Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem” is a masterful blend of a number of ekphrastic strategies, although one word toward the end seems a touch off.

One strategy employed is a tellingly selective detailing. This detailing helps “Poem” succeed even if a reader has no familiarity with the image that prompts the poem.  For some time after I first read the poem—back in the 1970s—I took it as brining an imaginary painting into existence.    (Not until a few years ago did I come across a reproduction of the image, George Hutchinson’s Great Village, Nova Scotia, in John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth?–a book of insightful commentaries on environmental poems that I recommended to those interested in ecopoetry).   In the poem’s second verse paragraph, the speaker helps readers visualize what the landscape depicts—gabled brown and white houses, elms, a steeple, cows, geese in “blue water,”  irises, and “blue sky / below steel-gray storm clouds.”  An ekphrastic poem need not detail the look of a well-known masterpiece, but Bishop ‘s “Poem” suggests something of the clarity that can be gained with attention to the particulars in the observed image.  Even if not blended with other strategies, thoughtfully focused detailing can stand alone as a poem .

In “Poem” another strategy overlaps with the detailing—the speaker’s noting and commenting upon the painter’s technique.   The speaker foregrounds the technique of George Hutchinson:   the “sketch” was painted on “Bristol board” “in an hour, ‘in a breath’”; “some tiny cows” are “two brushstrokes each”; the “wild iris” appears “fresh-squiggled from the tube.”  The speaker comments that ”the artist’s specialty” is “clouds and wonders if a “specklike bird” is not actually a “flyspeck.”  As with detailing, this strategy—focusing on technique—might serve as the basis for a poem in itself.

The poem also highlights the painting’s provenance and, along with that discussion, a brief biography of the painter.  In “Poem” these are strategies that help the poem move toward its conclusion about sharing looks, narrating how the painting has come into the speaker’s possession, establishing the speaker’s family relationship with the painter, and clarifying the painter’s familiarity with Nova Scotia. Each strategy can serve more prominently in an ekphrastic  poem than it does in “Poem.”   A still image exists over time, appearing to different people—the artist, the owners, others who look at the image—and a poem might focus on the differing takes of different people. And, of course, a poem might focus on how a painting relates to or derives from the concerns of the painter’s life (a technique employed by Steve Gehrke in Michelangelo’s Seizure, a collection I hope to discuss in later posts).

Though an ekphrastic poem may not need to suggest how the speaker or readers may relate to the image that prompts the poem, in “Poem” the speaker’s relationship to the image and the place depicted help make the poem “touching.”  The controlling strategy employed by the speaker is to record the viewing of the image as an encounter that moves toward recognition and insight.  Why, the speaker seems to ask herself, is the image worth looking at?  Rather than the know-it-all docent W. H. Auden gives us in “Musee des Beux Arts,” Bishops gives her speaker the voice of someone who is unsure of the value of the “family relic” a downsizing aunt has passed along to her.  If she has seen it hanging in her aunt’s home, she seems not to have looked at it closely; the “little painting” is not, after all, a Bruegel, not does it have the mythological or religious weight one finds in the works of the “old masters”; it is only a “sketch.”  Why “bother” to look, the speaker seems to ask herself.   Noting the old-fashioned “dollar” size of the painting, she stresses words that help her think in words that suggest a concern with value—monetary and otherwise.  And what she records is a narrative of recognition—that the place is one she remembers, knew well.  Then she move to insight—that, even though the village continues to change, it is has been and, though the image, can continue to be a place that is “still loved,” a place the speaker finds worthy of a lyric poem.

“Poem” builds past a recognition of how the painter and speaker share coinciding “visions” or, as the speaker suggests as a more apt word, “looks.” In bothering to study the paining, the speaker has found that “life and memory” of a place can get “compressed,” “turned into each other.”  She goes on to conclude:

Life, and the memory of it cramped,

dim, but how live, how touching in detail—

the little that we get for free,

the little of our earthly trust.  Not much.

About the size of our abidance,

along with theirs: the munching cows,

the iris, crisp and shivering, the water

still standing from spring freshets,

the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

Let me add one other remark, one that is as much about me as a reader as it is about Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem.”   In this otherwise flawless work,  the one word I do not fully trust is “abidance.”  Admittedly, with its long i echoing neatly with the i in “size,” “abidance” conveys the meaning needed; the speaker’s thoughts have moved her to make a claim about shared attachments to a place can abide.  And the context—the phrase “About the size” and the list of passing things listed in the final lines— suggests that any abidance is tenuous,  But is the word “abidance” itself apt, the best word for expressing the speaker’s  meaning?  I am not sure, though I fumble for reasons for being troubled.  Do I find the word a bit of pretentious heightening because of the (in my experience) rarity of its use? Would I prefer “abiding,” so that the word seemed less an abstraction?  Do I wish to see the speaker more pointedly hesitate over the word, as she does with “visions” and suggest the more concrete “hold”?   If so, why am I not as distrustful of “trust”—because of its meaning both “faith” and “inheritance” at once?     Am I troubled that “abidance” might be taken as synonymous with “compliance”?  If so, why am I troubled by the suggestion of dutifulness?   Whatever the reason, “abidance” seems not quite right, a touch that distracts me as much as it fits the argument of Bishop’s admirable poem.

—Jack