ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
love repetition. She was right. If this is ‘witnessing history’ – I’d rather not” (Costello
209). The island also offered the occasion for her poem “North Haven,” an elegy for
Robert Lowell. In her memorial, Bishop re-imagines repetition and temporal witness
through her own reflective relationship to the Natural world and its renewable effects
upon subjectivity:
In Memoriam: Robert Lowell
I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse’s tail.
The islands haven’t shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have—
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south, or sidewise—
and that they’re free within the blue frontiers of bay.
This month our favorite one is full of flowers:
Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,
Hackweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,
the fragrant bedstraw’s incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.
The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.
Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first “discovered girls”
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer.
(“Fun”—it always seemed to leave you at a loss . . .)
You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue . . . And now—you’ve left
for good. You can’t derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.
(Bishop The Complete Poems1-30)
In form and theme, the elegy posits an interrelationship between repetition and
semiotic exchange. Bishop configures a three-way semiotic encounter among the
poet-as-speaker, the apostrophized dead (Lowell, to whom the poem is addressed),
and the poem, figured in the lyric voices of the poem’s birds. For her, poetry and
science share the same processes of inquiry into the conditions of life. The search for
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