Jorie Graham talks about Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.”

On August 9, 1947, The New Yorker He devotes nearly an entire page to one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. “In the Fish Houses” by Elizabeth Bishop represents, after the high modernism of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, a break toward a more personal vernacular. It is also a work of imagination, showing how a solitary soul can descend into the heart of life and matter and achieve solace and spiritual insight, however temporary. It confirmed the emergence of a rare new voice: a voice that oscillates between melancholy and intelligence, questioning, even skeptical, but possessing a sacramental sensitivity; A voice that is companionable, insightful and exploratory, but without the need for ideology or belief system–an enchanting voice that has become indispensable in American poetry.

Bishop was not a prolific poet, having written, or considered to have finished, about a hundred carefully edited poems; Many of her best works appeared in this magazine. She spent most of her adult life as an expatriate in Brazil, and once described herself as “the loneliest person ever.” But she approached her editors at The New YorkerEspecially Katherine White and Howard Moss. They were constant and reliable sources of encouragement, something the tormented poet was in desperate need of. It is inconceivable what might have gone unwritten far from the usual home of her poems, a Destination– The word that means the world to this homeless soul.

Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911, but after her father’s death, in the same year, she was transferred to her mother’s family in Nova Scotia—only to be returned (“without counseling”) to Massachusetts in 1918, after her mother, whom she never saw again, suffered an irreversible breakdown. “In the Fish Houses” sees Bishop revisiting a place in Nova Scotia redolent of early memories: “Though it is a cold evening, / Near one of the fish houses / sits an old man netting, / His net, in the darkness almost invisible…”

Opening with the word “notwithstanding” immediately signals a waiver of the emergency. Against, or through, such a coincidence, the poem clearly seeks, through Bishop’s careful description and observation, a “total immersion” in nature, an absolute element that flows beyond mere circumstantiality. Moving down into the landscape, she smells the old air cleaned and purified – “so strong as cod / It makes your nose run and your eyes water” – and makes plans for the sloping fish houses, the shingles. Everything pulls her down; Everything shines, sparkles, reflects; All opaque things become iridescent, then transparent. Surfaces produce depths. Materialism produces immateriality. The old man’s knife, which “scrapes the scales, the chief beauty, of countless fishes,” has a blade that is “almost frayed.”

Drawn toward something “cold and dark and deep and quite clear, / An element which no mortal can bear,” Bishop’s language is filled with an incantation of trance-like initiation. Hypnotic repetitions penetrate and transform her consciousness and ours: “I saw it again and again, the same sea, the same thing, / ​rolling slightly, carelessly over the stones, ​/ icy heat over the stones, ​/ ​over the stones and then the world.” The poem moved from conversation and stories to divination. It speaks to us intimately: “If you dip your hand in it, / Your wrist will immediately ache, / Your bones will begin to ache and your hand will burn ​ / As if water were a transmutation of fire.” Then communion – the bishop writes: “If you taste it, you will first feel bitterness.”

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Dark, salty, clear, poignant, completely free
Derived from cold hard mouth
The world, derived from rocky chests
Forever. . .

And then, because we must learn to abandon this connection and re-acknowledge the unpredictable and unstable currents of human existence: “they flow and flow, and since our knowledge is historical, they flow, they fly.” We desire “total immersion,” but salvation includes – because we are mortal – the knowledge that we must let go and submit to time again. The final word, ‘flew’, seems to slip etymologically straight from the watery ‘flow’ before being transformed, as if by a miracle – the miracle of language – into the action of a bird. The vision lifts away. Was it a visit? Good news? But he’s gone. We have returned to our strange isolation, to our individuality – in history. ♦

“Cold and dark, deep and crystal clear, / An element that no human being can bear.”