ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
meaning and desire for discovery – the impetus for the poet – also underlies semiotic
exchange. In several of her later works, such as “North Haven,” meaning is not
conceived as a consequence of a search, but instead exists in the intellectual and
affective underpinnings of a repeated encounter.
“North Haven” reveals a broken continuity in a semiotic event, making palpable a
multivalent loss: not only the speaker’s loss of a friend, but also Lowell’s
epistemological and psychological losses, as he – unlike the speaker – can no longer
engage in the semiotic encounter. Ultimately, “North Haven” elegizes not only a lost
contingency, but the dynamic in which contingency becomes a possibility or
impossibility. The dynamic encompasses states of estrangement and connection,
which are not displaced, but mutually rooted in the affective and intellectual agitations
of its tropes: loss and return. The speaker’s optical movements from identification to
dis-identification and qualification to psychic recognition are worth charting: “The
Goldfinches are back, or others like them,/ and the White-throated sparrow’s fivenoted song/ pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes” (16-18). In her qualifying
impulse, Bishop privileges a phenomenology that recognizes zones of mutual
otherness and shared estrangement, rather than direct (and potentially mis-)
identification. She addresses both the potentialities and limits of intersubjectivity and
reciprocity. While the sparrow, speaker, and the apostrophized