Abstract
Elizabeth Bishop locates the mystery of the sea and its shore in many poems. The poem, however, which I return to is “At the Fishhouses,” in which Bishop masterfully considers the juncture between the land and the sea. In “At the Fishhouses,” she travels from the dense description of the land to the depths of the sea in three stanzas that call to mind sea poems in the French symbolist tradition. Bishop composes a music in “At the Fishhouses” that extends the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Valéry (and Stevens). This chapter unfolds in two parts: the first briefly places Bishop’s poem in relation to the symbolist genre of sea poem, and the second comprises a close reading of “At the Fishhouses” in light of Valéryan theory.
This chapter is based on a longer version of my work on Bishop and the symbolists in Chapter V of my book, Unexpected Affinities: Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics, published by Sussex Academic Press. I am grateful to the editor for acknowledging and agreeing to the publication of this current chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
See such poems as Baudelaire’s “L’Homme et la Mer” [“Man and the Sea”], Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine” [“Sea Breeze”] and “Le Nénuphar blanc” [“The White Water Lily”], Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin,” and Rimbaud’s “L’Éternité.”
- 2.
Bishop writes in a letter to Anne Stevenson: “I’ve always thought one of the most extraordinary insights into the ‘sea’ is Rimbaud’s L’eternite” (PPL 861).
- 3.
Anna Balakian, in The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal, groups Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé together as symbolists, and understands Valéry as working in the symbolist tradition. However, Balakian distinguishes Rimbaud from them. She writes, “What Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé have in common is the fact that they produced their major works at the same time, in the early 1870’s” (56). She goes further, “Rimbaud’s name belongs in the Symbolist ranks by personal association only.” For the full discussion of her association of Rimbaud with the later surrealists rather than the symbolists, see The Symbolist Movement, Chapter IV (54–71). I group Rimbaud and Baudelaire together here for their mutual impact on Bishop, who did not see herself aligned with a particular school of poetry, but admired and drew from both late nineteenth-century French figures.
- 4.
Translations from Valéry’s prose are my own.
- 5.
See Valéry’s “Lettre à Madame C …,” in which he discusses his work with Croiza, an opera singer to bring poetry to a musical realm: “je voulais essayer d’une voix qui descende … de la mélodie pleine et entière des musiciens à la mélodie de poètes, qui est restreinte et tempérée” [I wanted to try a voice which descends from a full musical melody to the melody of poets, which is more restrained and moderate] (Oeuvres II 1260). Valéry writes of the imprecise relationship of poetry and music throughout this essay as he details his work with Croiza (Oeuvres II 1260–1261).
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Goldfarb, L. (2019). Music of the Sea: Elizabeth Bishop and Symbolist Poetics. 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_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33180-1_3
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