On a Villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

THE NEW YORKER M A G A ZIN E published a masterpiece on April 26, 1976. Elizabeth Bishop's Art, later reproduced in her Geography HI, is a convincingly drastic approach to the archaic French form. It shows what drabness may do for an all-too-golden repetitive form. It is superior to the maudlin manias of Thomas, finer than the cerebrations of Empson and still severe, and takes its place along with those of Auden, James Schuyler, and a few other premonitory practitioners' specimen stanzas. The title is Art, and it identifies for us the integrity and lack of integrity that remain the polarizing tensions of the poem. It is indeed a poem of explicit art, of many-minded cunningness. The poem reminds us, as Freud does in his chapters upon the theme of forgetting in The Psycho pathology of Everyday Life, that the most buried life corresponds in its dynamic aspects to writing, to expression. The poem is necessarily self referential and self-reflexive whilst it never gives up its bitter burden of referentiality. The art of losing seems a mere theme, but it is also the central and active theme of themelessness, affording such a space of absence to the poem. The title is reserved and masterful. In a poem which conceives of mastery in the most negatively thrilling terms, it stands as a Keatsian lone star of hermitage over the poem. The title is an unadorned handle and forgets nothing. A villanelle may be said to be the classic form of repetition and persistence. Like Kierkegaard, Bishop broods about the possible repetitions possible upon this mortal earth. She is part of the dreaming tribe Keats brooded about and nearly deposes in his Fall of Hyperion and she persists in brooding. The poem is both an homage to poetry, a defense of poetry, and a terrifying lament about the weaknesses of poetry in relation to mortalia that touch us in the Virgilian sense. Each repetition furnishes a new twist of suffering. Rather than producing a stream of repetitions to remind us of voice or consciousness in Stein's explicit meanderings, she composes and decomposes with repetition and persistence to give us a very palpable thickness (in Jakobson's senses) of attention. The poem is filled with palpable dissonances of off-rhymes that link Bishop with the tradition of orality, desire, and dissonance, in Dickinson and Moore: fluster/master; gesture/master. These dissonances each lead to the incongruous congruent rhyme of master and disaster. It IS disaster that is the large fate of the master. As Heidegger has it of Nietzsche, so Bishop of herself, the topoi are the circle and suffering. The poem is a circle from which we cannot escape anymore than Borges can escape from Odin's disk in his phantasmal story. The poem and its archaistic form are themselves a fine and almost comical fate. One modulates from dissonance to dissonance, as in Charles Rosen's sense of the classical style, too often perceived as a