Abstract
Using the narrative of Bishop’s ongoing interest in music, evidenced in her early musical notebooks, and in particular her love for the clavichord, this chapter explores Bishop’s interest in repetition and rhythm. Focusing on a discussion of her early poem “Anaphora,” the chapter shows how Bishop, from an early stage, is using music to develop a social model for the lyric that also allows her to locate and embody herself temporally, and to engage with the unsayable losses of her early years. Several other of Bishop’s early poems in North & South, which invoke the musical study or song, particularly “Song—for the Clavichord,” “Little Exercise” and “Songs for a Colored Singer,” are also examined.
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Notes
- 1.
See manuscripts at Vassar College, Bishop 69.A1 Elizabeth Music; Bishop 71.3 Early Keyboard Music.
- 2.
Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources, edited and with a commentary by Daniel Albright (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2004) p. 27.
- 3.
See Hound &Horn (July–September, 1934). See also Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
- 4.
See Gary Fountain, ed., Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
- 5.
Those visits also seem charged when set alongside the knowledge that Bishop never visited her mother during the 18 years she was committed to a mental hospital; the hospital’s name here also surely creates a particular and resonant irony in the poem.
- 6.
Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Oakland: University of California Press, 1995) p. 81.
- 7.
For a history of the Dolmetsch workshops, see https://www.dolmetsch.com/Dolworks.htm.
- 8.
Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, ed. and annotated by Alice Quinn (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006). See Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Sonnets of Desolation” or the “Terrible Sonnets,” written between 1885 and 1886.
- 9.
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2006).
- 10.
Bishop had been travelling in Mexico with Marjorie where they had stayed for a while with Pablo Neruda. She goes on in that letter to add that the poem was finished in Key West. It is likely then that the poem, which was first published in The Paris Review in 1945, was finished between May 1945, when she received news that her first book was to be published by Houghton Mifflin and was asked to add more poems, and that autumn. Perhaps, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, even an awareness of the devastations of atomic energy is folded into the poem’s resonances as well as its aesthetics. Certainly Bishop was anxious enough in thinking about the lack of references to the war in the book to ask that a note be made that most of the poems were written in 1942.
- 11.
See Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2006) p. 92.
- 12.
See Sarah Posman, “Modernist Energeia: Henri Bergson and the Romantic Idea of language” in Paul Ardoin, S.E. Gontaski, Laci Mattison, eds., Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) p. 219.
- 13.
For an exploration of Bishop’s later poetry, via Christopher Bollas” concept of the “unthought known,” see my “Repetition and Poetic Process: Bishop’s Nagging Thoughts” in Jonathan Ellis, ed., Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019) pp. 132–148.
- 14.
See Wordsworth, Selected Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (London: Penguin) p. 131. Angus Cleghorn makes a convincing case for Bishop’s engagement here with Wallace Stevens’ old woman in “The Old Woman and the Statue” from Owl’s Clover, “a figure excluded by the sculptor’s transcendent vision” to whom Bishop directly refers in her letter to Marianne Moore when discussing her reading of Stevens. See “Bishop’s Stevensian Architecture,” unpublished conference paper. Elizabeth Bishop in Paris: Spaces of Translation and Translations of Space. University of Paris-Sorbonne, June 6–8, 2018. See also Thomas Frosch, “Wordsworth’s “Beggars” and a brief instance of “Writer’s Block” in Studies in Romanticism, vol. 21, no. 4, 1982, pp. 619–636.
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Rees-Jones, D. (2019). “I am in Need of Music”: Elizabeth Bishop and the Energies of Sound and Song. In: Cleghorn, A. (eds) Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33180-1_2
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