Superannuated Man - interests include education, literature, politics, religion, ICT. In thrall to the unlimited heartbreak associated with following Knockaderry and Limerick GAA!
Patricia Coughlan*, in a very thought-provoking article, finds two opposing but possibly complimentary representations of sex roles in Heaney’s poetry:
A dominant masculine figure who explores, describes, loves and has compassion for a passive feminine figure, and
A woman who ‘dooms, destroys, puzzles and encompasses the man, but also assists him to his self-discovery: the mother stereotype, but merged intriguingly with the spouse.’
It is easy enough to identify the first representation as the speaker of the poems. Coughlan traces male activities and attitudes of the speakers in Heaney’s first book, Death of a Naturalist – ploughing, digging, and its equivalent, writing – as well as significant male attitudes, such as the importance of following in the footsteps of ancestors and imitating their prowess, in poems such as ‘Digging’, ‘Follower’, and ‘Ancestral Photograph’. She traces the development of male identity in such poems as ‘Death of a Naturalist’ and ‘An Advancement of Learning’, where the young boy passes a test of male courage in facing up to a rat. The identification of the speaker with the natural maleness of creatures such as the bull and the trout (‘Outlaw’ and ‘The Trout’) is noticed in the second volume, Door into the Dark.
Heaney views the creative process as a particularly male activity in ‘The Forge’ – the violence of the activity, the archetypal maleness of the protagonist, leading to the suggestion that the truth of art is forged out of violence and brute strength. But the poetic process of ‘seeing things’ in the later poetry is a more spiritual, even intuitive practice. The image of the poet changes to one of seer, or mediator between states of awareness (‘Field of Vision’, ‘Lightenings VIII’, ‘St. Kevin and the Blackbird’.
Something of the prowess of ancestors is present in the speaker’s celebration of his father’s gift in ‘The Harvest Bow’. It is a quintessentially male prowess (‘lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks’), yet the skill involved in making the bow exhibits an understanding of the spirit and a delicate craftsmanship. Indeed plaiting the bow is a female art form, at least in traditional thinking. So perhaps sex roles are not so clear-cut here, as the male ancestor is celebrated for his prowess at a feminine craft.
The representation of woman in the poems on the Leaving Cert. course leads to the consideration of a number of issues.
WOMAN AS LOVER
Consider ‘Twice Shy’ and ‘Valediction’. In ‘Twice Shy’ woman is the love object; perhaps there is even a suggestion in the imagery of being victim to the male (‘tremulously we held / As hawk and prey apart’). But this is balanced just after this by an equality of rights, by the mutual recognition that each had a past and that each had a right to be cautious, even timorous, in the new relationship (‘Our juvenilia / Had taught us both to wait’).
In ‘Valediction’, roles are reversed. Not only is the woman the source of stability in the speaker’s life but she is in complete control of the relationship, ‘Until you resume command / Self is in mutiny’. Nevertheless the image of woman here is traditional and somewhat stereotyped: an object of beauty, defined by dress and pretty, natural allusions such as the frilled blouse, the smile, and the ‘flower-tender voice’. So in these poems there seems to be a traditional visual concept of woman, combined with a more varied understanding of role, both as love object and as controlling force.
Woman in ‘The Skunk’ is very much sex object, alluring, exciting in a primitive, animal way:
stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-neck nightdress.
Here she is an object of desire, observed with controlled voyeurism by the speaker.
WOMAN AS MOTHER
In ‘Mossbawn: 1. Sunlight’ the female figure is associated with traditional domestic skills, in this instance baking. The mother figure (in this case, his aunt, Mary Heaney) is one of the central props in Heaney’s ideal picture of rural life. His aunt is characterised as being ‘broad-lapped’ signifying her warm and loving nature and her kitchen is a womb of security for the young boy, radiating warmth, nurture, and love, as well as being a forger of identity, offering links with tradition and values mediated by the female figures.
A feminist critique would argue that this representation is denying women the freedom to develop fully, by giving them fixed roles within the domestic environment and by associating them with what is maternal rather than with any intellectual activity. As Patricia Coughlan says: ‘Woman, the primary inhabiter and constituent of the domestic realm, is admiringly observed, centre stage but silent.’
THE EARTH AS FEMALE
Nature – the earth and both the physical territory and the political spirit of Ireland – is viewed as feminine by Heaney. There was a hint of this in the soft, preserving, womb-like quality of the earth in ‘Bogland’. This feminine aspect becomes explicitly sexual in such poems as ‘Rite of Spring’ and ‘Undine’. But the female principle is destructive to man in such poems as ‘The Tollund Man’, where the male is sacrificed to the goddess, who is female lover, killer, and principle of new life and growth, all at once.
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body.
Coughlan feels that the female energy here is represented as ‘both inert and devouring’ and that if the poem is understood, ‘as a way of thinking about women rather than about Irish political murder, it reveals an intense alienation from the female.’ But can it be divorced from its political context? And was not Caitlín Ní hUallacháin always the femme fatale of Irish political revolutionaries? And hadn’t this fatalistic attraction almost a frisson of sexual passion about it, coupled with maternal devotion? The poem reveals the danger of the attraction, but surely it was a willing consummation? The poet envies Tollund Man ‘his sad freedom’, so perhaps the poem reveals less an intense alienation than a fatalistic attraction to the female.
The feminist critique certainly throws some light on central aspects of Heaney’s writing – among them a very traditional view of woman – but there is too much complexity in his vision to allow us to view the encounter of the sexes in his poetry as simply antagonistic.
Portrait of Seamus Heaney by Paul McCloskey. (www.paulmccloskeyart.com)
* ‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney by Patricia Coughlan, in Theorising Ireland, ed. Clare Connolly, pages 41-60. NY: Palmgrove, 2003.
THIS IS A PERSONAL REVIEW OF SOME THEMES AND ISSUES WHICH FEATURE IN DEREK WALCOTT’S POETRY. YOU SHOULD CONSIDER THESE IDEAS, THEN RE-EXAMINE THE POEMS MENTIONED FOR EVIDENCE TO SUBSTANTIATE OR CONTRADICT THESE INTERPRETATIONS. IN OTHER WORDS MAKE YOUR OWN OF THESE NOTES, ADD TO THEM OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.
THE FOLLOWING SELECTION IS SUGGESTED BECAUSE THEY DEAL WITH THE MAJOR THEMES WHICH RECUR IN HIS POETRY:
Letter from Brooklyn,
Endings,
To Norline,
The Young Wife,
St. Lucia’s First Communion,
Pentecost.
W. B. YEATS ONCE SAID THAT HIS POETRY WAS ‘BUT THE CONSTANT STITCHING AND RESTITCHING OF OLD THEMES’. CHECK THIS OUT FOR YOURSELF IN RELATION TO WALCOTT AND ALL THE OTHER POETS ON YOUR COURSE!
YOUR AIM SHOULD BE TO PICK YOUR OWN FAVOURITES FROM THIS SELECTION AND GET TO KNOW THEM VERY WELL.
BIOGRAPHICAL TRIVIA
Derek Walcott is a Caribbean poet who was born in 1930 in Castries on the island of St. Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles.
Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves.
He was born into a Methodist, English-speaking family although the dominant tradition on the island was Catholic and French speaking.
His father, described in the poem “A Letter from Brooklyn”, was a civil servant and painter who died at the age of 34 when Derek was only one year old.
He began writing poems at the age of fourteen and plays at the age of sixteen.
After studying at St. Mary’s College, a school run by the Irish Presentation Brothers in St. Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica where he graduated with an Arts Degree in English, French and Latin, he moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he worked as a theatre and art critic.
In 1954 he married Faye Moyston. They separated in 1956 and divorced the following year.
He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and he remains active with its Board of Directors.
At the age of 18, he made his debut with his first collection 25 Poems in 1948, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night, in 1962. That same year he married his second wife, Margaret Maillard.
In the 1960’s his Selected Poems was a publishing success and he was awarded a substantial grant by the Rockefeller Foundation.
In 1970 his best known play, Dream on Monkey Mountain, was published and later performed with great success in New York.
He has learned his poetic craft from the European tradition, but he remains mindful of West Indian landscapes and experiences.
In 1973 he published Another Life, a long narrative book-length poem, offering autobiographical details and opinions.
In 1976 he published a collection Sea Grapes (including the poem “Endings”) which dealt with changing phases – beginnings and endings – of his life.
After a break with the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1976, Walcott directed his attention increasingly to the United States, where he has held a number of teaching positions, including a long-standing appointment at Boston University.
In 1979 Saint Lucia achieved independence following the collapse of the West Indian Federation.
In 1979 he published The Star-Apple Kingdom, a very successful collection containing the long poem, “The Schooner Flight”.
He founded the Boston’s Playwright’s Theatre at Boston University in 1981 hoping to create a home for new plays in Boston. That same year he was granted an award by the American MacArthur Foundation worth over $250,000.
In 1982 he published a collection of poems called The Fortunate Traveller and, that same year, married Norlene Metivier, his third wife.
In 1986 his Collected Poems were published and sold remarkably well.
His 1988 collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament, written about his life in Saint Lucia, (dealt with in part one entitled “Here”) and his life in America (dealt with in part two entitled “Elsewhere”) contained the following poems: “To Norline”, “Saint Lucia’s First Communion”, “Pentecost”, “The Young Wife”, “For Adrian” and “Summer Elegies”.
In 1989 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the first non-English writer to be granted the award.
Omeros (modern Greek for Homer) was published in 1990, just after his sixtieth birthday, and is Walcott’s most ambitious work to date, a book-length poem that places his beloved West Indies in the role of the ancient bard’s Cyclades. Gods and heroic warriors do not inhabit this retelling of the Odyssey, but simple Caribbean fishermen, whose Greek names register their hybrid identities.
In 1992 he became the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
With his artistic and financial success he bought a house on Saint Lucia and spent more and more of his time on the island.
In 1997 he brought out a new collection, The Bounty, which dealt with themes such as old age and death.
In 1998 he co-wrote a Broadway musical, The Capeman, with the singer/songwriter Paul Simon. Unfortunately it proved to be the biggest flop in the history of Broadway musicals closing with losses of $11 million.
In 2000 he published the long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, a biographical study of the Impressionist painter Camille Pisarro.
That same year his twin brother, Roderick, died.
In 2004, at the age of 74, The Prodigal, his sixteenth book of poetry was published.
In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta.
He now divides his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
A BRIEF THEMATIC GUIDE TO THE POETRY OF
DEREK WALCOTT
A Letter from Brooklyn
The poem deals with the influences that were important in Walcott’s life and career as an artist.
Religion, particularly the Methodist religion, was an important part of his father’s life and has also influenced his own poetry in both substance and style.
The artistic example of his father is celebrated in this poem.
The belief that poetry is a divine gift is exemplified in the story of his father’s life and death
Endings
This is a short one-sentence poem on the theme of transience.
The poem offers examples of things that fade and end.
Even love is seen as transient.
The idea of Beethoven’s hearing ending offers a deeper meaning and a deeper image.
See also For Adrian which deals with the same theme of transience
To Norline
This is a brief meditation on lost love and the power of memory.
The poem also considers the evocative and memorable power of poetry.
The theme of the sea and its fluctuating status is important in Derek Walcott’s poetry.
The Young Wife
This is a poem written to comfort a husband who has lost his wife.
The poem explores the complex processes of grief, including guilt, despair and comfort.
There is a contrast evident between how grief affects a husband and how grief affects their children.
The poem concludes by asserting the primacy of love over death.
Saint Lucia’s First Communion
The poem describes one of the most important religious festivals on the island of Saint Lucia.
At first the poem describes the communicants.
It sees the religious ceremony as akin to a form of slavery.
The poet wishes to liberate the children to find their own way to heaven.
Pentecost
This is primarily a poem about the nature of belonging.
The theme is the power of the Caribbean landscape to affect the poet’s very soul.
There is a strong contrast between the constrictions of city life in winter and the freedom of the sea in Saint Lucia.
MAJOR THEMES IN WALCOTT’S POETRY
Religion
Derek Walcott was brought up in the Methodist religion. His father’s religious faith and the influence that had on both his father’s life and on his own life is dealt with in the poem A Letter from Brooklyn. In that poem the simple faith of the old lady restores the poet’s faith in God.
He offers a critical perspective on the traditional religious practices of Catholicism in Saint Lucia’s First Communion where he sees the children as innocent victims of an institutionalised religion. But the poem does have a positive religious perspective as he imagines the children flying heavenward beyond prejudice and evil.
Pentecost has not only a religious title but also a religious conclusion as it celebrates the sense of a soul finding itself in a natural seaside environment away from the soulless city.
Love and the End of Love
Derek Walcott was married three times and many of his poems deal with themes of love.
That love has a powerful but temporal influence on human life is acknowledged in Endings where love’s “lightening flash” has no “thunderous end.”
The dissolution of his marriage to his third wife, Norline Metivier, is treated with metaphoric brilliance in To Norline, a poem that charts the end of a relationship.
Death can also end a relationship but in The Young Wife Walcott explores the manner in which love can overcome death and the ending of life.
Death/Bereavement
Derek Walcott’s father died when the poet was only one year old but his death had a profound effect on his poetry. This is explored in A Letter from Brooklyn.
That positive view is also expressed in another poem on death and grief, The Young Wife, where a sense of hope evolves out of the devastation of grief.
AN ANALYSIS OF WALCOTT’S STYLE
Style
Derek Walcott uses a variety of poetic forms in the poems on the course.
• There is a loose, relaxed narrative form, using dialogue and description, in the poem A Letter from Brooklyn.
There is a complex use of couplets in the poem Endings. In this brief poem the couplets are short, pithy and, like “the silence that surrounds Beethoven’s head”, imbued with a sense of power and mystery.
The most common form evident in these poems is the four-line quatrain, influenced to some extent in the Methodist hymns Walcott learned in his childhood. The themes, as well as the form, often reflect a religious content, perhaps not in To Norline, but certainly in Saint Lucia’s First Communion, Pentecost, and The Young Wife.
Language
Derek Walcott was born into an English speaking family in the predominantly French-speaking island of Saint Lucia. His use of English belongs to the English poetic tradition but it is also influenced by the religious language of his Methodist up-bringing and also by the traditional patois of Creole English.
He has a very fine ear for dialogue as is evident in the manner in which he captures the old-fashioned religious language of the elderly correspondent in A Letter from Brooklyn. There is an astute religious sensibility present in many of the poems. Pentecost uses religious terminology as does Saint Lucia’s First Communion.
The poetic sensibility of this modern poet is revealed in his constant and varied use of metaphor and simile (see below).
Metaphor and Simile
From the beginning Derek Walcott has used both metaphor and simile with great inventiveness and originality.
The metaphor of a spider’s web runs throughout A Letter from Brooklyn and helps to unify the different strands of this complex, sensitive treatment of old age, art and death.
In Endings the “silence that surrounds Beethoven’s head” becomes a metaphor for the mysterious of endings and beginnings while the poem is bolstered by the clever use of similes.
To Norline, although very brief, has a subtle mixture of metaphor (in the opening stanza where the wave’s surf is seen as a sponge erasing lines and love) and simile in the second stanza (where the poet’s memory of his sleeping beside his wife is compared to a coffee mug warming his palm) and in the third stanza (where the sight of a salt-sipping tern is compared to a memorable line of poetry.)
At other times the use of metaphor and simile reveals a wonderfully visual imagination as in Saint Lucia’s First Communion where a caterpillar is compared to an accordion and communion girl’s compared to candles.
The Sound of Poetry – Rhyme, Assonance and Alliteration
Although Derek Walcott uses a variety of poetic forms in the poems on the course, his use of rhyme is more subtle than regular, more attuned to the off-beat sounds of the Caribbean than to any formal pattern.
An early poem like A Letter from Brooklyn uses rhyme more regularly than is evident in the latter poems. There are many rhyming couplets in this narrative poem and it ends with a distinctive rhyme in the concluding couplet: believe/grieve.
Another poem using couplets, this time very short-lined couplets, is Endings. In this poem, although none of the couplets rhyme, there are subtle echoes throughout the poem involving off-rhymes ( flesh/flash, sand/end/sound) assonance (fail/fade) and alliteration (fades from the flesh, flowers fading like the flesh, sweating pumice stone, silence that surrounds).
Five of the poems are written in quatrains but none of these employ regular rhyme schemes. To Norline is the closest to an ABAB rhyme scheme with its half-rhymes and assonantal echoes. The rhymes are purposely faint: dawns/sponge, come/palm, house/yours, tern/turn. This poem also uses alliteration cleverly, particularly on the “s” sounds to convey the sound of the surf on the beach: slate, surf, sponge, someone, still-sleeping, salt-sipping and some.
The rhyming scheme in Saint Lucia’s First Communion varies from a loose ABAB in most stanzas to AABB in the third stanza and ABBA in the fourth stanza. There are assonantal patterns throughout the poem (cotton frock, cotton stockings, pink ribboned missals, caterpillars accordion).
Pentecost uses rhyme more regularly than in any of the other quatrain poems: concrete/street, show/snow, roof/proof, shoal/soul. As in many of the other poems, the use of alliteration, particularly on the “s” sounds, is very evocative: slow scriptures of sand/that sends, not quite a seraph.
Contrast: Many of the poems use a form of contrast to emphasise their thematic concerns.
Pentecost comes from a book, The Arkansas Testament, which is divided into two contrasting sections entitled “Here” and “Elsewhere”. The poem contrasts the soulless, winter, lost city where he works with “the slow scriptures of sand” he finds in his warm Caribbean home. There is a stark contrast between the dead and the living in the poem, The Young Wife. In this poem the contrast is overcome by the sense of love that accompanies the end of the poem.
Bucknell University. (Photos by Timothy D. and Nicole M Sofranko)
COMMENTS ON WALCOTT’S POETRY
Derek Walcott on Derek Walcott
“There is a continual sense of motion in the Caribbean – caused by the sea and a feeling that one is always travelling through water and not stationary.”
“My calling as a poet is votive, sacred… it was a cherished vow taken in my young dead father’s name, and my life is to honour that vow.”
“Throughout my whole youth, that was happening. It was the experience of a whole race renaming something that had been named by someone else and giving that object its own metaphoric power.”
“I had a sound colonial education
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
And either I am nobody, or I am a nation.”
“I come from a backward place: your duty is supplied by life around you. One guy plants bananas; another plants cocoa; I’m a writer, I plant lines. There’s the same clarity of occupation, and the sense of devotion.”
“I think of myself as a carpenter, as one making frames, simply and well. I’m working a lot in quatrains… and I feel there is something in that that is very ordinary… I find myself wanting to write very simply cut, very contracted, very speakable and very challenging quatrains in rhyme.”
“Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind…”
“History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.”
“This island is heaven.”
“Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.”
“It takes a West Indian a long time to say who he is”
“People who praised classical Greek, if they were there then, would consider the Greek’s tastes vulgar, lurid….All the purple and gold – that’s what I’m saying is very Caribbean, that same vigour and elation of an earlier Greece.”
“The easiest thing to do about colonialism is to refer to history in terms of guilt or punishment or revenge, or whatever. Whereas the rare thing is the resolution of being where one is and doing something positive about that reality.”
“The romanticised, pastoral vision of Africa that many black people hold can be an escape from the reality around us. In the West Indies, where all the races live and work together, we have the beginnings of a great and unique society. The problem is to recognise our African origins but not to romanticise them.”
Critical Comments on Derek Walcott by the Critics
“What moves me in Walcott is his refusal of simplifications.” Paul Breslin
“It was the Metaphysicals technique of using metaphor as the prime vehicle of shape and meaning in their poetry that seems to have so greatly impressed Walcott, who has always …” moved in metaphor as in his natural element.” Stewart Brown
“Walcott is a model of ripened ambivalence that makes impossible demands of the heart, tears it to pieces by a contradiction of origins, and finally offers it to the dubious consolation of despair.” George Lamming
“Naming is central to Walcott’s claims for an ‘Adamic’ New World poetics. The act of naming takes the natural world into the cultural domain while grounding language in the domain of the natural. And the choice of a name reveals much about the consciousness of the namer, the degree to which it has become Adamic by exorcising ‘the pain of history words contain.’ ” Paul Breslin
“Omeros attempted to shrink the Iliad and the Odyssey into the tiny sins and squabbles of some Caribbean fishermen and bewildered colonials” William Logan
***********************************
Sample Answer: Write a personal response to the poetry of Derek Walcott.
Of all the poets on the Leaving Cert course, Derek Walcott, in my opinion, is the one who has most to say about the ‘big issues’, about life, the universe, and everything. I would recommend his poetry to anyone who has lost someone close to them, or to anyone who finds themselves wondering about man’s place in the universe.
There are three aspects of Walcott’s poetry in particular that appeal to me: his approach to the notion of ‘endings’, his poems about lost love, and his poems about bereavement. I’m not saying that Derek Walcott has the answers to all the questions that surround these issues; just that he asks them in a very beautiful and enlightened way.
One aspect of Walcott’s poetry that really hit home with me was his focus on the way everything in this world is moving slowly but surely toward its end. ‘Endings’, for example, depicts how things ‘do not explode, / they fail, they fade’. Everything, the poem maintains, is disappearing, but too quietly for us to notice. Things fade away as gently and subtly, ‘as the sunlight fades from the flesh / as the foam drains quick in the sand’. We no more notice most things disappearing than we do the water draining into the sand at the beach. Reading his poetry, we are constantly reminded, of the fragility and preciousness of all things. His work reminds us to enjoy what we have while it lasts.
For me, one of the finest aspects of Walcott’s work is his depiction of lost love. ‘To Norline’, is filled with a melancholy longing for a love that has been and will never be again. This poem paints a sad portrait of the poet walking along an empty beach remembering his lost love. He seems certain that ‘someone else’ instead of him will soon be enjoying Norline’s affections. His poetry is always keenly aware of the fact that love inevitably fades away. As he puts it in ‘Endings’, ‘love’s lightning flash / has no thunderous end’. Love, like everything else, fades away quietly, without us even noticing, ‘it dies with the sound / of flowers fading’. We can no more notice love fading away than we can hear a flower withering. All in all, then, I would recommend the poetry of Derek Walcott to anyone who has had their ‘heart broken’! His writing provides real solace and comfort for anyone whose relationship has just ended.
Bereavement is one of Walcott’s most recurring themes and he deals with it magnificently. He never shrinks from depicting the true horror of bereavement. ‘The Young Wife’, for example, is a moving depiction of great loss. This poem is about a man whose wife has just died from cancer. He must mourn her quietly so as not to upset their children, ‘the muffled sobbing / the children must not hear’. The house he lives in is haunted by memories of his departed partner. There are certain drawers in the house which he ‘dare not open’ because the objects they contain would remind him too painfully of her. Despite this obvious emotion and pain, however, his poems invariably contain an element of hope. In this case, the wife may have been claimed by cancer at a tragically young age but she somehow lives on in her children. When her husband sees their children laugh he is reminded so strongly of her that she may as well be in the room, ‘They startle you `when they laugh. / She sits there smiling’.
‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ is another poem that offers hope to the bereaved. Mabel Rawlins, a friend of the family, writes to the poet about his dead father. She is convinced that this man, who died twenty-eight years ago, is at God’s side in heaven, ‘he was called home, / And is, I’m sure, doing greater work’. Mabel’s unquestioning faith helps to overcome the poet’s own doubts about the existence of God and ‘restores’ his belief in the afterlife, ‘I believe. / I believe it all, and for no man’s death I grieve’.
Just as I would recommend Walcott’s poetry to anyone who has had his or her heart broken by the break-up of a relationship so too would I recommend it to anyone who has been bereaved. His poetry presents us with a full picture of the sorrow and pain of bereavement. Yet it also suggests that maybe, just maybe, there is hope.
Derek Walcott receives his Nobel Prize for Literature from the King of Sweden King Karl XVII Gustaff – in December 1992.
Larkin’s worth and relevance as a poet is constantly under review. The most recent biography by his friend and former colleague at Hull University, James Booth, was published in 2015 entitled, Philip Larkin: Life Art and Love. Booth sees himself as keeper of the Larkin flame and is at pains to debunk much of the negative publicity which has surrounded Larkin in the decades since his death. Booth’s main motto seems to be: judge the poems, not the poet.
All good biography should send us back to the poet’s work and in this Booth succeeds admirably. He also makes Larkin more likable – we are made to wonder how it was that this miserable, self-hunted man managed to produce such great, enduring work.
Larkin was born in Coventry in August 1922. He has described his childhood, with his domineering father and timid mother, as a “forgotten boredom”. Tall and shortsighted, he grew up self-conscious and shy, developing a stammer at an early age. He did well in school and went to study English at Oxford, where his interest in writing and his love of jazz were nurtured.
On leaving Oxford with flying colours, he took up a post as librarian in a small village in Shropshire, and it was here that he began to write more extensively. He went on to work as a librarian in various colleges and universities, including Queen’s University in Belfast and the University of Hull, and he won increasing recognition as a writer.
There were many significant women in his life, but despite a yearning for love and intimacy his relationships seem to have been blighted by fear and indecision, and he appears to have resigned himself to the idea that marriage was not for him. He remained alone and became something of a recluse in later years, growing increasingly melancholic.
In June 1985, he was diagnosed with cancer and he died that same year, on December 2nd. He left behind him a body of work that has won him the accolade of being one of England’s finest post-war poets.
(skoool.ie)
WHAT FOLLOWS IS A PERSONAL REVIEW OF SOME THEMES AND ISSUES WHICH FEATURE IN THE POETRY OF LARKIN. YOU SHOULD CONSIDER THESE IDEAS, THEN RE-EXAMINE THE POEMS MENTIONED FOR EVIDENCE TO SUBSTANTIATE OR CONTRADICT THESE INTERPRETATIONS. IN OTHER WORDS MAKE YOUR OWN OF THESE NOTES, ADD TO THEM OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.
THE FOLLOWING SELECTION IS SUGGESTED BECAUSE THEY DEAL WITH THE MAJOR THEMES WHICH RECUR IN LARKIN’S POETRY:
At Grass,
Wedding Wind,
Church Going,
An Arundel Tomb,
Ambulances,
Cut Grass,
The Whitsun Weddings
YEATS ONCE SAID THAT HIS POETRY WAS ‘BUT THE CONSTANT STITCHING AND RESTITCHING OF OLD THEMES’. CHECK THIS OUT FOR YOURSELF IN RELATION TO LARKIN AND THE OTHER POETS ON YOUR COURSE!
YOUR AIM SHOULD BE TO PICK YOUR OWN FAVOURITES FROM THIS SELECTION AND GET TO KNOW THEM VERY WELL. MAKE NOTES FOR YOURSELF, TOGETHER WITH QUOTATIONS AND REFERENCES.
MAJOR THEMES AND PREOCCUPATIONS IN LARKIN’S POETRY
Larkin’s awareness of modern society: When asked if writers should be concerned with political and social issues, Larkin said: ‘The imagination is not the servant of the intellect and social conscience.’ But while his poetry may not be directly motivated by specific social themes, Larkin was always alert to social behaviour, and many important aspects of modern society are reflected in his poetry:
The bleakness of urban living is explored in ‘Ambulances’ with its references to traffic, accidents, frightened people.
The random nature of social bonds is also explored: ‘the random blend of families and fashions’ is mentioned in ‘Ambulances’.
The vanity and empty glitter of our fashionable functions is explored in ‘At Grass’:
Numbers and parasols: outside
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass.
The society Larkin writes about is a post-religious one (see ‘Church Going’ which can be read as charting the stages in the breakdown of faith – from scepticism, to superstition, to disbelief).
The function of churches in an age of disbelief is considered: they supply ceremonies that provide unity in our lives and mark significant points, places where ‘all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies’ (‘Church Going’)
Love and Marriage
In general, Larkin yearns for the ideal of love as a solution to human isolation.
In ‘An Arundel Tomb’ he toys with the vain hope that love might transcend death:
to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love
He deals with the fragile nature of human happiness and love in ‘The Wedding Wind’ when he compares the fragility of the newly married woman’s joy to ‘a thread carrying beads’.
Also in ‘Wedding Wind’ he deals with sexual fulfilment, happiness and joy from the woman’s point of view: ‘Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters’.
Complete happiness is never achieved for Larkin: as far as he is concerned there is an untruth at the heart of the love statement in ‘An Arundel Tomb’; love is qualified, as the speaker is still sad that she cannot share her happiness, in ‘Wedding Wind’.
Death
Larkin is obsessed with the passage of time in many of his poems. He doesn’t make any heroic attempts to defeat Time as other poets like Shakespeare or Keats have done, rather he records the different faces of death and finds the odd crumb of comfort along the way!
In ‘At Grass’ death is seen as the culmination of life. Death is seen as natural and gentle, yet it is essentially lonely: ‘And not a fieldglass sees them home’.
In ‘Ambulances’ the bleaker side of death is introduced. Here death is seen as capricious (‘children strewn on steps or road’), it is impersonal, alarming, the final loosening of all bonds, utterly comfortless, ‘so permanent and blank and true’.
Larkin sees death as the meaning of life: ‘the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do’. (‘Ambulances’)
In ‘Cut Grass’, death in nature is seen as something beautiful; death and beauty exist side by side:
It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers
Nature
Larkin is constantly aware of nature in his poetry. In our selection all but ‘Ambulances’ use nature as a backdrop.
For Larkin, nature is the one constant, the only survivor, outlasting many institutions, ideas, etc. In ‘Church Going’ he says, ‘And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky’.
Nature imagery is used by Larkin to express human emotions: ‘perpetual morning shares my bed’, ‘all-generous waters’ (‘Wedding Wind’).
Death is acceptable, less threatening, natural in the context of the seasons (‘At Grass’, ‘Cut Grass’)
Larkin’s Philosophy of Life
Many critics find a deep sense of disillusionment and pessimism in Larkin’s poetry: Eric Homberger describes it as, ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, while Charles Tomlinson says of Larkin’s writing that it shows, ‘a tenderly nursed sense of defeat’ (Charles Tomlinson)
The main areas of disillusionment for Larkin were:
the lack of religious faith, which means that he has not got the comfort of that absolute in his life (‘Church Going’)
his very bleak view of the end of life is given full expression in ‘Ambulances’ when he speaks of, ‘the solving emptiness that lies just under all we do’.
the pointlessness of the struggle and the irony of all the effort, ‘not a fieldglass sees them home’ (‘At Grass’)
We also find that his perpetual awareness of death colours all his attempts to celebrate life. For example, ‘At Grass’ celebrates the success of life, but it is a life that is over. Even the celebration of nature’s beauty and abundant growth is qualified by the presence of death (‘Cut Grass’).
Larkin himself denied that he was a completely pessimistic poet: ‘The impulse for producing a poem is never negative; the most negative poem in the world is a very positive thing to have done’. Would you agree?
SAMPLE ANSWERS ON LARKIN – FOR THE OPTIMISTS AND PESSIMISTS AMONGST US! TAKE YOUR PICK!
(1) Sample Answer Specially Written for Pessimists!: ‘The realities of his own society and life, explored through a variety of traditional techniques, is characteristic of the poetry of Philip Larkin.’
In many of Philip Larkin’s poems we are presented with situations in a society that is post-war, increasingly materialistic, decreasingly spiritual, often alienating and occasionally meaningless. In this society we see ordinary people struggling to realise their ideals, dreams and hopes, grasping at an illusive happiness, which for many will remain unattainable and remote. This contrast between the ideal and the ordinary is central to Larkin’s view of the life and society within which he worked.
In ‘At Grass’, the narrator recalls the brief moments of fame enjoyed by the horses and their trainers. The poem is carefully structured into five stanzas, each of six lines with a regular rhythm and the rhyme scheme abcabc. Most of the lines are of equal length and of eight syllables, which is suited to a poem that is ponderous and sad in tone. The horses are closely observed in the poem and their retirement in the ‘unmolesting meadows’ suggests how short-lived fame or notoriety is, and just as short, perhaps, for humans as for these horses. They enjoy a temporary freedom from the flash bulbs and public glare before being called to the stables, symbolic of the inevitable submission to death.
The idea of death disturbed Larkin. In ‘Church Going’ he confesses to being a non-believer in a church which has frequently left him ‘at a loss’. Through the argument of the poem, Larkin discovers his purpose in these frequent visits to churches. It is a desire to fulfil, ‘A hunger in himself to be more serious’, to be, perhaps, important, significant, or simply a desire to matter and to make a difference. This desire to be important underpins several poems by Larkin which deal with love. In ‘Wedding Wind’, the speaker, in this case a young bride, delights in her happiness, despite, or perhaps in spite of, being left by her husband to feel, ‘Stupid in candlelight’. Her joy is tempered only by her reflection on those less fortunate than herself who ‘lack the happiness’ she anticipates and perhaps expects to enjoy in her married life. However, Larkin is not so convinced and in the second stanza the newly-weds have once again been parted by the domestic rituals that will demand attention and disrupt the ideal of shared married life. It is notable that the rhyme patterns are less than regular in this poem. In the last four lines of stanza one, a pattern emerges as the bride speaks of her joy and contentment but this pattern is not continued into the second stanza, the tone of which is certainly more anxious and uncertain.
In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ Larkin deals with several marriages that occur on the same Saturday in June in a landscape that is quintessentially English, ‘wide Farms’ are observed from the train and as the journey continues south the poet speaks of ‘Canals with floatings of industrial froth’ and of new towns which were ‘nondescript …. with acres of dismantled cars’. Gradually the poet’s curiosity draws his vision to the wedding parties where women wore ‘nylon gloves and jewellery substitutes, / The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres’ and ‘girls, gripping their handbags tighter’. The speaker’s increasing involvement with those married couples who have boarded the train is suggested when the personal pronoun ‘I’ is replaced by ‘we’ in the final stanza. The sense of ‘swelling’ of hope and of possibility in the future is with all of those who step from the train in London. The poem is meticulously crafted over eight stanzas each of ten lines and with a regular rhythm. The rhyming scheme mirrors the speed of the train – slow at first and then gradually picking up speed as it leaves each station.
Not all – in fact, very few – of Larkin’s poems show such optimism! While there are moments of joy and happiness, and surprise in Larkin’s poetry, the overriding sensation which remains with the reader, having read his poetry, is disillusionment. In ‘Ambulances’ the clamour of the sirens which ‘Brings closer what is left to come, / And dulls to distance all we are’, is a striking reminder of the inevitable fate we await in death.
Larkin’s poetry reflects the experiences and impulses that were common to many people living in England in the immediate post-war era. Some of these experiences he shares, if not physically, then emotionally. He may at first stand as an observer, but he often becomes less detached and removed from the scene he observes in order to identify himself with those who live and breathe and ‘grow old’ before him and with him.
(2) Sample Answer Specially Written for the Optimists among us – for those who see the bright side of everything!: Write an essay in which you outline your reasons for liking and/or not liking the poetry of Philip Larkin.
Of all the poets I studied as part of my Leaving Cert course it was Philip Larkin who really struck a chord with me. When I think now why I liked his poetry so much I think of his moving elegiac accounts of the passing of time in poems such as ‘At Grass’. Then there are the poems rich with philosophical ideas and considerations that give rise to many questions without pretending to know the answers. ‘Church Going’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’ offer a fascinating perspective on how values and meanings change over time without resorting to unnecessary obfuscating language. Larkin’s poetry also gives us a view of life that is ‘permanent and blank and true’. However, whereas some readers may find the poetry of Larkin to be bleak, at the heart of many of these poems lies a beautiful sensitivity to the bonds and moments of love that come to define our lives. This is particularly the case with ‘Ambulances’, a poem that deals unflinchingly with mortality. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is the language that Larkin uses. Every poem contains exquisite lines of poetry that are a joy to read.
‘At Grass’ is a perfect example of Larkin’s ability to evoke the past and the heart-aching melancholy that comes with the passing of time. The poem is an elegy to a lost world – the world of the summer races, Ascot, the Derby: ‘Silks at the start: against the sky / Numbers and parasols: outside / Squadrons of empty cars, and heat’. However, there is a very interesting and moving ending to this poem. Having described the exciting world of the races he brings us back to the scene of two horses alone in a field, their racing days now long over. Capturing perfectly the melancholic sadness of life drawing to its close, Larkin describes how now that the world of the races has vanished, ‘Only the groom, and the groom’s boy, / With bridles in the evening come’. This final detail achieves a powerfully poignant melancholy.
This awareness of the passage of time and its consequences also lies at the heart of ‘Church Going’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’, two poems I found particularly stimulating. Each poem considers how an object, though it might physically remain the same, comes to have different value and significance over the course of time. In ‘An Arundel Tomb’, the poet considers the representation in stone of an ‘earl and countess’ upon their tomb. Using sharp observation the poem raises many fascinating questions about the changes that time effects. Those buried in the tomb could never have imagined how the world would change around their frozen image:
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read.
In ‘Church Going’ the poet raises equally fascinating questions about the significance of the churches that lie at the centre of every town in the country.
What I particularly liked about ‘Church Going’ was the way Larkin draws the reader into the poem. Using the register of the ‘Bored, uninformed’ tourist, the poet charms the reader with his observations (‘From where I stand the roof looks almost new – / Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t’) and humour (Hatless I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence’) before raising some very important questions about the gradual demise of the church in modern society. The church ultimately becomes a ‘serious place on serious earth’, a place, ‘In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies’. That the church does this seems an invaluable thing and Larkin rightly wonders what institution will take its place when it no longer exists.
Wherever Larkin’s poems start from, they most often end with the inescapability of death. ‘Church Going’ contemplates the importance of churches in our lives but cannot help but notice in the end that ‘so many dead lie around’ them. In ‘Cut Grass’, something as ordinary and everyday as mown grass becomes a powerful symbol for the great sadness and finality of death:
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It is ‘Ambulances’, however, that provides us with the bluntest depiction of human mortality, with its vivid descriptions of illness and death. The poem exposes ‘the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do’. However, even in this bleakest of poems Larkin remains keenly aware of the small things that come to define our lives and invest them with value and meaning – ‘the unique random blend / Of families and fashions’ and ‘the exchange of love’.
And that is what lies at the heart of Larkin’s poetry – his attention to the intimate details that define our everyday lives. He was not a poet who needed to travel to exotic places in order to find inspiration for his poetry. His truths are the simple truths of life and death and as a poet Larkin stuck with what he knew and like Frost’s, ‘The Road Not Taken’, that has made all the difference for me!
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This one is a bonus – however, it is not on the Leaving Cert course – maybe for obvious reasons!
Elizabeth Bishop has garnered the reputation of being one of the finest, one of the most formally perfect, poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon have testified in lectures and in essays on her poetry, to the unchallengeable subtlety of her work. And if she has been called a poet’s poet she is also pre-eminently a reader’s poet, and a poet whom it is always a serious joy to teach – students come alive when asked to discuss her work, partly because she communicates with an eager, unforced directness, partly because of the wit, the sheer pizazz and style with which she writes.
In the 1980s, there was a serious resistance to her work: she never came out as a lesbian, refused to appear in all-women anthologies, guarded her privacy and did not take direct political stances like her friend Robert Lowell. She was seen as insufficiently political, a misreading of her work, which identifies with black Americans, and with the struggle of the poor and oppressed in South America. But she, wisely, does not draw attention to those themes. She designs beautiful cadences, perfect shapes, and then she runs a counter-theme against them: ugliness, bad taste, rough or unbroken surfaces and sounds infiltrate her paradise of pure form and make it both more ideal and more real.
In ‘Cape Breton’, she draws our attention to the “weaving water”, and then offsets it with “hackmatack”, the name of a hard American spruce much admired by Walt Whitman. She also introduces an “irregular nervous saw-tooth edge”, and a “rough-adzed pole”. A gifted amateur painter, she designs a composition which plays the rough against the smooth, and allows a coded unhappiness and anxiety to disturb the surface of her art.
Bishop’s personal life – like many other poets – was often unhappy – two lovers committed suicide – and she became an alcoholic as a young woman. Behind the formal façade of her poems, there is a homeless, orphaned imagination, whose loneliness was expressed in her insatiable letter-writing and in late-night phone calls to friends.
She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 11th, 1911. Her mother was from Nova Scotia, her father, who was half Canadian, half American, died in 1911, eight months after she was born. Her mother became deeply disorientated over the next five years, was diagnosed as permanently insane in 1916 and died in a public sanatorium in Nova Scotia in 1934. Bishop lived alternately with her grandparents in Nova Scotia and New England, and later with an aunt. She suffered poor health and hadn’t much formal education until she was fifteen. In 1930 she attended Vassar College and joined a brilliant generation there.
Bishop impressed everyone she met – she was musical, very well read, and was also a painter with a great knowledge of the visual arts. She was a compulsive traveller, who manages to avoid all the pitfalls of tourist verse.
The roots of Bishop’s art can be traced to her undergraduate years at Vassar, and rather unusually it is to a single academic essay that we must turn to understand her idea of form and beauty. As an undergraduate she read a famous essay by the distinguished scholar, M. W. Croll. It was called ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’ and is one of the classic essays on prose style (it can be found in a collection of essays called The English Language, edited by George Watson). Croll’s concept of baroque style – ‘not a thought, but a mind thinking’ – spoke to Bishop like a vocation. She quoted Croll’s essay in letters to friends, because what she admired in the baroque was the “ardour” and dramatic energy and immediacy of an idea as it was formulated and experienced. The result is a poetry of intense visual and vocal power, where the play of rhythm, rhyme, spoken inflection and carefully composed, sometimes abraded images, has a spontaneity and deft authority whose perfect cadences create that “unique feeling of timeliness” which she sought and admired in poetry.
We can see this in ‘Cape Breton’ where she places against the rapid movement of the song-sparrow songs as they float upward “freely, dispassionately, through the mist” – the sudden short, heavily stressed line “in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets”. It’s this difference of movement and texture that makes Bishop such a continuously interesting and alive poet.
We can see her delight in rapidly changing tones and surfaces in one of her wittiest and most painterly poems, ‘Seascape’, where she describes “white herons got up as angels,/flying as high as they want”. She is making the picture baroque, and her delicate ear starts a run of ee sounds: the herons fly “in tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections”. In the next line the word “region” picks up the ee sound, then hands it on to bright green leaves edged neatly with bird-droppings”.
The reason why Bishop appeals so strongly to fellow poets can be seen in the sudden uncomfortable word “edged”, which brings in the idea of a margin and the marginal, as it abruptly breaks the pair of ee sounds in “green leaves”, before letting the sound come back with emphasis in “neatly”. The two ds in “edged” are echoed in “bird droppings” to design an uncomfortable, deliberately bad-taste moment. That moment of unease frays against the aesthetic surface she is designing, a surface she reasserts by transforming their faecal randomness into “illumination in silver”. This use of images of discomfort and unease also suffuses Seamus Heaney’s poetry from Death of a Naturalist on – it is as though he has developed the ontological anxiety in her poetry into a form of social and political anxiety.
In Bishop, this tension between the aesthetic and a type of anti-aesthetic effect is one expression of her puritan upbringing – it introduces an anxiety into the delineation of a beautiful image, and this discomfiting effect then helps strengthen and make more flexible the particular aesthetic moment.
Bishop was also a gifted short story writer (her collected prose has been published), and she was also a marvellous translator. Many of her translations came out of the fifteen years she spent in Brazil, where she moved in 1952 to live with Lota de Macedo Soares. She moved back to New York in 1967, and it was there that Lota committed suicide later that year.
Though Bishop continued to travel, she based herself in Boston and died there on October 6th, 1979. She is one of the greatest American poets of the last century, and is the subject of many books, essays and academic dissertations; 35 years after her death, her work is revered and admired more than ever.
Edited extracts from an essay by Tom Paulin first published in The Irish Times, Saturday, September 11th 2004.
The legend of Plath as a dark and driven and unstable young woman is a tremendous simplification of her work. Her work will endure where poetry endures.
The trouble for us who come to study her work in depth at Leaving Cert or A Level is that we already know the ending – a bit like watching a film of The Titanic! We know that Plath died by suicide in mid-sentence, so to speak, at the age of thirty one. Studying this arbitrary selection of her poems here should impress on us her vast and vital legacy. She is, in my view, a very essential poet.
There is unfortunately a widespread tendency to interpret Plath’s work as autobiographical, to read her poems as if they tell her life story. While it is quite obvious – and probably inevitable – that a writer’s life will influence what she writes, it is important to understand that poetry is art. Writing about this issue, Ted Hughes pointed out that the reader must learn, ‘to distinguish between a subjective work that was trying to reach an artistic form using a real event as its basis, and a documentary of some event that did happen.’
Some critics read her later poems exclusively in the light of her suicide. They argue that she signals her suicide (intentionally or otherwise) in a number of her last poems, through various references to despair, rage, loss, separation, or death. This is by no means as obvious as these critics claim and after all hindsight has always been the great tormentor of those left bereaved and bereft after a suicide. Many of these poems are the work of a woman who is coming into her own, recognising her own needs, using her own voice, finding her true self. Look, for example, at ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. This is about facing and releasing the fears that are hidden beneath the surface – not about a woman who is contemplating death.
So therefore, it is important to read the poems as they stand. Looking for signs of what was to happen afterwards in her life is to predetermine how the poems should be read, not actually attending to the poems themselves.
Note:To help you prepare for your Leaving Cert you need to become very familiar with at least six of Sylvia Plath’s poems. I would recommend that you concentrate on her later poems (from 1960 to her death) because of their power and honesty. The following selection will be dealt with in some depth here:
‘Morning Song’ (19th February, 1961),
‘Finisterre’ (29th September, 1961),
‘Mirror’ (23rd October, 1961),
‘Pheasant’ (7th April, 1962),
‘Elm’ (19th April, 1962),
‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, (4th October, 1962),
‘Child’ (28th January, 1963).
The points made here represent one interpretation of her work. It is important that you develop your own response to each poem; where this differs from the suggestions given here, trust your own judgement! Become familiar with the poems and with the major themes running through Plath’s poetry.
BACKGROUND
Plath wrote incessantly during her short life: poetry, short stories, articles, essays, and one semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Her writings were first published in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; later they appeared in book form.
She considered poems written before 1956 as ‘juvenilia’. Her first published book, The Colossus, includes only poems written after this date. Her remaining poems were published after her death in three collections: Ariel and Other Poems, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees.
Her last poems are generally seen as Plath’s outstanding achievement and that is why we concentrate on them here in this review. Here she truly found her voice, expressing herself in a distinctive, unique style. She was aware of this herself: while writing them she informed her mother, ‘I am a writer…. I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name…. (Letters Home, 16th October 1962).
Her husband, Ted Hughes, describes these poems equally glowingly:
‘Her real self showed itself in her writing … When a real self finds language and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event’ (The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982).
MAJOR THEMES IN PLATH’S POETRY
Motherhood: Plath wrote many poems dealing with all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, at a time when writers, especially poets, rarely touched on such topics. Her best-known work on the theme, ‘Poem for Three Voices’, evokes powerfully the variety of emotions experienced by women around pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, and adoption. Her poems on this theme are remarkable for their lyricism (their song-like quality), depth of feeling, and tenderness.
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
However, being a realist, she also reflected the other side of being a mother: the drudgery, the anxieties, and the level to which a mother is bound to her child:
I have never seen a thing so clear …
It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.
Both attitudes are seen in ‘Morning Song’. The mother’s life is shadowed by the child’s arrival, but is enriched by the joy of love. ‘Child’ also reflects the simple pleasure she derives from her child; his eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing that she longs to fill with the beauty of the world. But there is also an underlying threat to the child’s safety, which distresses her.
Identity: Plath frequently returned to the issue of double identity in her writing. The subject of her undergraduate thesis in Smith College was: ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Dostoevsky Novels’. Her interest in what appears on the surface and what is hidden is reflected in ‘Mirror’. Here, the depths hide something frightening and sinister; something the woman would prefer to avoid but cannot escape.
‘Elm’ also deals with doubleness: the apparent calm of the elm in the opening stanzas, and the hidden terrors that surface as she talks. A similar preoccupation is at the heart of ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. The practical, square box is a simple container: apparently there are no mysteries here. However, it conceals something sinister, but also fascinating.
Nature: Plath’s abiding interest in the world around her, her interest in nature, is reflected in many poems. Her descriptions are remarkable for their concrete, precise detail.
‘Finisterre’ paints a graphic picture of the scene before her eyes, conveying the harshness of the sea, the bleakness of the rocks, the delicacy of the flowers on the cliff, and the effect of the mist.
Her painterly style creates graphic images in ‘Pheasant’: the bird itself, the flowers, the hill and elm in the background, the earlier scene where the snow was marked with the ‘crosshatch’ footprints of various birds. This poem also reflects her stance against the destruction of nature, a concern that features in many of her poems.
Psychic landscapes/Mindscapes: While her descriptions of landscapes and seascapes are very striking, the scene is at times simply the backdrop to the mood of the speaker. In ‘Finisterre’, the place is identified by the title. The landscape is captured in a series of wonderful images. Many of these are personified: cliffs are ‘admonitory’, rocks hide their grudges, the sea wages war, and mists are without hope. The place assumes an atmosphere that is oddly human.
Plath with husband Ted Hughes
PLATH’S TECHNIQUE
Style: Plath’s style changed considerably during her career – unlike, say, Hopkins. However, there are certain features that mark all her work:
Her remarkable use of language
Unusual and striking imagery
Language: Plath’s ‘crackling verbal energy’ is apparent in her poems’ biting precision of word and image. Her writing has been variously praised for its tactile quality, power, incisiveness, control, taut originality, and luminosity. Joyce Carol Oates observed that, ‘the final memorable poems (‘Elm’, and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ among others) … read as if they’ve been chiselled with a fine surgical implement out of arctic ice.’ In her Journals, Plath constantly urges herself to develop ‘diamond-edged’, ‘gem-bright’ style. This she certainly achieved. Part of her technique was to reuse certain words in many poems, which thus took on an almost symbolic meaning: smiles, hooks, element, dissatisfaction, vowels, shriek, horse, sea.
‘Pheasant’ is a good example of her skilled control of descriptive language. The form here is less dominant, and the poet’s feelings are reflected in the personal voice that speaks throughout. The words are simple, the descriptions are vivid, and the poem is crystal clear – a good example of Plath’s descriptive powers at their best.
‘Elm’ shows her powerful response to loss, pain and terror. The feeling of despair, for example, is conveyed through a number of highly charged nouns and verbs.
Imagery: Certain images recur in Plath’s poetry, taking on a symbolic meaning that gains added force through repeated use.
The moon symbolises barrenness, coldness, and the negation of life. in ‘Elm’ it is merciless, cruel, and barren, associated with pain and suffering.
The mirror often symbolises the hidden alter ego (the ‘other self’), as in ‘Mirror’.
The horse is a symbol of vitality. In ‘Elm’, love gallops off like a horse.
The sea is often associated with undefined menace or hidden threat, as is so graphically evident in ‘Finisterre’.
She uses many other images, however, that are not symbolic, images that add to the vividness and immediacy of what she is describing. One of the most distinctive features of her work is her use of metaphors, many of which are visual.
Examples abound:
Mists are ‘souls’, which ‘bruise the rocks out of existence’ (‘Finisterre’).
The pheasant is ‘brown as a leaf’, a ‘little cornucopia’ (‘Pheasant’).
The bee box is ‘square as a chair’, a ‘midget’s coffin’ (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’).
Bees are like ‘African hands, / Minute and shrunk for export’ (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’).
The baby’s mouth opens ‘clean as a cat’s’ (‘Morning Song’).
Her crying is ‘a handful of notes’, which rise ‘like balloons’ (‘Morning Song’).
Plath attached great importance to colours, often identifying them with specific attributes. The repeated use of colour to suggest certain qualities links her poems to one another, giving added force to her meaning.
Red signifies vitality, life force: the pheasant’s vitality is envisaged largely through its vivid colouring.
Green too signifies the positive, creativity, life force: the pheasant is red and green.
Black is associated with death, anger, depression, aggression, and destruction: the black headland that opens ‘Finisterre’ underlines the sinister mood.
Surprisingly, white too is sinister: the white faces of the dead, the white mists in ‘Finisterre’.
In Summary then…
Sylvia Plath was a lyric poet in the Romantic tradition. She wrote poems that drew on her own experience of life and explored a range of emotions from love and joy to terror and despair. Like the Romantics, she looked inwards rather than outwards; her experience is gauged by what she has lived through.
‘Elm’ is perhaps the most striking example of this. It is one of a number of poems she wrote around the same time, expressing agonising emotions. Some of these emotions were quite ‘acceptable’, provided they were not shown too openly: the grief and loneliness expressed in ‘Elm’, for example. However, less acceptable was the intensity with which she voiced these; it was considered ‘over the top’, too revealing.
The writer and critic Joyce Carol Oates sees in these poems the seeds of Plath’s eventual suicide.
Her poems have that heart-breaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares, her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her.
Not everyone agrees with this estimate, however. Janice Markey sees Plath’s writings as life-affirming:
‘The enduring success and greatness of Plath’s work lies in its universal appeal and in an innovative, effective presentation. Plath was the first writer in modern times to write about women with a new aggressive confidence and clarity, and the first to integrate this confidence and clarity in a sane, honest and compassionate vision’.
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SYLVIA PLATH – AN AMAZING POET
One of the problems when reading poetry is how much do we need to know about the poet’s life and background. The poet Thom Gunn argues that the making of poems is not like turning out clay pots; poems are rooted in and tell directly or indirectly of a life. People who have never read a Sylvia Plath poem know that she killed herself at thirty one and therefore, her death has come to overshadow and dominate the life. In Plath’s case, probably more so than the other poets on our course, her life is so emotionally complicated and complex that a fuller understanding and appreciation of the poems are possible when they are read against the life. That life was in Sylvia Plath’s own words, ‘magically run by two electric currents’ and these she named ‘joyous positive and despairing negative’; her poetry reflects those charged polar opposites.
The seven poems that we have chosen here were written in the space of two years – the last one, ‘Child’ two weeks before she died. Her poems describe the natural world and the domestic world but, whether she is writing about a pheasant, an elm tree, bees, or her child, she is primarily writing about herself.
Her poetry is always very urgent and intense. That poetry has sometimes been described as hysterical and self-dramatising but such descriptions ignore the clear-sighted understanding she has of a situation. She very often courageously writes of troubled emotions, the darker side of life, her own experiences. Ted Hughes once told Eavan Boland that Sylvia Plath’s face changed in absolutely every single moment of expression. She did experience extremes and, if her work is more pessimistic than optimistic, more shaded than light, she herself defended it as follows:
Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying that the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages (Letter to her mother, 21st October, 1962).
‘Morning Song’, ‘Finisterre’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Pheasant’, ‘Elm’, and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, in Seamus Heaney’s words, reveal, ‘the terrible stresses of her own psychological and domestic reality’. If she writes about a dramatic landscape, as she does in ‘Finisterre’, we see that landscape as Plath sees it. She brings to it, just as every viewer would, her own preconceptions and concerns. Anne Stevenson, in her book Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, writes that Plath’s, ‘raw-edged response to personal sorrows and joys, her apprehensions of the world’s horrors and injustices, as well as its beauty, were excessive to an unusual degree.’
Asked once about the importance of poetry, Plath said:
‘I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far – among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.’
She wanted her poetry to mirror the life lived, its ordinariness and its extraordinariness, so much so that Plath once famously said that she wanted to get a toothbrush into a poem and that she was interested in writing about, ‘The real world. Real situations, behind which the great gods play the drama of blood, lust and death’.
Her mother, Aurelia Plath, said that Sylvia Plath, ‘made use of everything and often transmitted gold into lead …… These emotions in another person would dissipate with time, but with Sylvia they were written at the moment of intensity to become ineradicable as an epitaph engraved in a tombstone’. But on the page the thoughts and feelings are shaped and crafted. Eavan Boland speaks of Plath’s, ‘great elan, her handling of the line, her very unusual take on language and image – all of those things have become coded into the poetry that we now have. Robert Lowell speaks of Plath’s, ‘perfect control, like the control of a skier who avoids every death-trap until reaching the final drop’ and Michael Schmidt says of her poetry that it ‘is hard to imagine a poetry more forcefully stamped with a personality and voice’.
Therefore, it is clear that the legend of Plath as a dark and driven and unstable young woman is a tremendous simplification of her work. Her work will endure where poetry endures.
SAMPLE ANSWER: Nature imagery in the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Plath was a very ambitious writer. In 1958, before the publication of her first volume of poetry, she wrote in her journal: ‘I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America ….. I am eager, chafing, sure of my gift.’ Plath dedicated much of her short life to writing and developed several features that became characteristic of her style. One of the most interesting and accomplished features is her depiction of nature in her work.
Plath shows a very keen eye for detail in her fine and striking portrayals of nature. It is easy to picture the ‘Black admonitory cliffs’ in ‘Finisterre’ and she can also recreate the beauty of nature’s creatures as we see in ‘Pheasant’ where she marvels at ‘the wonder of it, in that pallor / Through crosshatch of sparrows and starling’. She manages to capture the beauty and richness and ‘rareness’ of the pheasant in one remarkably apt image: ‘It’s a little cornucopia’. Imagery, of course, adds a new dimension to Plath’s descriptions of nature. She uses imagery in a way that sends echoes of suggestion, of splendour, of menace through a poem and invites interpretations from the reader.
Much of her imagery is of a visual kind, in itself emphasising the importance of ‘seeing’ and ‘reflecting’ in her work. One of her common images from nature, very like Heaney, is water. In ‘Finisterre’, for example, Plath recreates the sights and sounds of land’s end in a dramatic evocation of the sea as it explodes, ‘Whitened by the faces of the drowned’. The sea ‘cannons’ to the dead, suggesting that for Plath, it represents a destructive force that humans can only hope to oppose in their unheard prayers to ‘Our Lady of the Shipwrecked’. The scene at the sea cliffs is a grim one. Nature is unforgiving; it is a receptacle of death, ‘Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars’, and it holds potential for more evil where ‘rocks hide their grudges under the water’. Certainly, it is not a benevolent force, not a nostalgic, romantic or sentimental place. Plath’s vivid and perhaps unexpected images have created a disturbing ‘Bay of the Dead’.
However, a further development occurs in Plath’s imagery when she begins to use it, not merely to create a vivid picture of external reality, but as a device to suggest the inner reality of her own mind. In this way, Plath uses imagery as an expression of landscape but also as a reflection of her own inner mindscape. (Hopkins does this also in his Terrible Sonnets). In other words, Plath succeeds in fusing external events with her own inner feelings. In the poem ‘Elm’ the poet creates a dark, disturbing and surreal world where love is ‘a shadow’, sunset an ‘atrocity’, where winds are violent, the moon ‘merciless’, and the tree/woman is ‘terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me’. The poem concludes with death that seems, rather than being final, to be ongoing. The external landscape of the tree may indeed express the inner turmoil and disturbances of Plath’s mind, that has become ‘inhabited by a cry’ that ‘Nightly … flaps out / Looking with its hooks, for something to love’. The poet is ‘terrified by this dark thing’ that ‘petrifies the will’.
Imagery, therefore, captures various states of emotional distress. Often this unexpected power of her images originates in objects that at first appear commonplace, such as the elm tree or, in ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, the bees. Nonetheless, the echoes that emanate from such commonplace objects are unexpected and startling. The bees in the bee box, for example, are variously described ‘a Roman mob’, ‘maniacs’, who speak ‘unintelligible syllables’. However, the poet has to ‘live with’ them overnight. Such imagery certainly animates the bees in the poem, but it could also evoke the inner turmoil and chaos within the poet’s mind. Her inner voices are like the bees: she can’t control them, can’t understand them, they remain ‘dark, dark’. She also sees them as ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’ and their shriek ‘appals’ her. In the poem she decides, hesitantly, to ‘set them free’ from her mind, which up to now has remained a ‘coffin’, a locked up box with ‘no exit’. The poet, dressed in her ‘moon suit and funeral veil’ both wishes for and fears their release. But the conclusion is more hopeful than that in ‘Elm’, for tomorrow she will ‘set them free’.
(As an interesting exercise, you might examine the poem ‘Mirror’ with some of these ideas in mind. Stanza two of that poem should reward you with some thoughtful insights! Another worthwhile study would be Plath’s use of colour and what it might symbolise in her poetry.)
It is clear, therefore, that Plath’s striking metaphors and startling similes are usually central to a poem’s development. Her images can evoke vivid descriptions of the external world, the poet’s feelings for that world, and at times she has the ability to fuse these feelings to the emotional insecurities of her inner world.
Hartnett bronze by artist Rory Breslin in The Square, Newcastle West.
There is a very telling little poem by Michael Hartnett tucked away in A Book of Strays called ‘Aere Perrenius’. In it the poet recounts early encounters with Patrick Kavanagh after Hartnett had made his way to Dublin, ‘fresh from Newcastle West / at twenty, with a sheaf of verse / tucked into my belt’. It is really a very gentle admonition by the very prescient Hartnett who was already garnering academic interest. He is saying to those who are required, as part of their academic studies, to rummage through the entrails of a poet’s work to be gentle in their excavations.
The Latin phrase aere perrenius comes to us from Horace. In the final poem in his third book of Odes, Horace boasts that his poetry will outlive any man-made monument: “Exegi monumentum aere perennius.” (“I have made a monument more lasting than bronze.”). Hartnett would probably have been first introduced to the beauty and wisdom of Horace by Dave Hayes, erudite classics scholar and teacher of Latin at St. Ita’s Secondary School, Newcastle West where Hartnett studied for his Leaving Cert in 1950’s.
Hartnett’s poem ‘Aere Perrenius’, is therefore, really a poetic warning to young aspiring academics not to ‘tamper with the facts’ of his verse – or indeed Kavanagh’s verse either! He mentions these, ‘dull strangers with degrees / who prune, to fit conceptions’. These aspiring scholars build their theories on fragile ground, ‘give you ancestors and heirs’ and try to ‘bring you into line / with academic aims, / number all your bones / and make false claims.’
Would-be academics who undertake such necessary work should be aware, however, of the poet’s sensitivities. Hartnett is adamant that he can live with being forgotten but not with being misunderstood or misinterpreted:
It is easy to forgive
a world that forgets
but not a world that changes
with subtle sentences
a life that was and is.
Both Hartnett and Kavanagh have had their fair share of being misunderstood – and for those who are familiar with the ‘history’ of their friendship, many will find Hartnett’s appeal on behalf of his ‘mentor’ very commendable! He claims to understand Kavanagh, for all his rough edges, ‘the smokescreen of your talk / about fillies, about stallions’. His intimate knowledge of the man from Inniskeen is encapsulated in that uniquely Irish form of the ultimate trusting relationship: ‘I sometimes placed your bets.’
He declares that the bronze statue by the Grand Canal in Dublin’s Baggott Street is best described by Kavanagh’s own word ‘banal’! He, unsuccessfully as it happens, hopes that he will never suffer a similar fate. He issues an appeal to all young, and not so young, aspiring academics to thread softly when they come to investigating and exploring the work of any poet:
I’d rather be forgotten out of hand
than wronged in bronze:
let the sad facts stand.
Patrick Kavanagh’s bronze commemorative seat near Baggott Street Bridge in Dublin
The main purpose of these notes is to assist you in forming an overview of Bishop’s work. For this reason the material is structured as a series of ‘thinking points’, grouped under general headings. These cover the poet’s main preoccupations and methods, but they are not exhaustive. Neither are they ‘carved in stone’, to be memorised: ideally they should be altered, added to or deleted as you develop your own set of notes. This priceless pearl of wisdom can be applied to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop but it equally applies to all the other poets on your course as well!
The poems that we will analyse are: The Fish, Filling Station, The Prodigal. (These are also on the Ordinary Level Course.) and also First Death in Nova Scotia, In the Waiting Room, At the Fishhouses and Questions of Travel.
Major Themes in Bishop’s Poetry
Childhood
Many of her poems have their roots in childhood memories, indeed are based on her own childhood (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
The perspective is mostly that of adult reminiscence (‘In the Waiting Room’), but occasionally the child’s viewpoint is used (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
The lessons of childhood are chiefly about pain and loss (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
There is a strong tension between the need to return to childhood and the need to escape from that childhood (‘In the Waiting Room’, ‘At the Fishhouses); she even returns in dreams in a poem called ‘The Moose’.
Perhaps this is based on the notion of childhood as the completion of the self, and the poems are a search for the self? (Don’t mind me I’m just showing off!)
We know she attended counselling to find the origins of her alcoholism and depression. Yet her reconstructions of childhood do not seem to function as Freudian therapy. She doesn’t seem to alter her direction or attitudes as a result of drawing her past into the conscious, though she does seem to find a deal of comfort and a greater acceptance in the later poem, ‘The Moose’. She is not trying to apportion blame, neither is she trying to be forgiving or sympathetic. In general she seems neutral and detached (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
She also deals with the end of childhood and the awakening to adulthood (‘In the Waiting Room’).
Her life was her subject matter
Bishop was ‘a poet of deep subjectivity’, as Harold Bloom said. She wrote out of her own experience, dealing with such topics as
Her incompleteness (‘In the Waiting Room’)
Alcoholism (‘The Prodigal’)
Achieving adulthood and the confusion of that (‘In the Waiting Room’)
Travel, her wanderlust (‘Questions of Travel’), her favourite places (‘At the Fishhouses’)
Even her hobbies, such as fishing (‘The Fish’).
The poet and travel
As her own wanderings show, she was a restless spirit, constantly on the move: Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil, Europe, New York, San Francisco, Harvard.
Many of the places she visited (Nova Scotia, the Straits of Magellan, the Amazon Estuary, Key West, Florida) stand at the boundary between land and sea. There is a tension between land and sea in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’), with the sea viewed as a strange, indifferent, encircling power (‘At the Fishhouses’). Perhaps this is a metaphor for the conflict between the artist and life? Quite a few of her poems are set at this juncture between land and sea (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘The Fish’).
She seemed to be fascinated by geographical extremities: straits, peninsulas, wharves; mountains, jungle, outback (‘Questions of Travel’). Perhaps she was attracted to the near-isolation of these places. They are almost isolated in her poems. One critic viewed these as the sensual organs of a living earth, ‘fingers of water or land that are the sensory receptors of a large mass.’ The poet is seen as making sensuous contact with the living earth.
Bishop has an eye for the exotic and the unusual (‘Questions of Travel’) but also for the ordinary (‘Filling Station’).
She dwells on the difficulty of ever really knowing another culture (‘Questions of Travel’), but this did not prevent her trying!
Travel and journeying can be seen as a metaphor for discovery of truth in some poems (‘Questions of Travel’).
Bishop and the natural world
Nature is central to her poetry, either as an active element central to the experience of the poem or by making an intrusion into the domestic scene (in a minority of poems such as ‘Filling Station’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, and ‘In the Waiting Room’).
The experience of really looking at and encountering the natural is central to her poetic process (‘The Fish’, ‘Questions of Travel’).
Our ability to understand the natural is sometimes limited, yet there are great moments of awe and insight in our encounters with the otherworldly spirit of nature (‘The Fish’).
Bishop is always aware of the sheer beauty of nature (‘Questions of Travel’) and this is obviously tied in with her fascination with travel and her already mentioned interest in the exotic.
She tends to domesticate the strangeness of nature through language and description (see ‘The Prodigal’).
You should also consider again some of the points already made, such as how geographical extremes fascinated her, her beloved places, and the significance of journeys for her.
The domestic and the strange
The importance of the domestic is also a central ground in her poetry. Domesticity is one of the unifying principles of life. It gives meaning to our existence (‘Filling Station’).
The comfort of people, of domestic affections, is important (‘Filling Station’).
Yet the heart of the domestic scene can sometimes be enigmatic. This strangeness, even at the centre of the domestic, is a powerful element in human life (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’). One can be ambushed by the strange at any time, even in the security of the domestic scene (‘In the Waiting Room’)
Bishop’s philosophy as revealed in the poems
Bishop’s is a secular (non-religious) world view: there is no sense of ultimate purpose, and in this she relates to modernist American poets like Frost and Stevens.
Hers is very much a here-and-now, existential philosophy: the experience is everything. There is some sense of tradition or linear movement in her life view, but tradition is just an accumulation of experience. The transience of knowledge (‘At the Fishhouses’) and the limits to our knowing (‘Questions of Travel’) contribute to this outlook.
Her ecological outlook is at the basis of her philosophy, as we have seen: humans communing with nature, discovering, encountering, not domineering (‘The Fish’).
She demonstrates the importance of the domestic (‘Filling Station’).
Her view of the human being is as fractured and incomplete (‘Chemin de Fer’). This duality has been described by Anne Newman (in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom) as follows: ‘She sees the ideal and the real, permanence and decay, affirmation and denial in both man and nature’; a sort of ’fractured but balanced’ view of humanity’. Examine ‘Filling Station’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ for signs of this.
A person may not always be entirely free to choose her location (‘Questions of Travel’), yet she can make a choice about how her life is spent. Life is not totally determined (‘The Prodigal’).
The bleaker side of life is often stressed, the pain, loss and trauma (‘The Prodigal’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’), yet she is not without humour (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Filling Station’).
She believes we need to experience our dreams (‘Questions of Travel’).
Is her overall view of humankind that of the eternal traveller, journeying? And is the journey all?
She expresses the unknowable strangeness of death (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
Yet there is a sort of heroism evident in her poems. Many of the poems feature a crisis or conflict of some sort, with which the narrator deals courageously, often learning in the process (‘The Fish’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
Bishop and Women’s Writing
Are you conscious of the femininity of the speaker in Bishop’s poems? Some critics have argued that the importance of the domestic principle in her philosophy (‘Filling Station’) and the attitudes of care and sympathy in the poems (for the fish, the prodigal, the animals and birds) and even the occupational metaphors, for example of housekeeping (‘Filling Station’) and dressmaking and map colouring in other poems, all indicate a strong feminine point of view in her poetry.
Other critics have argued that her rhetoric is completely asexual, that the poet’s persona is neutral, the Bishop ‘I’ is the eye of the traveller or the child recapturing an innocence that avoids sex roles altogether, an asexual self that frees her from any sex-determined role. Examine ‘Questions of Travel’ and ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ in this regard.
We have already encountered something of her treatment of her own sexuality and her attitude as a child to female sexuality (‘In the Waiting Room’ and other poems).
Style and Technique
Variety of verse forms
Though she was not often attracted to formal patterns, there are a variety of verse forms found in Bishop’s poetry: sonnet, sestina, villanelle, etc. (‘The Prodigal’, ‘Sestina’).
She used a variety of metres but often-favoured trimeter lines (resulting in those long thin poems!).
She was happiest using free verse (‘Questions of Travel’. ‘At the Fishhouses’).
Her descriptions
The surface of a Bishop poem is often deceptively simple.
A favourite technique is ‘making the familiar strange’ (‘Questions of Travel’).
Her detailed descriptions function as repossession or domestication of the object by the artist. This is how she gradually apprehends her subject, through the accumulation of detail (‘The Fish’).
Bishop often insisted on the truth of her descriptions, but the reality is more complex than that. Her descriptions are both recreation and creation, creating veracity but also using poetic licence (‘In the Waiting Room’).
Her similes and metaphors are often surprising, like conceits. They can be both exciting and exact.
Control and feeling
Many of her poems deal with emotive subjects (‘In the Waiting Room’).
There is an element of spontaneity and naturalness in the tone. Consider the opening of ‘In the Waiting Room’ and ‘Filling Station’. ‘The sense of the mind actively encountering reality, giving off the impression of involved immediate discovery, is one of Bishop’s links to the Romantics,’ as the critic Penelope Laurans put it.
The matter-of-fact tone avoids sentimentality. The use of understatement controls feeling (‘In the Waiting Room’).
The absence of moralising
Her dislike of didacticism is well documented. She disliked ‘modern religiosity and moral superiority’, and so she avoids overt moralising in her poems. The scenes offer up their wisdom gradually, ass the descriptions help us to understand the object or place (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’).
Bishop as a dramatic poet
Consider:
Scenes of conflict or anger
Moments of dramatic encounter
Dramatic monologue structure in many of the poems.
MAKING THE STRANGE FAMILIAR: FORGING A PERSONAL UNDERSTANDING OF BISHOP’S POETRY
Think about the following points, and make notes for yourself.
Which of her poems made the deepest impression on you?
Which passages would you wish to read and reread?
What are her principal issues or concerns?
Did you find that reading Bishop gave you any insights into human beings or the world? What did you discover?
Think about the landscapes and places that attracted her. What do they suggest about the poet and poetry?
What do you notice about the people featured in her poetry?
Do you find her poetry different in any way from other poetry you have read?
Why should we read Bishop?
What questions would you like to ask her about her poetry?
BISHOP’S LINKS TO THE ROMANTICS
The Romantic Movement held sway at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was at its height between 1800 – 1830 and the main architects of this movement were Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge.
There follows a list of some of the main distinguishing features of Romanticism. Consider Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in the light of some or all of these statements.
Romanticism stressed the importance of the solitary individual voice, often in rebellion against tradition and social conventions.
In place of orthodox religious values the individual looks for value and guidance in intense private experience.
Nature often provides this intense experience, hence the notion of nature as the great teacher and moral guide as in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (or even ‘The Daffodils’!).
Romanticism can show a divided view of the individual. The individual is often pulled in opposite directions – for example solitariness versus sociability, lonely pursuit of an ideal versus community fellowship.
It is anti-rational. Feelings, instinctive responses, unconscious wisdom and passionate living are valued more than rational; thought.
Dreams and drug-enhanced experiences are especially valued. Children, primitive people, outcasts, even the odd eccentric figure are regarded as having special insight and wisdom.
‘Bishop explored typical Romantic themes, such as problems of isolation, loss, and the desire for union beyond the self.’ Explore the poetry in the light of this statement.
It has been said that Bishop’s practice of poetry follows Wordsworth’s advice that poetry should embody controlled passion. For Wordsworth, (and for Bishop also), poetry was ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and many of his great poems embody the notion of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Would you agree with this assessment of her poetry?
Finally, as a little test of your new-found expertise, examine ‘At the Fishhouses’ as an example of a great Romantic poem.
ELIZABETH BISHOP – AN OVERVIEW
The poems by Elizabeth Bishop on our course reveal many of the most striking characteristics of her work: her eye for detail, her interest in travel and different places, her apparently conversational tone, her command of internal rhyme, her use of repetition, her interest in strict poetic forms (the sonnet and the sestina), childhood memories, identity, loss.
The world, which Bishop describes in her poetry, is vivid and particular. She is so intent on accurate description that often the detail is qualified and clarified within the poem. In Michael Schmidt’s words, ‘the voice affirms, hesitates, corrects itself; the image comes clear to us as it came clear to her, a process of adjusting perception until the thing is seen. Or the feeling is released.’ For example, in ‘The Fish’ she tells us:
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
– the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly –
Another example would be where she describes the eyes of the fish. She says that they ‘shifted a little’ and then she clarifies this further with the more precise observation that, ‘it was more like the tipping / of an object towards the light’.
Bishop is a sympathetic observer and it has been said of her that she asks us ‘to focus not on her but with her’. She looks at the fish, imagines its insides – ‘the coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers, / the big bones and the little bones … ; she sings hymns to the seal in ‘At the Fishhouses’; she finds love is present in the unlikely setting of a dirty filling station. When Bishop uses ‘I’ in her poetry it is never alienating or distancing. Somehow she makes the reader feel at ease. The poems as we read them are working something out.
Her poetry is not always strictly autobiographical but Bishop, an outsider for much of her life, writes indirectly in ‘The Prodigal’ of the outsider and later, in the explicitly autobiographical ‘In the Waiting Room’, she names herself (‘you are an Elizabeth’) and charts the sense of her child’s mind realising her uniqueness and identity. ‘Sestina’ is also autobiographical, in that it tells of a home without a mother and father. She only wrote of her childhood experiences late in life: ‘Sestina’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ all date from when she was in her fifties. In these poems she captures the confusion and complexities of childhood, its terror, panic and alienation. In ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, she pieces together, as a child’s mind would, the details in order to understand them: ‘Arthur’s coffin was / a little frosted cake, / and the red-eyed loon eyed it / from his white, frozen lake.’
It has been said that Bishop preferred geography to history and it is significant that she remembers reading National Geographic in ‘In the Waiting Room’. The title of her first book, North and South, contains the idea of opposites but opposites that co-exist. Yet her descriptions of place are never just descriptions of place. Morality, history and politics are also evident in Bishop’s landscapes. In ‘Questions of Travel’, Brazil and its otherness prompt Bishop to ask if it’s right to watch strangers in another country. She dwells on the country’s traditions (‘In another country the clogs would all be tested’), religious influences (‘a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque’), history (‘the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages’).
In her poetry there is self-discovery, a sense of difference, moments of heightened awareness (epiphanies), a strong sense of here and now, an absence of any religious belief but a belief in the mystery of knowledge ‘flowing and flown’. In ‘At the Fishhouses’ what begins as accurate and gradual description of landscape gives way to a downward movement towards the dark cold centre of meaning, here imagined as deep beneath the ocean surface and something that we can never know or understand fully.
In Bishop the act of writing and the art of writing bring shape and order to experience. In ‘Questions of Travel’ she describes the traveller taking a notebook and writing. The use of ‘we’ in the poem and the way in which every traveller is contained in ‘the traveller’ allows everyone to enter into the experience. This record of thought and feeling is what Bishop herself does in her poems. She was interested in form: the sonnet and the sestina are very formal, but in other poems where the structure and rhythm may not be obvious at first there is often a very fine command and control.
***
In one of her finest poems, ‘Crusoe in England’, she imagines Robinson Crusoe lonely for his island and his friend Friday; and remembering his time there, she writes:
The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me.
Here we have the voice of Robinson Crusoe, and the voice of Elizabeth Bishop, and the voice of all other lonely, observing, travellers. It is significant that Bishop was attracted to the figure of Robinson Crusoe, an isolated figure, someone ill at ease having returned to society. Her sexuality and her struggle with alcohol were part of her own sense of isolation. In a letter written in 1948 to Robert Lowell she said, ‘When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.’ Her later work suggests a happier Elizabeth Bishop, but her life was never uncomplicatedly happy.
Bishop’s The Complete Poems 1927 – 1972 contains just over 140 poems and some thirty of these are translations from French, Spanish, and Portuguese. She wrote very slowly, very carefully, sometimes pinning bits of paper on her walls, leaving blank spaces (‘with gaps / and empties for the unimagined phrases’ is how Robert Lowell described it in a poem for her), waiting for the right word. Some of her poems were several years in the making. She worked on ‘The Moose’ for over twenty-five years, yet it seems effortless as all good poetry does. She writes a poetry that echoes the rhythms of natural speech and her rhymes are not always easy to detect. End rhymes and cross rhymes or slant rhymes create a special and effective music. And what Yeats says of all true poetry is true of Bishop:
‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’
Sample Answer:
‘Bishop’s poems are constructed around movement and reflection. She is a meticulous writer who effectively combines precise observations with striking imagery’.
In the words of famous American poet, Robert Lowell, ‘I don’t think anyone alive has a better eye than she has’ – there is ample evidence in her poems on the course of the truth of this statement.
Each of her poems, from ‘The Fish’ to ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, throbs with movement and reflection. Bishop is a poet who seems preoccupied with the passion of movement, yet never strains in her ability to capture its beauty, strangeness or intricacies in imagery which can be dramatic, and at times almost outrageous, in its originality. In ‘The Fish’, she describes how the fish hung ‘a grunting weight’ while his eyes ‘shifted a little’. Through the poem, Bishop reflects on its suffering movements before she finally ‘let the fish go’. Further activity is observed in ‘At the Fishhouses’ including the motion of wheelbarrows, the sea that considers ‘spilling over’, the standing seals and ‘forever flowing water’, all elements within a sea of change.
‘Filling Station’ has dirty monkey suits, wickerwork baskets and dogs, bringing to vivid life the ordinary, mundane scenes of a petrol station. The observations here are precise, honest and real, ‘a dirty dog’, ‘a big dim doily’ … (‘Embroidered in daisy stitch / with marguerites, I think, / and heavy with grey crochet’.); the comic books which provide ‘the only note of colour’. Much description, little movement it seems, until the observer moves outside where ‘high-strung automobiles’ fill up with gas as they impatiently prepare to depart the scene.
Movement is never described for its own sake or in isolation. It expands on a theme, a tone, a mood that the poem is trying to reflect on. The repentant wastrel in ‘The Prodigal’ mentions ‘pigs’ eyes’ following him, while the farmer comes at dark to inspect his labourer. These images are used to emphasise to us the misery and remorse of the prodigal, a lonely emigrant worker in a foreign land at the soul-destroying job of pig-herding.
In her later poems, Bishop’s reflection on what she observes becomes a theme in itself. In ‘Questions of Travel’, for example, there are ‘too many waterfalls … and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops / makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion’. Bishop feels a pang of guilt as the scene unfolds and asks, ‘Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres?’ It is noteworthy too, that in describing the skies of Brazil she imports her imagery from Nova Scotia in saying, ‘the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled’. However, some things she observes will always be ‘inexplicable and impenetrable’ and can only be pondered on ‘blurr’dly and inconclusively’.
In all her poems, Bishop describes and defines movement, reflecting on landscape, animals and on people who work in and traverse that landscape. No detail seems too trivial for her to note in her observations. She paints striking pictures with imagery which is surprising, unusual and captivating – all the more so because many images depict ordinary, everyday scenes. Bishop was a meticulous worker, whose attention to detail shows she had a reflective mind and was a keen observer. Her craft, like her knowledge, is ‘flowing and flown’.
I’ve just finished The Green Road (Jonathan Cape) by Anne Enright, the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. The blurb accompanying the book states that it is a darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way – isn’t everything these days! – a story of fraction and family, of leaving home and coming home, a novel exploring selfishness and compassion, a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.
The novel is a bit of a slow burner at first, that is until we are introduced to the great Irish matriarch, in this case, Rosaleen Madigan. Her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance, Hanna, all leave the West of Ireland for lives they could never have imagined in Dublin, New York, Toronto and various third-world towns. Then Rosaleen announces that she has decided to sell the ancestral home and divide the proceeds. They all come home for a final Christmas together.
In truth I found the novel to be eerie and close to the bone. How did Anne Enright obtain such deep insight and information about my own mother! Her depiction of Rosaleen Madigan is worthy of a Booker on its own – ‘The world she grew up in was so different it was hard to believe she was ever in it.’ Like Michael Harnett’s grandmother, Bridget Halpin, in his poem, ‘Death of an Irishwoman’, ‘she clenched her brittle hands / around a world / she could not understand.’ I feel the novelist would have benefitted from an editor of the calibre of Harper Lee’s – if so we would now be reading about, ‘Rosaleen Considine at six and Rosaleen Madigan at seventy six’ rather than Rosaleen and all her offspring.
There were also a number of inexcusable typographical errors in my paperback edition, the sign of rushed publication, but surely unforgivable in a Booker nominated novel.
However, despite all my nit-picking, this novel is a must-read for any among you living with – or away from – a strong willed ageing Irish mother! Anne Enright has done a remarkable job of depicting this woman, a survivor of the Celtic Tiger era, who decides to cash in her chips and divvy out the proceeds to those who have survived her reign. Like Lear in his dotage we all are aware of the pitfalls of such a course of action!
My one major criticism of the novel is the ending. It is as if Anne Enright loses interest in the project and it fades out like a damp squib. The ending is disappointing and disjointed – skipping about tying up the loose ends. The characterisation is uneven – with Rosaleen and Constance being strongly drawn while the others are insipid and aimless enough. This novel won’t win this year’s Booker Prize, indeed it will be lucky to be shortlisted when you compare it to Tom McCarthy’s masterpiece, Satin Island, my current read.
This beautiful film, with its haunting Ennio Morricone soundtrack, is indeed a classic. Cinema Paradiso was a critical and box-office success and is regarded by many with a great fondness. It is particularly renowned for the ‘kissing scenes’ montage at the film’s end. Winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1989, the film is often credited with reviving Italy’s film industry, which later produced Mediterraneo and Life Is Beautiful. Film critic Roger Ebert gave it three stars and a half out of four and four stars out of four for the extended version, declaring, “Still, I’m happy to have seen it–not as an alternate version, but as the ultimate exercise in viewing deleted scenes.”
Cinema Paradiso was shot mainly in director Guiseppe Tornatore’s hometown of Bagheria, Sicily. The famous town square is Piazza Umberto I in the village of Palazzo Adriano, about 30 miles to the south of Palermo. The ‘Paradiso’ cinema was built here, at Via Nino Bixio, overlooking the octagonal Baroque fountain, which dates from 1608. Told largely in flashback the film tells the story of a successful film director Salvatore beginning with his early childhood love of cinema. It also tells the story of his return many years later to his native Sicilian village for the funeral of his old friend Alfredo, the projectionist at the local “Cinema Paradiso”. Ultimately, Alfredo serves as a wise father figure to his young friend. Alfredo only wishes to see him succeed, even if it means breaking his heart in the process.
Seen as an example of “nostalgic postmodernism”, the film intertwines sentimentality with comedy, and nostalgia with pragmaticism. It explores issues of youth, coming of age, and reflections (in adulthood) about the past. The imagery in the scenes can be said to reflect Salvatore’s idealised memories of his childhood. Cinema Paradiso is also a celebration of films; as a projectionist, young Salvatore (a.k.a. Totò) develops a passion for films that shapes his life path in adulthood.
THE HISTORICAL/LITERARY BACKGROUND: The film begins in a Sicilian village in the late 1940’s after World War Two. It was a time when cinema was just developing, and before the arrival of television. Cinema made a huge impact on the people of Sicily, who were in many ways socially isolated from the cultural developments of mainland Italy. The film spans a 30-year period, showing the changes in society and in the history of film itself, but more importantly, it documents the changes in the history of its viewers. The simplicity of the lives of the Sicilian people alters significantly as the effects of a rapidly changing world impact increasingly on their way of life.
THE STORY: Salvatore da Vita is the central protagonist or hero of the film. The film begins with Salvatore as a successful middle-aged man in Rome, receiving a message from his mother in Sicily that someone called Alfredo is dead. The shock of this news prompts a flashback to Salvatore’s youth and most of the film consists of Salvatore’s memories of his childhood in a small Sicilian village.
As a child, Salvatore (nicknamed Toto) had a fascination for the cinema in his village of Giancaldo, the Cinema Paradiso. The projectionist was a local man, Alfredo, and Toto befriended him and observed him at his work. Toto was a quick learner and soon knew how to run the cinema and he was especially interested in the work that went on in the projection room at the back of the cinema. Alfredo became a father-figure for Toto as his own father had not returned from the Russian Front during the war and Toto had never really known him. Alfredo taught Toto many things about the cinema, but he often discouraged him from considering it as a career as he could see that Toto was capable of better things.
However, one night, a fire broke out and Alfredo was trapped in the burning building and subsequently lost his sight. A local man who had won the lottery rebuilt the cinema and Toto became the new projectionist. Here the film jumps ahead about ten years and Toto is in his late teens and still working in the cinema. He begins to experiment himself making amateur films and while filming people at random, he filmed a beautiful young girl, Elena, with whom he fell in love. After persistently waiting under her window for weeks, like the soldier who waited for the princess, in a story told to him by Alfredo, he succeeded in winning her love in the comic ‘confession box scene’.
Alfredo still felt that Toto was wasting his time in Giancaldo and urged him to move away and do something with his life. Toto and Elena made tentative plans to elope together but these plans come to nothing when through a misunderstanding they fail to meet. Now Toto realised that there was no reason why he should stay. He left Giancaldo with Alfredo’s advice not to look back and to forget about him. We learn that while Toto did succeed materially, and later became a very successful film director in Rome, emotionally he has not found anyone to love.
The film ends with Toto (now Salvatore) returning home to attend Alfredo’s funeral after 30 years’ absence and noting the changes in his village. He visits the remains of the cinema and puts his old memories to rest. Alfredo’s legacy to him contains a reel of film which turned out to be a collection of the censored clips of actors kissing. He looks at this with a wry smile as he remembers all that this stood for. They were the times when the local priest, Fr. Adelphio, would censor any hint of intimacy on film, no matter how slight, as far cry from the present, where we see the priest’s influence on Sicilian society is greatly diminished. Alfredo may also have left the reel of film to remind Salvatore of the importance of love and to tell him to look for happiness in his personal life.
THEMES AND ISSUES
The Power of the Imagination (Cinema)
The people of Giancaldo and its surrounds are intoxicated by the power of the cinema. For them, the cinema not only transposes them from their mundane, limited circumstances into a world of excitement and drama, but it introduces them to modern living and all its promises. They enter into the film as it unfolds and shriek with laughter or gasp with horror at the crisis points.
A clever touch in the film is the way in which we see the boy, who has seen the film many times, watching the audience’s reactions and behaviour. They become his entertainment, as their responses are what make the projectionist’s job worthwhile. Alfredo once told him that when the audience were happy, it made him happy too.
The local people were almost in a frenzy to get into the cinema to see the latest film. The local priest, Fr. Adelphio, felt morally obliged to censor each film before it was shown to the public because he feared the influence of the film’s contents upon them. Actors’ kissing on screen was completely unacceptable.
However, with the passing of time, the films have become less censored and the excitement of seeing bared flesh and especially scenes with sexual overtones are what attract the audiences now. The priest has less control now over the content of the films because the cinema has now gone into private ownership.
Sadly, with the competing outdoor film companies (Drive in Movies) and the introduction of television, the cinema loses its customers and falls into disrepair. When Salvatore returns thirty years later, what was once the centre-point of the village is now in a sorry state. What was once the most powerful pulse of the locals’ entertainment, has now weakened and is fading away.
The Theme of Isolation
As a child, Toto was isolated from his mother. He was an intelligent child, who needed to question and explore new things. His mother was a woman who held the old values dear to her and looked at the changing times with suspicion, so Toto gradually became distant from her. He lacked a father-figure due to the fact that his father had not returned from the Russian Front so he formed a bond with Alfredo. This fact furthered his alienation from his mother. Toto also had a younger sister who rarely features in the film and he seemed to have little in common with her.
Toto spent every spare moment with Alfredo in the projection room of the cinema, so in that respect, they isolated themselves from society. Alfredo lived for the cinema and seemed distanced even from his wife. This may be partly due to the fact that his job involved so many anti-social hours. When he left Giancaldo, Toto seemed to have lived a rather lonely life, despite having no shortage of female companions. He had never really formed a relationship with anyone since he left his home town.
The Theme of Love
In more than one way, this film could be seen as love story. It deals with the relationship between Toto and Alfredo, which resembles a father-son relationship. The fact that Toto’s mother disapproved of it may have drawn them closer together. Alfredo loved Toto enough to send him away for his own good. He felt that it was necessary to sever their bond so that Toto would be able to make more progress in the field of cinema than just merely showing films. This proves to be the case as Toto became a respected film director.
Toto had only ever fallen in love once in his life, with a new girl to the locality who was the bank manager’s daughter. It was, for him, the type of romantic love story he had seen in films many times – love at first sight. Despite Alfredo’s reservations on the subject, Toto insisted on pursuing her. When Elena is taken away by her father to live in an area where she can go to college, Toto’s heart is broken. He never really recovers from this and cannot maintain a steady relationship with any other woman he meets later. Every time his mother telephones, a different woman answers the phone. As only a mother can tell, she says to Salvatore when he returns, that not one person who answers the phone is in love with you. When Salvatore reruns the old film clip he had of Elena, his mother peeping in at the door understands. As the film ends with Salvatore viewing the passionate kisses from the old films, he seems to be more at peace with himself and ready to let go of the past.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
There is a strong emphasis on the changes in the Sicilian way of life from the end of the Second World War up to thirty or more years later. At first the people are simple and ignorant of modern life and almost worship the power of the cinema with awe. They take what they see literally and repeatedly view the same films over and over again. As the cinema develops, so do they and they demand more variety. The old and rather tame Romances are rejected and a more vibrant genre takes its place. Now they are watching westerns, thrillers and passionate love stories.
These changes in Sicily, mainland Italy and, indeed, throughout Europe may not be welcomed by all but they are seen to be inevitable. At the end, as Toto gazes at the old square which he knew as a boy, now filled with cars and noise and bright colours, we can sense his sadness. The most shocking part occurs when the cinema is knocked down to make way for a car park. That says it all. It symbolises the transition from the old way of life to the new. As the camera looks out from the hearse carrying Alfredo’s coffin to the graveyard it seems that there are two funerals taking place: Alfredo’s and the old way of life. The cinema, which stood for the old cultural values, is gone.
LITERARY GENRE
Cinema Paradiso fits into the genre of social realism. It deals with realistic relationships and gives a realistic view of Sicilian society. It depicts the modernisation of Sicily in the post-war period, emphasising the rapid changes. It can also be classified as a romance (especially the director’s cut version), but this is only a minor part of the plot. The only real conflict is within the central character, when he struggles to make his decision to break from Alfredo and leave Sicily. This film is also biographical, which makes it a narrative story in the form of a film.
STRUCTURE AND STYLE
PLOT: It is quite a conventional plot at face value: a young boy is fascinated by the cinema in his youth and he leaves his small village to seek his fortune and he becomes a respected film director and then returns to his native village to attend the funeral of his mentor. There is one main flashback which tells most of the story until the end, with a couple of additional minor flashbacks. The history of the cinema is presented in sequence, and the progress of the society’s cultural development cleverly parallels this.
SETTING: Most of the film is set in the cinema or in the square outside. Toto is occasionally seen in the streets nearby. Only a few scenes are set in the schoolroom, near Toto’s house, or at the river close by. Salvatore’s house in Rome features at the beginning and at the end and the only other time the film goes any real distance from the village is when Toto goes away on military service. There are some brief glimpses of the surrounding countryside and there is also one very significant scene where Toto takes the blind Alfredo to the sea after his return from military service.
VISUALS: Sicilian architecture features significantly in the film, both outdoors and indoors. Early on in the film some of the sequences are shot in the church and then they move to the cinema, which closely resembles the church. The cinema is carefully designed to fit in closely with the buildings of the time and, by implication, its ethos. Towards the end of the film, the structure of the new cinema deviates from this with its many garish qualities, neon signs, etc., mirroring the modernisation of society.
The stone carving of the lion is striking as it symbolises power and strength (maybe a reference here to the Metro Goldwyn Meyer lion?) At dramatic points in the film, there is a quick cut to the lion, perhaps to remind us that film is a powerful medium of information and influence for the people.
Two very memorable visuals are the quick flashes of Elena and Salvatore in a bed of greenery, sharing food and love, followed by the lovers running through a cornfield, laughing and calling to each other. The brevity of the shots may have been intended to emphasise the brevity of the relationship.
CAMERA SHOTS/ANGLES: Cinema Paradiso has a varied selection of camera shots and angles. On screen, we are shown the history of film and we can see the development and progression of film techniques in clips from a selection of films. Within the cinema itself, the audience are viewed by the use of under shots, over shots and side shots often taken at unusual angles.
One feature that stands out is the one where Alfredo is advising Toto to leave Giancaldo and as his hands pass over Toto’s face, Toto becomes a young adult. We quickly realise that Toto has been the projectionist in the cinema now for many years (since Alfredo’s unfortunate accident) and that nothing has changed. There is something very unsettling in this, which illustrates how Toto is wasting his life in the confines of the Cinema Paradiso.
At the end of the film, the technique of superimposing one picture over another is used and with brilliant effect, giving the impression of a reflection in a car window as Salvatore looks out on the countryside.
We see a very clever variation on a camera angle at the funeral when the shot is taken from inside the hearse looking out at the mourners. It resembles a television screen as the rear window of the hearse frames the picture. (Not only is this Alfredo’s funeral but also a funeral for cinema and the old ways which are being replaced by the new fangled ideas such as television!?) Towards the end of the film there is a greater variety of camera techniques displayed, showing the viewers that things have really changed and advanced since Salvatore left thirty years ago. Now everything is presented differently.
(Read the excellent review on Cinema Paradiso by Barbara Poyner – it is very good in this area.)
LIGHTING: The lighting in Cinema Paradiso is very cleverly manipulated to echo the content of the film. Lighting constantly changes in this film. We see it changing within the films themselves shown on screen, and also inside and outside the actual cinema. Much of the film is set in the small room in the cinema where Alfredo and Toto are either cutting and splicing films or showing them. The projection room is small and usually dark or shadowy. One moment we can see Alfredo and Toto in the shadowy reel room and suddenly it changes to the square outside; we almost have to blink to adjust to the change in lighting. When the cinema becomes modernised and Toto takes over, suddenly the room is bigger and awash with light. The film begins with Salvatore in his bed, beginning to dream of home in the dark. At the end we see him in his own private viewing room, in the dark, viewing his legacy from Alfredo – the reel of stolen kisses.
SOUND: The sound effects in Cinema Paradiso are extremely appropriate. The outstanding feature in this area is the music of Ennio Morricone which is as much a part of the film as anything else and which does so much to create the emotional responses sought by its director, Tornatore. The soft music at emotional moments (often deliberately muffled to suggest poor and primitive sound systems) emphasises the strength of the relationship between Alfredo and Toto and between Toto and Elena. One instance where the music is light-hearted is where Toto is racing from one village to another and back again, against the clock, to get the second part of the film. The music is racing too, as speed is the important issue here and so the suspense is very well conveyed.
Often, there are silences when something significant happens. When Salvatore’s mother tries to contact him, silence is used to highlight the tension. A sound of thunder contrasts with this after Salvatore hears the news that Alfredo is dead. Also at the funeral, silence is used effectively.
It is interesting to note that the flashback sequences in the film are announced by the sound of chimes or bells and this is a very clever use of sound.
So now, take a break – sit back and luxuriate in the haunting music of the soundtrack!
LANGUAGE: The whole film is spoken in the Sicilian dialect, and subtitled for English speakers; therefore much of the richness of the language is lost on the non-Italian speaker. However, the facial expressions of Toto as a child and the tender expressions of Alfredo are all the more meaningful. A good example of this is the way in which Elena is first presented. The absence of language makes her appearance more effective.
SYMBOLS: There are many symbols in the film, some obvious and others partly hidden. The church and religious images feature quite frequently. In fact, at the beginning, the church and the cinemas are almost indistinguishable. At the end, the cinema is transformed into something almost unrecognisable in comparison. The statue of Mary is present on occasions to remind us of the strength of the Church in all areas of society, but she fades away and is notably absent at the end. It is interesting to note that when Salvatore manages to speak to Elena in church, she uncannily resembles the statue of Mary.
The symbol of anchors is also very prevalent, especially when Salvatore returns from military service. He goes with Alfredo to the sea and they speak. Salvatore nervously tells jokes in an effort to show a brave face. Alfredo tells him again that he should leave. Sicily is an island and they are by the seashore surrounded by rusty anchors that seek to keep Salvatore anchored to the island.
The half-hidden symbols include the mother’s ball of wool, which we notice on his return. She gets up to answer the door and let Salvatore back into their lives and as she does so the knitting begins to unravel signifying the unravelling of the years.
Middle Earth, Narnia, and Wessex are all examples of exotic, or parallel-world settings created by novelists to base their stories in. Novelists have always created these imaginary worlds for their own purposes. Middle Earth is the fictional universe created by Tolkien for his best loved works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. C.S. Lewis goes to great rounds to create another fictional realm for his seven Narnia books which make up his Chronicles of Narnia. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Novels are situated in a ‘partly real, partly dream country’.
Being a Harper Lee fan I’ve been awaiting Go Set a Watchman with eager anticipation since the old PR machine kicked into gear earlier in the year. For the purposes of this blog, however, I just want to focus for a little while on the setting of both novels, and novels in general, and it is clear to me that the real life Monroeville, Alabama of her youth becomes the fictional Maycomb, Alabama of her novels. Lee sets her novels here for a reason: she deliberately selects her setting, and in effect the fictional Maycomb becomes another Narnia or Middle Earth – a microcosm of all that is good and bad in 1930’s America. She tells us that one went to Maycomb, ‘to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his soul saved, his mules vetted’. She describes it as an isolated place, in effect it is an Everyplace – the town, ‘had remained the same for a hundred years, an island in a patchwork sea of cotton fields and timber land’. It is, in effect, a remote backwater bypassed by progress, the perfect playground of her youth, and the perfect cauldron for change.
In Go Set a Watchman she says that Maycomb County is, ‘a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements’, it is, ‘so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilection over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.’ It is so remote, ‘no trains went there’. In fact Maycomb Junction, ‘a courtesy title’, was located in Abbott County twenty miles away! However, she tells us that the, ‘bus service was erratic and seemed to go nowhere, but the Federal Government had forced a highway or two through the swamps, thus giving the citizens an opportunity for free egress.’ However, Lee tells us that few took advantage of this opportunity! Then in one of those Harper Lee epiphany moments, one of those lightening bolts she releases now and then, she perceptively describes her hometown as a place where, ‘If you did not want much, there was plenty.’
In To Kill a Mockingbird she continues in the same rich vein. Maycomb is, ‘a tired old town’. People moved slowly, ‘they ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything’. She tells us that, ‘There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County’, a scenario somewhat reminiscent of modern day Greece!
The setting of George Eliot’s novel, Silas Marner, has many echoes of Maycomb in Eliot’s fictional depiction of Raveloe. Eliot tells us that it, ‘was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices.’ She further describes it as being, ‘Not …. one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization — inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England’. However, like Maycomb it was off the beaten track, ‘it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion’. Much of this abundance is of course meant to contrast with Silas Marner’s previous place of residence in Lantern Yard. Whereas Lantern Yard had been austere, white-walled, and filled with serious and devout Puritans, Raveloe is a place of lazy plenty, pints at the local tavern, and carefree religion on Sundays. Chapter One declared it to be a place where bad farmers are rewarded for bad farming!
This description of Raveloe also holds great echoes with The Village as depicted in Jim Crace’s latest (and last?) novel, Harvest. The narrator, Walter Thirsk tells us that, ‘these fields are far from anywhere, two days by post-horse, three days by chariot, before you find a market square.’ Harvest dramatises one of the great under-told narratives of English history: the forced enclosure of open fields and common land from the late medieval era on, whereby subsistence agriculture was replaced by profitable wool production, and the peasant farmers dispossessed and displaced. “The sheaf is giving way to sheep”, as Crace puts it here, and an immemorial connection between people and their local environment is being broken – their world is crumbling around them. Great changes are coming and, as everyone knows by now, the only people who welcome change are babies with wet nappies!
Brian Friel’s use of Ballybeg (small town) as the setting for many of his plays and short stories is also similar in vein to these others. In Philadelphia Here I Come, Gar Public tells us that Ballybeg is, ‘a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end’. Friel, like Lee, and Eliot and Crace is deceptive because he is dealing with familiar things and familiar characters – shopkeepers, housekeepers, and parish priests – a very familiar rural Ireland fixed in its own time. Friel’s use of the alter ego – Public Gar and Private Gar – allows us the opportunity to see behind the superficiality of so much of this world of small-town life.
In many ways Friel’s major theme is the failure of people to communicate with each other on an intimate level. In this play especially we are introduced to the typically Irish practice of verbal non-communication! He, like Harper Lee, George Eliot, and Jim Crace, forces us to examine the nature of society. In Ireland our society in the 40’s and 50’s was dominated by the church, the politician and the schoolmaster. Ultimately the world that Gar is leaving has failed him and his generation. But Friel is too subtle to allow us to imagine that the world Gar is about to enter in Philadelphia will be any better.
These meandering rambles are an attempt to place myself at the beginning of a work of fiction, to stand for a moment in the author’s shoes, so to speak, and see the world from their point of view. From my limited reading it seems to me that many authors deliberately choose a world untrodden, less travelled as the setting for their novel. I have mentioned some here in this piece but I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg and you will be able to reference many examples from your own reading. Ideally the setting is always remote, secluded, off the map or often off the mainland, cut off from change and advancement. This microcosm is then filled with characters and fictional dilemmas, action and inaction. I have always been truly fascinated and overawed by each author’s unique ability and ingenuity in creating and imagining these hidden places and thus allowing us the privilege of entering the world of their texts.
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