ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
Repetition and the Honest Signal in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics
Sarah Giragosian
Many fine critics of Elizabeth Bishop’s work, including David Kalstone, Bonnie
Costello, and David Shapiro, have discussed Bishop’s natural inclination towards
repetition. Shapiro argues that Bishop’s repetition, whether metrical, sonic, tropic, or
syntactic, does not insist upon “consciousness or voice” in the way of Gertrude Stein,
but instead enables the poet to “compose and decompose with repetition and
persistence to give a very palpable thickness . . . of attention” (Shapiro 77). I posit that
Bishop’s repetition engages with attention so as to articulate its foundational role in
forging a connection between consciousness and conscience (which are not
necessarily coincident). Repetition, with its generative ties to feeling, is also a site of
creative immanence and a potential force of authentic communication in her poetics.
Re-creating the organic and ontological makeup of sensual attention, Bishop’s
repetition exposes the material, physiological, and psychic underpinnings of sense
experience, which bears a renewable relation to feeling. Like many formal poets,
Bishop establishes patterns of repetition in order to pivot from them, disrupting the
reader’s expectations and offering novel possibilities for apperception. Attention, as
Shapiro argues, is the fulcrum of Bishop’s repetition; however, while formally
inflected, her repetition is conceptually concerned with variation or repetition-with-adifference, a phenomenon that for Bishop is derived from the organic processes of
life. The imbrication of attention and repetition, as well as how that relationship
establishes the aesthetic, ethical, and social valences in her work, requires further
examination.
A poetics invested in optics, her work examines the potentially vexed relationship
between perception and sense- and language-making. Her poems engage the somaticcognitive dimension of meaning-making, in which judgment can never remain fixed
because it is contingent upon how accurately the beholder views the material world.
Acts of perception within her poems are marked by self-qualification and the
interposition of mediating similes, which function as markers of the limits of human
perception. The repeatedly self-inquisitive, self-monitoring aspect of Bishop’s mode
of attention mimics the fleet cognitive-affective shifts of the observer. An ethics
inheres within her aesthetics, as her signature permutational similes and qualifying
descriptions disclose the process of developing both consciousness and the
conscience. This process can be traced in her poem “North Haven,” the primary poem
of my study, which intersects personal, social, and biological themes.
Tied to these concerns are the interactive states of compulsion and consolation, a
means for Bishop to depict and cope with bereavement and suffering, such as in “One
Art,” “Casab