A Map-Like Imagination in the Poetry of ...

0:11 Erin: Welcome to part three of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Today we're going to be focusing on First Death in Nova Scotia. Wes, I was just wondering, were you familiar with this poem at all before I suggested it?

0:26 Wes: No, not at all. And I have to admit that I've been actually thinking about the poem, but the title that's been in my head is Last Death in Nova Scotia. Odd transposition.

0:40 Erin: Not really. I think the title. You're anticipating my first point, which is going to be that the title is a bit of a lie. If we know anything about Bishop's biography, which we do because we covered it. Her previous parts. Right. The first death in Nova Scotia that she would have experienced, though she wouldn't have remembered it, was the death of her father. Did you enjoy it? This is one of my favorite.

1:01 Wes: Yes, it's great.

1:02 Erin: Yeah. It's not among the best known of her poems, but I mean, every single one is really a gem. This is from Questions of travel from 1965. That collection has two sections to it. One called Brazil, which is obviously Brazilian poems, and then one called Elsewhere. And this is in the Elsewhere section, of course. Should I start out just by reading it and then we'll dive in?

1:29 Wes: Yeah.

1:31 Erin: First Death in Nova Scotia. In the cold, cold parlor, my mother laid out Arthur beneath the chromographs Edward, Prince of Wales with Princess Alexandra and King George with Queen Mary. Below them on the table stood a stuffed loon, shot and stuffed by Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. Since Uncle Arthur fired a bullet into him, he hadn't said a word. He kept his own counsel on his white frozen lake, the marble topped table. His breast was deep and white, cold and caressible. His eyes were red glass, much to be desired. Come, said my mother, Come and say goodbye to your little cousin Arthur.

I was lifted up and given one lily of the valley to put in Arthur's hand. Arthur's coffin was a little frosted cake and the red eyed loon eyed it from his white frozen lake. Arthur was very small. He was all white, like a doll that hadn't been painted yet. Jack Frost had started to paint him the way he always painted the maple leaf forever. He had just begun. On his hair a few red strokes. And then Jack Frost had dropped the brush and left him white forever. The gracious royal couples were warm in red and ermine. Their feet were well wrapped up in the ladies ermine trains.

They invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court. But how could Arthur go Clutching his tiny lily with his eyes shut up so tight and the road steep in snow.

3:14 Wes: Really great. You should try to say, stood a stuffed loon, shot and stuffed three times really fast.

3:22 Erin: I know.

3:24 Wes: Stood a stuffed loon, shot and stuffed. What kind of people put. I was gonna say taxonomy. That's not right. What's the word for stuffed?

3:33 Erin: Taxidermy.

3:34 Wes: Taxidermy. Taxidermy. At a funeral or at a viewing or whatever it is. It's a little insensitive, don't you think? A little. Uncle Arthur fired a bullet into him and it's like, wait, did Uncle Arthur kill the little boy or did he kill the loon? Sorry.

3:53 Erin: I know. What is this connection? Yeah, I mean, I think this is the invasion of death into the normal. You know, the normal life of the domestic scene. So this loon is ordinarily there in some kind of Canadian flowchart going down from the. You know, the British royal family to the stuffed loon on the table.

4:15 Wes: Canadian flow chart. Canada is pretty far down the chart.

4:23 Erin: But in the accident of proximity, you know, some really interesting kind of mental association is happening. Which sort of. Everything in the poem operates through this kind of association. I think even between the different stanzas. This is a poem of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stanzas of 10 lines each. Short lines. They're trimeter lines. I just was noticing a lot of sort of surprisingly logical jumps. And, of course, it occupies, for the most part, the child's mind. Or it's kind of like a tunnel view where you have the adult looking through the mind of the child looking at the scene.

So that kind of associative logic is childlike as well. Like, there must be something that Arthur has to do with these pictures on the wall, though. I actually think that that connection with Arthur being a page at court must have been suggested by the mother. That's at least my reading, because it's immediately refuted by the child with that. But. And that logical refutation which suggests that the mother said, oh, Arthur's going off to be page. Of course, I guess the mothers also made the association between Arthur and these images. I don't know.

5:31 Wes: I hadn't thought of that. But it's a very poignant moment whether or not that's been put into her head by an adult or whether she's just thought of that herself as if the royal scene represented part of heaven or something like that. But in the beginning. Let's talk about these chromographs. And I looked this up, and it's. Technically, they're what there's a different word for this. And I forgot.

5:56 Erin: Chromolithography.

5:57 Wes: Yes. Okay. Chromolithograph. These very colorful pictures in contrast to the whiteness of the boy and the loon. Although I guess he's still got a little color. We'll talk about. You might have to explain that to me a little bit, but. Yeah. What is the. Maybe we should speak of this. The general significance and the specific significance. Why do people have these representations of royalty in their homes? It's a very middle class sort of thing. I remember my older sister, who's like 11 years older than me, who we, you know, we all lived in England and Ireland and she went to school in England and she had an English accent by the time she came to the United States.

But she had all these little pewter figures of all the royalty in England. And it's kind of a little. A single. I don't know what you call it. You know, kind of little shelves that you put on the wall, small, small pewter figurines, but all in a. All the king, all the royalty, and a little. Whoever lived in a little house together, so to speak. I don't think they'd get along very well. They didn't, but. What is that? I don't know if this is a trite question. It's like I'm asking what the fascination with royalty is, but we kind of know that. But you know what I mean.

7:05 Erin: Well, I have something in common with your sister. I do love souvenirs of Tudor royalty, at least. And I do have a couple of things from the Queen's Jubilee, because I was over there, luckily, right after her jubilee, when all this stuff was being sold. And then shortly thereafter, she passed away. So I picked up a few things. I do like them. I think the important thing is that these are colored. I mean, the color is an important part of the last stanza. But I think that for the most part, these chromographs or chromolithographs, a lot of times they were, I guess, like hand painted.

The really well done ones could be mistaken for art, for a painting. And so that made them a little bit suspicious, I think. But also they were used because they're so highly colored. They were used in things like advertisements, like tourist advertisements showing a beautiful view of someplace. And they were also used in children's books, so an illustrated book of maybe fairy stories or something that would appeal to children. I think that association in particular is what's prevalent here.

8:08 Wes: Right.

8:08 Erin: The child's name is Arthur. He's also a junior. So this sort of idea of faint idea of succession and these images on the wall which are obviously part of British Canadian culture, this is. Their monarch is still very distant at the same time. So. And that distance perhaps creating a kind of mythology or the desire to have these people say artificially close. The only way that they. That a Canadian would be likely to see these. These royal figures is through one of these chromographs. And I think that that idea of distance and closeness as well as of hot and cold, the hot and cold poles in Bishop are really important. Right. And even in this book, the book itself, Questions of Travel, which I mentioned has these two sections which are kind of like poles, Brazil and elsewhere. There's a hot and cold association between those two.

9:04 Wes: Right.

9:04 Erin: Brazil being the hot place and elsewhere as just a general marker of some kind of remote other being cold. I started to read this whole poem through that kind of vector with cold associated with remoteness and heat with closeness. Of course, not a groundbreaking connection, but you have this idea of these people on the wall who you want to keep close. But as we'll see again and again in the poem, art objects are kind of suspect and maybe they promise a closeness which is in fact really a distance.

9:40 Wes: Yeah. And in this case. Right. It's the. I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but you know, as a Canadian, you might want to say, look, I have roots in the. In the old country.

9:49 Erin: Right.

9:50 Wes: In America we're proud of rebelling. We don't think, let's put royalty on our walls. So maybe some people do. But in Canada, despite the difference and the distance, you know, you could think, well, I'm still connected to the motherland in some important way. I guess I was thinking of this when you said the false closeness that it promises. Right. So this is a connection to ancestry, I guess, and genetic ancestry and cultural ancestry. And arguably it's probably not that important. Maybe I'm overstating that now I'm thinking of, oh, wait a minute, what about English common law and how important it is in the United States?

And I. I don't know. Right. But there's this promise. So the, the heaven parallel that I'm noting that I think comes later, as if the. In death you're right, you're going to return to the court here. You're going to return to this higher up realm. Right. It's royalty. So it's also higher up, like heaven. And it's. There's lots of parallels. We could say to divinity. And they are the royalty, after all, are supposed to be established by divine right. So to go become a page there is analogous to being a little angel and going up to heaven. So. But the picture on the wall is suggestive of a destination for the one who's deceased.

And it's a destination which is very colorful in contrast to the, you know, the whiteness of the deceased, although it has little, you know, he, the little boy apparently has some color in his hair. I don't really understand that part, but we'll get to it. And then the loon has the red eyes and the. So there is. That's. There's a. In there. Limned L, I, M, N. Is that right? Limned with color? A little bit. And maybe it's a little bit painted on in the way it is with a chromolithograph, something like that. But yeah, this is what you made me think of when you're talking about the.

Was it the false promise of the aesthetic object or the promise of closeness that you can't really get? I don't know if this is related to what you're saying.

11:50 Erin: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. The false promise of closeness or the false idea that through the aesthetic object you can achieve a kind of closeness with. With what? I don't know. I mean, I suppose with certain sets of abstractions. Right. Like what you're referring to. Heritage, national identity, you know, in keeping with that too, or in a further, you know, nod to that desire for proximity to heritage in England. The boy's name is Arthur, which, you know, there couldn't be a more resonant English name than that. And obviously the fact that his name is Arthur and he's been struck down, we don't know by what. Maybe the flu. Right, exactly.

12:31 Wes: Also a very royal name.

12:32 Erin: Right. But, you know, the combination of this boy's name with the position that he's in obviously is full of pathos. That seems to me to be a gesture. Not that Arthur isn't a common name already, but there's the fact that his father is Arthur and there's this, like I said, idea of succession that seems to be an invocation of a kind or self conscious gesture that a person who is really into royalty and whose name happens to be Arthur, who perhaps inherited, you know, being really into royalty from his father, names his son Arthur as well. And then, as you suggest with that last stanza, where Arthur goes and imaginatively joins the court as a royal page, the speaker's imagination, or in the mother's imagination, which she has then infused in the girl, the speaker, that is a fairy story.

A further. A further kind of aestheticized or artistic, if you will, kind of idea that's contrasted with the cold reality, which is that they're in Canada, the streets are full of snow. He can't get there. You know, not to mention that he's also dead. And so there's the desire through imagination to give Arthur proximity to royalty and warmth and to all of these values and the reality that these are. That this is a false promise or this is a false association to be making or flight of fancy.

13:55 Wes: Yeah. So also. Yeah. You're making me think the coldness of Canada and the snowiness of Canada further accentuates the being cut off from the motherland, so to speak. And the images of color are like a way of. Like the colorful images are represent an overcoming of that distance, the distance between Canada and England. And in a way, the settlers, the. Is that what you call them, immigrants? They're more than immigrants, though, I guess. They're settlers from England, the people who settled Canada. Any. Right. In a way, they've been cast off and in some cases. Right. They were fleeing persecution maybe. I don't know. It's not like Australia is a penal colony.

14:42 Erin: Right, Right. And it's not. It's not like America either, where the

14:46 Wes: Puritans were trying to get out of there. I mean, some of it is about opportunity, but I don't know specifically the history of Canada, but just feeling of being like an orphaned child, maybe. Right. The death of the child here becomes resonant with the position of someone who's cut off from the. From the motherland and the more colorful origin. Something like that. But I like the way she. Right. We learn of her relationship to him. Right. To Arthur. Without her mentioning herself or the fact that he's her cousin. Right. I have to do the math to figure out if that's right.

15:27 Erin: No, that's right.

15:28 Wes: And that's stuffed by Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. And I like. I really like that. What is it? Enjambment.

15:37 Erin: Yes.

15:38 Wes: And then also you get the relationship on the other side between uncle and father. Anyway, so we learn of her relationship without any direct mention of it.

15:48 Erin: Let's scroll back just a little bit, though, because I want to dig in actually, just to those first two lines because I think they support your point.

15:55 Wes: Yeah. It's very unusual for us to be past the first two lines.

15:59 Erin: Right.

16:01 Wes: Three minute mark. So you back us up.

16:03 Erin: Right. In the cold, cold parlor, which I've got to Say that this is the first poem that actually induced the realization for me that parlor is a very cold word. And ever since then, I've thought of parlor as a cold word. I want to talk about that with. With loon as well, which is a word which is aerated. You know, it has holes in it for the wind to blow through or something. So parlor is a cold word. And obviously we're going to get several images of the domestic space being quite cold, I think, not only because of the fact that it's obviously the dead of winter, but that there's something going on here because my mother laid out Arthur.

And then the only two living figures in the poem are the speaker and the mother. Uncle Arthur is referred to, but he's not present. The mother is laying out the body of the boy. For obvious reasons, one would think that the parents of Arthur are actually absent from this scene out of grief. Right. But they're elsewhere. Which is, again, I think it speaks somehow to this idea of heritage or this strange thing that's happening with Fatherland Father Ness. You know, there's a sort of. Maybe there's a guilt that is suggested with the loon, but there.

But there's an absence. And so then there's also this idea that grief brings closeness. Right. The mother has to touch Arthur, lay out his body. The speaker is instructed to hand the lily of the valley to Arthur and say goodbye to him, and to speak to him as if he is alive. But then also, of course, the alienation and the distance of grief and death, which is suggested by the absence of Arthur's parent.

17:44 Wes: Well, I want to repeat what I said in the beginning. If I were laying out a body, I might take the stuffed dead animal that happens to be in the room and move it somewhere else. Seems a little bit insensitive. So I think maybe that sensitivity.

18:00 Erin: But, I mean, it's interesting to consider why.

18:03 Wes: Because I don't want to draw any. Draw, like, any sort of comparison between the dead boy and the dead animal.

18:11 Erin: But don't you think that. Very insensitivity. I mean, stuffed, it's used twice. It's quite violent in a way.

18:17 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is the other point I was gonna make is that, well, hunting, it's the sport of kings, right? It's the recreation of royalty. Horseback and fox and, you know, the typical tropes here. Right. And. And maybe I've seen too much Game of Thrones where, you know, it's. Yeah, it's a mark of royalty in the sense, to some extent, if you have that much power and wealth. You've escaped necessity. Necessity, meaning what we have to do to survive. That represents a more primitive condition that we're no longer in yet. The royals can voluntarily return to that and treat it as a form of recreation.

So I think that that's significant. And then the other part of this is that, yeah, the boy is placed in parallel to the stuffed loon who has been killed by hunting. And we get that, you know, Arthur fired a bullet into him, and we have to figure out that it's not the little boy, it's the loon that has to have the bullet fired into it. So I think there's a purposeful confusion or parallel between the boy and the loon. And the effect in the beginning of the poem is to say somehow he's a victim of this royal space or whatever it is, this royal thing, and at the end of it, he needs to return to it.

Or that's what his afterlife might. What might constitute his afterlife.

19:39 Erin: I think you're definitely right. But as you were talking, another reading of why the Loon is There occurred to me, which is that it would be deliberately left there to be. This is a little wacky. But to be in attendance at the. No, no, no, hear me out. I know it's stupid. The loon is the symbol of Canada, one of the symbols. And we also have the royal figures. So it interestingly reverses the ending idea of Arthur serving at court, where here they are in attendance at his funeral, in a way. So we have the British royalty, the symbol of Canada. I mean, it's gruesome and bizarre and very.

20:20 Wes: No, as you said, that I just had this image of me, my own funeral and someone putting my stuffed cat. Oh, no.

20:29 Erin: Well, hey, that's very.

20:30 Wes: In the casket with me.

20:32 Erin: Yeah,

20:34 Wes: right. She could attend. Attend to me for. Be in attendance with me forever.

20:40 Erin: But, yeah, it's also worth saying, and I don't know if I mentioned this before, but there's, you know, with hot and cold polarities in questions of travel. We just had a bunch of poems about Brazil. And obviously Brazilians have gregarious nature, et cetera. The Maritimes, at least, perhaps Canada more generally. I don't know. I only know from, like, Anne of Green Gables that the Maritimes are very strongly associated with a characteristic reserve. So there's also a kind of. Right. Which is very British, obviously. So I think British Canadians would identify with a kind of Canadian reserve. So there's a kind of stiff quality and of course, a coldness. Right. Associated with Reserve as well. Which might think that a stuffed bird has to salute at the

21:33 Wes: dead comrade offending the Canadians. Erin, don't you know there are enemies? So.

21:38 Erin: Yeah, please, please.

21:40 Wes: I love.

21:40 Erin: I love Canadians. I really hope I'm not miscarry. I think this is. I think this is well known.

21:46 Wes: Yeah. Animals at funerals and.

21:49 Erin: No, no, no, I don't. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I think this is a particularly weird. Obviously particularly weird, formal kind of family. I know plenty of very warm Canadians. It's more of a historical association. The same way that we would associate, historically, the British with being more. More reserved, say, Pre World War II, pre 60s, whatever. Pre Diana's death. I don't know. Anyway, I'm gonna get myself into trouble. Please, Canadians, I love you. I really do. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to truck in these stereotypes if I am.

22:23 Wes: I think Canadians are used to being loved or at least liked because they're so likable.

22:27 Erin: They are. But they're also ignored and wrongfully so because we're just the most obnoxious youngest child on earth. Getting all the attention now.

22:38 Wes: You're just buttering up the Canadians now.

22:40 Erin: No, that's how I really feel. And I feel really bad about. I just feel really embarrassed as an American, obviously.

22:46 Wes: Yeah, sure.

22:47 Erin: Not to get political anyway, so I

22:49 Wes: think it is quite funny, you know, since Uncle Arthur fired a bullet in him. He hadn't said a word. It's funny whether or not you have to stop to think about whether that's the boy or the. The loon. But then there's a turn here to really a great image of the loon keeping his own counsel. So that. That cold temperature. Right? So we get a number of associations here between lack of color and coldness and the frozenness. But also the frozenness of the body, right, that is no longer alive. But now we get an association with that and reserve, you know, the kind of reserve that you were talking about, which can be contemplativeness.

He kept his own counsel. So the. Yeah, the bird hadn't said a word. The bird is the word. No, the bird hadn't said a word. And since it was killed, of course, it never could have said a word. But now that becomes keeping his own counsel, giving this image of contemplativeness, right? There's a depth to the breast that is white and cold and caressible. And then there's a little turn at the end where the. You have the eyes that are red glass. So a bit of color standing out here in something white and then desire, which is another shift right from contemplativeness.

Now this little touch of desire that's been added to that frozen white contemplative image. It's a line that at least, yeah, it was unexpected for me and I don't know. Yeah. What is much to be desired here.

24:26 Erin: I did a little bit of research into children's marble games and the red marbles were highly desired by children. I worked this out. Obviously, if Bishop's mother is in the poem, it has to be before she was committed, when Bishop was 5 years old. So I would estimate since Bishop was born in 1911, that this is taking place around 1915. Say she's four years old and she's. Or maybe she's newly five. I don't know. I think three would be a little young for what goes on in the poem. But we're talking about a four, maybe five year old girl who may be, if not playing marble games because she doesn't have the dexterity, maybe kind of collecting them because they were also sort of desirable, just as collectible objects at this time.

I should also scroll back and say just in passing that if this is dated around 1915, Edward, Prince of Wales, Princess Alexandra, King George and Queen Mary. These represent three generations of royalty actually. So there is kind of a heritage happening even within the chromographs on the wall. There's so much going on here because of this conflict between cold and the warmth of touch. As if cold things are calling out for something to warm them up. So the cold breast of the bird is actually calling out for touch somehow. And the caress would then warm the feathers of the bird.

Obviously cold marbles haven't been touched for a while, are going to get warmed up by the heat of one's hand. I don't know if you had marbles as a kid, but I used to like to run my hand over the tops of. You know, like if you had a bag of marbles, you put your hand in and you like that cold feeling. There's kind of that yin yang there. There's the yin yang of fired and the dead bird. So the act of killing is a kind of a warm act. There's a hot, cold association there. There's the fact that the loon, which is an aquatic bird and of course it's associated with Canada, so it's used to frozen lakes.

Yet at the same time there's an obvious barrier being created by the imaginative frozenness so that the loon can't dive under the water. Or would have to find, you know, would have to break through the ice or find a way to get into the water in order to do its aquatic bird thing. I read online that these loons actually can't really walk very well because their legs are so far back for swimming purposes that on land they kind of like stumble around. And so they really are only made for water. And here we have this, the frozen lake, which is kind of.

Kind of barrier between them and their natural habitat. A cold barrier. And then the red glass, obviously, red being a hot color again. And red will return again and again. But this is the loons real eyes, of course, they've been replaced with glass in the taxidermy process. But loons in real life have red eyes. Very striking red eyes. And these are obviously, you know, these marbles chosen to resemble the loon's eyes in life. So a lot going on here that I think, then kind of coalesces in the rest of the poem.

27:34 Wes: So it's interesting here that death can induce this kind of desire. And I mean, not just death, but the static, contemplative image created by the preserved loon. Right. The frozen, stuffed, dead loon. Right. It doesn't just leave you uninterested. It creates interest and you want to caress it. In that case, it's clear what you want to do with your desire. But in the case of the eyes, it's. That's left vague. You know, they're much to be desired. Although I like your explanation in terms of marbles. Right. We might just want to possess the things that the eyes are made of here.

And they're like gemstones. Can think of that as another royal association. So something about death and frozenness can induce a kind of desire, which is odd, right? Because of killing something or when something is dead for that thing, it's the cessation of desire. But just to go back to hunting and royalty, Right. If you're above necessity and the need for survival, it's an interesting sort of occupation to curate death. Right. To hunt for sport and to then preserve those dead objects. As if to keep them alive forever. But to keep them alive forever in a dead state.

And as if to bring the natural world into the living room or into your home in general. When, of course, to be natural is to be growing and alive truly. So maybe this says something about your talk of the aesthetic object. Or maybe it says something about representation in general and the limits of representation. So we do a little bit of taxidermy, maybe even in poetry, I don't know. If that really works. But certainly whether it's chromographs or other forms of representation, of course they leave the real thing behind and the representation itself is not alive, at least in the same sense.

29:37 Erin: Right. I was thinking actually, as you were talking about the warmth of desire being related to the appetitive, you know, and what you've talked about so often with art and the appetitive. We want to caress the bird, we want to touch the. Right. There's something about these art objects which are, which are, you know, I'm calling the taxidermied loon an art object merely because I think in this maybe middle class home, Right. These are these and the chromographs, you know, not top tier art objects or meant as art objects. But yeah, the heat of desire.

And yet in relation to art, we always come up against a barrier that keeps us from. I think this is. Right. I don't know if I like what I'm saying because traditionally my argument would be art creates closeness or that you can, you know, through. Through the written word especially. There's. There's a way in which the written word can enter you and, and have. Make that connection that way. Or that it actually needs you to warm it up. Right. It needs you. It needs you to read it in order for it to live.

30:38 Wes: Yeah.

30:39 Erin: Say a painting. A painting in fact, is going to degrade if you touch it. You can admire it from afar, but it's only ever going to be a kind of false promise. I don't like this argument either.

30:54 Wes: The Kantian view, not just Kant, but many others, is that there's aesthetic interest is disinterested because it's an interest in the form. So the appetitive involves wanting to do something with the object. So if it's an apple, if it's a real apple, I want to eat it. That's the form of desire that is induced by the apple. But if it's an aesthetic object, I don't have that kind of appetite. Right. The painting of the apple, if I enjoy it, it's not that I want to eat it, it's something about the form, it's something about the representation. And so we can see a clear parallel here.

Whatever kind of desire the loon is inducing, it's not the desire to kill it that the hunters had at one point or the desire to eat it. So that there's something here like the aesthetic, but it's still a kind of desire. And maybe, maybe the. The talk of wanting to write the desirable red glass Eyes. One might cross the line there and say, actually, yeah, I just want to pluck. I just want to pluck the red glass out because that's valuable and I want to possess it. Or the desire to caress. Right. That's not a. That's not an aesthetic relation. Exactly right.

You would want to caress a living thing out of affection. But it may say something. The use of that metaphor may say something about the aesthetic which is a bit warmer. Right. Than the word disinterest would have us think. Disinterest is always a little bit of a misleading word, but so the relationship to the aesthetic object is, of course, complicated.

32:29 Erin: Right. Well, and as I said, I do think there is this. This charge between cold, maybe especially cold, smooth things, and us where we desire to touch. You know, sometimes even a statue that looks particularly smooth, you know, it almost invites touch in that way.

32:44 Wes: What about a frosted cake?

32:46 Erin: Should we have frosted cake? Yes.

32:48 Wes: Yeah, we'll get to that next time. All right?

32:49 Erin: Right, yes. So next time we'll get through the last three stanzas. We're halfway through, more or less. So next time we will finish our discussion of First Death in Nova Scotia. Thank you, Wes.

33:01 Wes: Thank you.