevent the four-beat from becoming as powerful as it might in a syntactically simpler context, as does the absence of any double offbeats; the abacbc rhyme scheme, meanwhile, exactly realised, weaves the stanza together in a fairly intricate whole. The pentameters set the seal on a stanza form that will lead readers to expect a careful, precise progression through the rest of the poem.

    21The second stanza defeats that expectation:

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    22The pentameter has disappeared, and every line except two is now a four-beat; moreover, the rhyme scheme has become slightly more relaxed, permitting the pairings “pragmatical”/ “amenable” and “on us/ “Time is.” Most important, however, is the change of metre that has taken place in the stanza’s third line, a change which in its interaction with rhyme and consequent semantic effect is very reminiscent of that identified in l. 6 of “Roosters.” In st. 1, this position had been occupied by a four-beat; here, the metre has shortened to a two-beat. The shortening quickens the pace of the line and means, crucially, that we hit the rhyme on “friend” two beats earlier than anticipated; the stanza’s first three lines function somewhat like a four-beat couplet. The satisfaction brought by the early rhyme is an unexpected pleasure which could not be more appropriate to the fact that, in some sense, unexpected pleasures are the subject of the stanza and the poem; it is appropriate, too, that the pleasure should arise on the rhyme-word “friend,” and that the line which follows should supply the words “precipitate and pragmatical,” which, at one interpretative level, can be heard as a description of the experience just enacted by the metre. The recurrence of the four-beat throughout the rest of the stanza, and the disappearance of the five-beat, cements the impression that a substantial shift in both form and narrative has occurred.

    23The opening of the poem’s third stanza carries forward the 4.2.2 opening from stanza 2, but quickens the metre a further notch by making the fourth line also a two-beat. There is, therefore a sense of rhythmic crescendo, of a move towards the poem’s climax:

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    24This climax is constituted by the stanza’s closing lines, which, in their metrical ambivalence, constitute the rhythmic and interpretative crux of the poem as a whole:

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    25How are these lines to be read? The text suggests two main possibilities; the choice between them is itself a constitutive element of the meaning of the poem. This is the first:

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    26This reading finds, in the eleven-syllable penultimate line, an echo of the pentameters that close stanza 1, and a return to the measured, formal tone of those lines; this measured tone then carries over into the final line, and an accent is placed on “like” to maintain a regular accentual-syllabic metre. This approach gives dignity and weight to the lines, and is sufficiently structurally seductive in its echo of the first stanza to be a real presence in the reader’s mind; it might be thought, on the other hand, to do a slight violence to the needs of the language, with the stressed “come” denied a beat (although this can be rectified if a falling inversion is instead chosen) and “in” given an unnatural degree of prominence.

    27The other performance throws caution to the winds, if reading poetry can ever be thought to constitute such an activity:

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    28The penultimate line is a typical accentual four-beat, with strong beats on the four stressed syllables, and a light swing over the irregular offbeats in between; nothing here is accented that does not absolutely have to be, and this gives the naturalness of tone missing from the first version. The last line adopts a similar preference for naturalness; there is no phonological need to accent “like,” and the three-beat that results is barely less powerful than the four-beat; indeed, the four-beat + three-beat combination is the basis of the ballad stanza. This is not a stately reading, but it implies full reader participation in the modes and meaning of the text; the pleasure that it can procure is thus an exceptionally persuasive rhetorical ploy.

    29This account of this poem suggests several conclusions. Firstly, that its opening balances slow human with slow non-human time, and reinforces this equilibrium by that between four and five beat metres. Secondly, that the changes wrought in the metre of the second stanza bring strong cognitive reinforcement to the stanza’s description of a moment of liberation from those timescales. Finally, that the reader himself or herself is invited, via the alternate possibilities for the poem’s final lines, to choose a similar moment of precipitate pragmatism, responding to the pressures of the language, rejecting the cautious pentameter, and enjoying the power of the four-beat, with all the associations that it has accrued in the previous stanza. The reader’s ability to choose between different forms of metrical satisfaction is thus a fundamental component of the poem’s meaning.

    3 “Five Flights Up”: metre as figure

    30In “Roosters,” the reader is continually on the qui vive for metrical change; in “The Shampoo,”, he or she is called upon to make a choice between related satisfactions. It is appropriate to close with a poem in which such satisfactions are presented as more difficult of access, and in which the adequacy of metre to poetry is itself problematised.

    31In “Five Flights Up” (CP 181), the poetic voice contrasts the difficulty of beginning a new day with the apparent ease with which the natural world makes such transitions. As such, the poem returns to two of Bishop’s main themes: the sense of time, and relations between the subject and the world. It does so through the figure of dawn, frequent in Bishop’s poetry—compare “Roosters”—as a metonymy for the daily re-engagement with the business of living; and it does so through a similarly metonymic use of metre, whose perceptual regularity, based in repetition, comes to stand in an ironic relationship to the regularity which obtains in the rhythms of the natural world. The poem presents regularity and repetition as an inevitable part of life, well suited to animals for whom rushing in circles is a satisfying activity in its own right, and to whom the returning rhythms of the daily cycle are uncomplicated— “yesterday brought to today so lightly”—, but much less satisfying to a thinking human subject. The regularities of metre play a significant part in this aspect of the poem’s argument, as does the glimpsed alternative of nonmetricality.

    32The poem sets up a series of oppositions between lines which are clearly metrical, and those which, lacking an obvious or satisfactory metrical realisation, are more likely to be experienced as nonmetrical. These oppositions are of two main kinds, structural and local, and through their recurrence in particular circumstances they come to acquire a semantic charge.

    33The principal structural opposition derives from the fact that all four stanzas begin with nonmetrical lines—or, to be more precise, lines whose phonological structure is such that any metrical realisation of them is relatively likely to be felt as forced or uncomfortable—and end with much less ambiguously metrical ones.

    34Stanza one:

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    35Stanza two:

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    36Stanza 3:

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    37Stanza 4:

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    38By virtue of its presence in each stanza, the movement from nonmetre to metre is also, therefore, present at the level of the whole poem, standing as the rhythmic counterpart to the poem’s other structuring movement, from darkness to day.

    39Within this structure, local rhythmic oppositions are multiple. As in “Roosters,” for example, lines of different metres are regularly adjacent. More unusual, the juxtaposition of lines of metrical and nonmetrical speech causes the intonational means by which speech becomes metrical to be foregrounded. The first stanza is particularly rich in such contrasts, which are of two kinds. One kind occurs over the length of a sentence. In the first stanza, two sentences consist in a highly regular metrical line, describing an element of the natural world, and a falling away from metre into the less regular intonation of everyday speech:

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    40A third has the reverse movement, passing from the irregular intonations of everyday speech to the regularity of metre:

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    41The second kind of intonational contrast is located in the poem’s repeated reliance on a pragmatically determined accent based on contrast in order to sustain the metre of a given line:

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    42In such a line, the reader’s voice creates a metrical pattern by dramatising the implicit contrasts on which the poem draws.

    43Via these oppositions, both metre and nonmetre take on semantic connotations, which develop as the poem proceeds. In the first stanza, metre is clearly associated with the animal world, via its presence in ll. 2-3, and with the ease of fit between animals and the rhythms of the day. Nonmetre is present as a reminder of the unformed patterns out of which metre arises. In the second stanza, these associations change slightly. The stanza’s sole nonmetrical line is also its most authoritative, possessed of intensely attractive phonetic echoes, and constituting, in the care and precision with which it describes the matching care and precision of the morning, a rare moment of human at-homeness in the world:

    Image

    44In contrast, the increasingly regular rhythms of the stanza’s succeeding lines tend towards boredom; the sentence in which it consists fades into an ellipsis, and l. 14’s textbook pentameter, by which it is succeeded, ends on a yawn.

    Image

    45There is, therefore, a sense in which l. 10’s nonmetre is experienced in this stanza as the most appropriate and creative kind of poetic language available—a moment in which Bishop’s poetics and prosody function in optimistic collaboration.

    46Yet such moments are rare within the rest of the poem, in which the interrelations between human and natural worlds are repeatedly dissatisfying, as are the metrical negotiations they lead to. In stanza 3, an opening line of an attractive lightness of descriptive and rhythmical touch is again succeeded by a textbook regularity, in the tetrameter and trimeter associated with the dog’s owner. Thereafter the stanza seems much more constrained, and the pairing that concludes the stanza is an awkward one.

    47The final stanza drives home both the failure of the poem’s voice to find a satisfactory sense of place in the world, and its inability to remain in nonmetre. L. 21, beginning the stanza, is, like the other stanza-initial lines, not obviously metrical, and is likewise followed by metrical ones. However, both metre and nonmetre are now made to stand for the dissatisfaction that the stanza expresses, a dissatisfaction which is most audible in the stanza’s repeated use of contrastive focus: “Obviously he has no sense of shame… he and the bird know everything is answered” (emphasis added). Where l. 5’s isolated contrastive accent seemed expressive of imaginative sympathy with the natural world, such a frequency of contrast, with the poetic voice as the implicit other term, suggests a collapse of sympathy into self-pity. The grounds of this self-pity are, clearly, that imaginative sympathy has not enabled the poem’s voice to overcome the dichotomy between human anxiety and animal ease. This dichotomy is brought into conclusive relief by the poem’s final lines. L 25 is nonmetrical—the first nonmetrical line to be located so close to stanza-end—and its nonmetre is coupled with a potentially admiring generosity of tone:

    Image

    48Yet neither nonmetre nor admiration lasts; the final line, relying once more on a contrastive accent—appropriately, on “I”—grinds out a pentameter whose formal coherence is richly appropriate to its meaning:

    Image

    49The contrastive accent may lift the pitch of “I,” or may cause it to fall, but either way it is that accent which will cause the line to be perceived as metrical. Like the dwelling in the world for which, in the course of this poem, it has become emblematic, metre here almost, but not quite, fails to be realised; like the psychological state to which the line points, it represents a hard-won but unhappy compromise. Led through the drama of performance, on which both dwelling and metre rely, the reader is uniquely placed to draw both pleasure from the coherence arrived at, and an understanding of the mechanics of that coherence.

    50In Bishop’s poetry, the experience of moments of satisfaction, beauty, and awe is simultaneous with an awareness of the contingency of such moments. The role of poetic form in the reader’s construction of this experience is considerable and, as this study has sought to demonstrate, operates in part through the semanticisation of formal variety and ambiguity.

    51In “Roosters,” competing metres demand continual attention from the reader; the resulting performative self-consciousness, in particular with regard to the grounds on which four-beat metres may be experienced as obtrusive or enjoyable, is a major part of the poem’s subtle interrogation of habit, violence and compensation. In reading “The Shampoo,” different readers, and indeed the same reader on different occasions, may choose different renditions of the poem’s ambiguous final lines; thematic aspects of the poem seem, nevertheless, to encourage that which is more conducive to the creation of the sense of liberty and fulfilment that is the poem’s subject. Finally, while the adequacy of metre as a poetic strategy is not, of course, the subject of “Five Flights Up,” it is a significant element in the poem’s multiple interrogations. Metre in the poem takes on the status of a necessary but unhappy frame, pulling the self into an accommodation with the imperatives of time that is itself necessary but unhappy; nonmetre appears as a figure for an alternative way of dwelling in poetry and in the world, potentially very satisfying, but, at least within the logic of this late poem, unsustainable.

    52Bishop’s prosody thus inscribes the doubleness often associated with her poetics within the local phonological and interpretative decisions that underpin oral performance, and enables the high charge of meaning carried by her form to be experienced as unobtrusive within a poetry that is generally sceptical of rhetoric. Rich in innovation in its own right, the relationship between Bishop’s prosody and her poetics is also worth considering in its relation to broader questions in which the two domains intersect. The association of metre with an unearned rhetorical authority was one reason for such patterning’s fall from favour during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In assigning to readers a considerable degree of freedom in the choice of metre, and in creating prosodic and interpretative conditions in which the exercise of that freedom is experienced as a source of self-consciousness, doubt and satisfaction, Bishop’s poetry constitutes an original and powerful intervention in the terms of that debate.

    Works cited

    53Attridge, Derek. Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

    54Attridge, Derek. and Thomas Carper. Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry. London: Routledge, 2003.

    55Bishop, Elizabeth. Complete Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983.

    56Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Noonday, 1994.

    57Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991.

    58Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

    59Laurans, Penelope. “‘Old Correspondences’: Prosodic Transformations in Elizabeth Bishop.” Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Eds. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983: 75-95.

    60Robinson, Peter. “Pretended Acts: ‘The Shampoo.’” Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery. Eds Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott. Newcastle: U of Newcastle/Bloodaxe, 2002: 103-12.

    61Roman, Camille. Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II—Cold War View. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

    62Rumsey, Lacy. “‘Exhilarating uncertainty’: reading Bishop’s rhythms.” Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: “and looked our infant sight away.” Ed. Axel Nesme. Paris: Ellipses, 2002: 127-43.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 On ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’, see Rumsey, ‘Exhilarating uncertainty’, 132-33.

    2 Following Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, / represents a primary stress, \ a secondary stress, x an unstressed syllable; the underlining of any of these signs indicates the association of a metrical beat with the syllable in question.

    3 A double offbeat is an offbeat associated with two syllables; an implied offbeat occurs when consecutive beats are associated with consecutive syllables, and where the syntax and punctuation induce no intervening pause. See Attridge and Carper, 35, 149.

    4 A different reading would allow a beat to be perceived on ‘mud-’, thus turning the stanza’s second line into a three-beat. For the reasons set out in this paragraph, my opinion is that such a reading serves the lines less well.

    Auteur

    • Lacy Rumsey

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    1 On ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’, see Rumsey, ‘Exhilarating uncertainty’, 132-33.

    2 Following Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, / represents a primary stress, \ a secondary stress, x an unstressed syllable; the underlining of any of these signs indicates the association of a metrical beat with the syllable in question.

    3 A double offbeat is an offbeat associated with two syllables; an implied offbeat occurs when consecutive beats are associated with consecutive syllables, and where the syntax and punctuation induce no intervening pause. See Attridge and Carper, 35, 149.

    4 A different reading would allow a beat to be perceived on ‘mud-’, thus turning the stanza’s second line into a three-beat. For the reasons set out in this paragraph, my opinion is that such a reading serves the lines less well.

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    Rumsey, L. (2006). A Prosody of Doubt and Satisfaction: Aspects of Meaning and Form in Elizabeth Bishop. In N. Axel & J. Pothier (éds.), Elizabeth Bishop (1‑). Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.16183
    Rumsey, Lacy. « A Prosody of Doubt and Satisfaction: Aspects of Meaning and Form in Elizabeth Bishop ». In Elizabeth Bishop, édité par Nesme Axel et Jacques Pothier. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2006. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.16183.
    Rumsey, Lacy. « A Prosody of Doubt and Satisfaction: Aspects of Meaning and Form in Elizabeth Bishop ». Elizabeth Bishop, édité par Nesme Axel et Jacques Pothier, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2006, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.16183.

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    Axel, N., & Pothier, J. (éds.). (2006). Elizabeth Bishop (1‑). Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.16053
    Axel, Nesme, et Jacques Pothier, éd. Elizabeth Bishop. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2006. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.16053.
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