There is no new thing under the sun, and not under the moon, either. Looking closely at what is known reveals its awful, terrible— in the sense of “awe” and of “terror”— unknowability. Attention is not prayer: it does not seek rapport, or to communicate. An excess of begging clogs the ventricles of faith. Attention is a form of devotion regardless of presence, a ritual that does not demand or require an audience. One might “pay” it as notes left to flutter on an empty altar.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is a genius and gifted in attention. She is one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother institutionalized, insane, when she was five. She was a sickly child and circulated between family, grandparents, relatives, boarding school, a small planet of solo orbit.
She read the Victorians first, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, the Brownings. She went to Vassar in 1929 with Mary McCarthy and Eleanor Clark (geniuses, both), and became close with Marianne Moore (a genius, herself). She was a composer first but the prospect of performing monthly as Vassar required aggravated her stage fright, and she switched to English. She was poised to attend medical school before Moore talked her out of it. She went to Europe instead on the small inheritance from her father, which allowed her to travel for the next several decades. She lived in France, traveled Europe, visited Brazil and stayed for fifteen years. She returned to the United States to teach when she began running out of money.
She loved women and wanted nothing to do with the women’s movement. She was not published in women’s anthologies, refused to refer to herself as a “woman poet,” did not believe in what she called “propaganda in poetry,” wishing to be judged purely on the merit of her work.
She was a perfectionist, not prolific. She rejected the personal in her work. Unlike her intimately epistolary friend Robert Lowell, her close attention was aimed outward and did not circulate event, detail, incident from her life into her poetry, and did not stop at misreadings (“The Man-Moth”) or the armored surface (“The Armadillo”), attending even to these.
Toward the end of her life she was sick of “The Fish” being anthologized.
The Fish I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. (Elizabeth Bishop, 1946)
In this poem of near-overwhelming loveliness, there are three areas one might attend to:
“—It was more like the tipping / of an object toward the light.” There are seventy-six lines of gentle rhythmic precision and no consistent formal rhythm yet a fine falling order to the lines, a harmony of sounds, a pacing that accomplishes the miraculous extension of time in one long stanza. (There is also a slant rhyme of “engine” with “orange” which has to be seen to be believed.)
“Wallpaper” “wallpaper” / “Gills” “gills” / “rainbow” “rainbow,” others. The particulars of the image are seen twice. There is a beautiful refraction and doubling as the image is turned over and the moment extends. The poem reflects itself, reflecting the fish, as water refracts light and scales shine back silver.
“Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” The rainbow is the sign of the covenant with mankind after the flood; the fish, in addition to several portentous appearances across the Bible, is often a symbol of Christ, derived from ichthys, or ἸΧΘΥΣ, representing the Greek phrase, quoted by Augustine, Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ, the first letters of which (iota chi theta ypsilon sigma) represent, roughly, “Jesus Anointed of God Son Savior.” The fish is let go in the final line.