Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
what to think).
The lexical ambiguity in “correspondences” hints at additional lexical ambiguity at work in this poem, as for example the pun in that same line. “The bight is littered with old correspondences” sounds very like “The bight is literate with old correspondences.” That light-handed homophonic resonance adds to the poem’s presentation of the bight as a place full of information and story, to be read. Or, again, in the last line the words “awful” and “cheerful” have a subtle duplicity to them. They seem to impute qualities to the activity itself: the activity is awful, and the activity is also cheerful. Since the poem has been talking about things, not about people, it is natural to extend the awe and cheer to those things. What is the awful and cheerful activity filling with awe and cheer? The dredge that is performing the activity. But the states that correspond to those qualities, awe and cheer, are human states. Humans experience awe and cheer, but dredges and sponge boats do not. So the more plausible extension is to the nearest human. Who is the awful and cheerful activity filling with awe and cheer? The speaker. This ambiguity, the dissonance between the more natural extension and the more plausible one (or, to put it differently, the location of the awe and cheer in the dredge and in me), establishes a relationship between the human observer and the things observed. It litters the poem with correspondences.
Bishop creates ambiguities with her words, certainly, but with her sentences as well. A beautiful example of her syntactical ambiguity occurs in “Filling Station.” The poem gives a bemused description of a very dirty filling station, so “oil-soaked, oil-permeated” that it elicits from the speaker the warning, “Be careful with that match!” The family members who staff the station all are dirty, the wickerwork furniture on the station’s porch is dirty, the doily atop the wicker taboret is dirty, the potted plant beside it is dirty. Yet, the speaker marvels, that all-pervading oiliness notwithstanding, somebody embroidered the doily, somebody waters the plant, and somebody “arranges the rows of cans / so that they softly say: / ESSO—SO—SO—SO / to high-strung automobiles.” The last line, with its summation of the speaker’s surprise, contains a clarifying ambiguity. “Somebody loves us all” might mean that each of us has at least one somebody who loves us, though the somebody who loves me is not the same somebody as the somebody who loves you; or it might mean that there is one somebody, the same somebody for everyone, who loves each of us. Those two meanings are very different. The first is a social and existential reassurance; the second, a spiritual and metaphysical reassurance. They cast themselves back over the poem very differently, giving the whole poem a double meaning. The first meaning, that each of us is loved by our own somebody, takes the filling station as evidence that we humans can and do offer one another consolation no matter how otherwise uncaring and unkempt our circumstances. I may be poor and shabby, but somebody loves me nevertheless. You may drive a more high-strung automobile than I do, but so what? I’ve got just as much love as you. The second meaning, that we all of us are loved by the same somebody, makes the filling station into an instance (however humble) of the argument from design, which contends that the whole world and everything in it, we ourselves included, has its origin and fulfilment in, and is suffused with, care.
That ambiguity enables “Filling Station” to portray as complementary, or even equivalent, two forms of understanding and hope that typically are construed as diametrically opposed. The poem embodies as equal possibilities and equal presences two very different integrities, just as the Nekker cube and the duck-rabbit do:
Is the right-hand square the closer face of the cube? Yes. Is it the farther? Yes. Is the figure a duck? Yes. Is it a rabbit? Yes. Both integrities remain “live.” In “Filling Station,” reading the ambiguous last sentence in one way foregrounds in the whole poem one presence; reading it the other way foregrounds the other. In the reading in which there are as many somebodies who love us as there are us who are loved, our human love is the consolation we can and do give one another in the face of the world’s entropy and ugliness. All is “quite thoroughly dirty.” Against this ultimate dirtiness, we ourselves can, and others in fact do, embroider doilies, water plants, and arrange rows of cans into symmetrical order. Love is a form of resistance to, or mitigation of, or compensation for, the world’s “disturbing, over-all / black translucency.” In the reading in which there is one somebody who does the loving, the same Somebody in every case, the situation is reversed. The embroidering and arranging are not done against the ultimate dirtiness; they are ultimate. The dirtiness is mere appearance, underneath which they are the reality. Love does not contest an ultimate disorder; it manifests an ultimate order. Love is not something we do for one another to contest the world, but instead is what the world itself does for us. We are used to thinking of these as mutually exclusive possibilities: if we must console ourselves for the dirty world’s indifference, then the world can’t care for us and arrange things on our behalf. Yet in the poem both worldviews are equally present, just as the duck and the rabbit are equally present in the one figure.
Yet a third kind of ambiguity in Bishop’s poetry, temporal ambiguity, is an important element of “The Fish,” in which the speaker catches “a tremendous fish,” but ultimately decides to “let the fish go.” Everything in the poem happens in past tense: I caught a fish, I held him up, I looked at him, and so on. In the last line, though, let is conjugated differently from the other verbs in the poem. “Caught,” for example, is only the past tense of “catch,” not also the present tense; “held” is only the past tense of “hold,” not also the present tense; and so on. “Let,” though, is not only the past tense of “let,” as in “Yesterday at lunch I let Susie cut in line.” As that past tense form, “let” describes a one-time event. But “let” is also the perpetual present tense, as in “When my little brother and I play ping-pong, I let him win.” As this perpetual present tense form, “let” describes a recurring or continuing event. Context typically chooses one tense for us. If I say, “I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I might mean I did it once, or I might mean I do it always. Context chooses. If I say, “We had a fight yesterday before he left for work, so when he got home I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I mean to describe a one-time event that occurred in the past and has been completed. If I say, “His parole officer says it’s best not to upset him, so I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I mean to describe a recurring event, still going on, not yet complete. In Bishop’s poem, though, the context does not enforce a choice, but allows either reading: at the past moment I have been describing, I allowed the fish to go, or as an ongoing condition I continue to allow the fish to go.
As a result of this ambiguity, I occupy two different relationships to the release of the fish: I did it once, on that day I am recalling from the past, and I am always releasing the fish. The event happened once, and the event is always happening. To reiterate why all of this matters: if “let” were not ambiguous, if it were only the past tense form, it would refer to an event and a thing, the release of the fish. Because it is ambiguous, because it is also the perpetual present tense form, it designates also a relationship between a self I was in the past and the self I am now.
It confirms the recognition that Bishop does not restrict herself to one form of ambiguity per poem, that the temporal ambiguity of the line is complemented by syntactical ambiguity. “I let the fish go” can mean “I let go of the fish” or “I allowed the fish to go.” In one case I perform the action, and in the other I authorize the action. In one the fish got his way, in the other I got my way. Thus is the relationship between myself and the fish made more nuanced.
Bishop’s “First Death in Nova Scotia” exemplifies a perspectival ambiguity: it offers the point of view of a child experiencing a funeral, limited to her child’s understanding, and the point of view of an adult looking back with an adult’s understanding on the child’s experience. An adult speaker recalls an event from her childhood, the funeral of her infant cousin Arthur. On the one hand, the descriptions all are calculated to place us in the child’s head, so that we look out on this domestic interior through the child’s eyes. As the reader, I see the stuffed loon as the child sees it, and from the position of the child. I experience being lifted up, so that I see the coffin from below