… Elizabeth Bishop Day (she lived there for a few years and wrote some great poems about it), UD reads through her copy of The Complete Poems and gives Bishop a good think. The last lines of The Bight (my analysis of it is linked to up there, at great poems) became her epitaph —
— and it does rather capture her philosophy, not to mention her life, which was lived with background messiness (drunkenness, loneliness, depression) and foreground … if not cheeriness, at least with a pleasant public countenance. Many of her best, and best-known poems, meticulously observe an operable, operating, world (cargo ships coming and going at harbors, buses traveling Cape Breton), but it’s a lumbering, ultimately go-nowhere, always deteriorating, sort of thing… just like us…
Obviously the thought of life’s desuetude and apparent meaninglessness is awful, and poems exist to prompt the thought; but what the poet mainly notes along the way is the cheerfulness – and even aestheticism! – we bring to existence nonetheless.
Reading a lot of Bishop’s poems in one sitting saddened me. No one says she has to be Whitman, but her buddies James Merrill and Malcolm Brinnin, let’s say, mixed the melancholy with – not superficial cheer, but merriment at the spectacle.