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

0:11 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part four of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. We are partway through First Death in Nova Scotia. We just finished the second stanza. We're talking about the conflict between warm and cold that we've seen so far in the poem. And then at the Beginning of Stanza 3, these images of something which is cold and yet desires touch, or we desire to touch it in spite of, or maybe even because of its coldness, is followed by the mother's attempt to make the child breach the distance or the barrier with the dead Arthur laid out in his coffin by a few different means.

With speech, she instructs the child to say goodbye to Arthur, lifts her up, presumably so that she can see Arthur, and then also to give him a gift of the lily of the valley. And speech here is interesting because we've also just been told that through a sort of childlike perspective, that what seems to characterize the loon is not that the loon is dead, though this speaker, who seems to be both child and present day bishop, knows that the bird has been shot and stuffed. But what seems to characterize the fact that the bird is not a live bird is simply the fact that he's not speaking, that he's keeping his own counsel.

So there's something here about speech separating living and dead, where the mother is instructing the child to speak and Arthur's not going to be able to respond, just as the loon isn't going to be able to respond. Not that the loon can talk, but you know what I mean.

1:55 Wes: So you're getting at the relationship between death and keeping one's own counsel. Because I think, you know, on the one hand there's just the very literal fact. Yeah. We can't communicate when we're dead. Although if you've ever lost someone, you know, you know, which I know you have, the way the dead seem to try to communicate with us in our dreams and otherwise you might have experienced them, but people often do. But the other aspect of this is just that contemplativeness, which is maybe I'm reading too much into this, but which is what I associate with this image of the loon keeping its own counsel floating on the marble topped table. That kind of inwardness is an ascetic position, right. Rather than just going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know how those loons love to talk. Whatever sounds. What are the sounds?

2:43 Erin: The crazy sounds. Yeah, the chatter.

2:46 Wes: Is it. Is there a thing about loons? And on Golden Pond there aren't loons featured in that. Yeah. Yes, but I forget the sound of their calls. But anyway, yeah, maybe they never shut up in real life. But if they could shut up, if they could restrain themselves a little bit, that would be an ascetic moment. And that the moment, moments of self restraint, right. To the extent that they are suppressive of instinct or desire or impulse, could be considered deathlike. Right. They rein life in, so to speak. So the limit of this, you know, for Nietzsche, it's science and all that stuff. Science and religion. Science and religion are the ultimate manifestations of this kind of asceticism.

3:31 Erin: You're reminding me, I mean, how in the previous part you made the connection between keeping one's own counsel and Canadian reserve. So, you know, we should note that this is the first death that the speaker has experienced. And she's obviously not registering, as I said, you know, she's not quite registering the loon as dead. She's registering the loon as thoughtful and contemplative, as you say, caressable and. Right. And otherwise she would think her relatives maybe just sitting there at a dinner table are dead. If she thought that that was the same thing.

But not speaking is the same thing as being dead. Right. There's a way in which she's not recognizing the loon as dead. And perhaps that is. Well, actually it just Occurred to me. Perhaps the loon is analogous to. If we know Bishop's biography is analogous to Bishop's father. Right. And the sense in which this child experiencing this. This first death that she's conscious of is at the same time not conscious of the death that's actually all around her. So she's not conscious of the loon as being dead. That this is a dead object that she's already come into contact with regularly, just as she was too young to register her father's death, which was for her or for her family, her first true death in Nova Scotia, the first death that she experienced there.

You know, I think this is just all indicative of the child's perspective that there's this breach of innocence. I don't know that, though, that there's actually loss of innocence here, because she's still kind of conceiving of maybe in the very last stanza, but she's still kind of conceiving of Arthur as an aestheticized object, as an imaginative page at court. When I say aesthetic object, I mean the fact that there's the cake and then Arthur compared to a doll. There's not really recognition he's embalmed as well.

5:22 Wes: Right. Aesthetic object in mimesis. It's all about preservation. In the case of the loon, it's preservation over a prolonged period of time. And it's not just a typical representation. Right. If you were to paint a picture of the loon, you might have immortalized it for however long a picture lasts. It's a bit different to write. Conflate the representation and the object of representation, which is what the taxidermy is doing. The taxidermied animals, in a way, just a representation of the living animal. But you're using the dead body of the.

Of the animal to represent what it was when it was living. It's a sort of insult added to injury. Maybe. But in the case of the right, the dead human being, they have to be embalmed and preserved long enough to say goodbye. And she is being confronted with that necessity. And I'm not sure she's being confronted with it in the nicest way. Although, again, I may just be reading into this, but when the mother says, come and say goodbye to your little cousin Arthur, and then gives her a flower to give him. I don't know, now that I'm reading it, maybe it's not so bad, but it seemed rather cavalier in the poem on my first reading.

But, yeah, I mean, I think maybe the point that you're getting at is that she's in a bit of denial about. As any child would be and as all of us are to some. To some extent about confronting the reality of the death and the preserved loon. Right. The loon that's still alive in a way, even though it's is dead. Lends itself to that kind of denial.

6:56 Erin: I think it's a lack of awareness. I think that she's only woken up to the idea of death and sees death as death in that final stanza. Prior to that, it doesn't seem that there's a recognition. So it's really just about what we recognize as death in our everyday lives and what we just sort of take for granted or walk past.

7:20 Wes: When do children comprehend death? I have this memory of my nephew who's now like a lawyer with his own children. But I remember when he was. I think when he was 3, we were at the Natural History Museum and Washington, D.C. and we were looking at the bones of dinosaurs. This is very apt story, I guess, for this poem. And it dawned on him that these are the bones of things that used to be living and that they were dead. And he had me explain this idea to him that these. It was as if he was shocked to learn that things could die. And then he said to me, let's not tell anyone else about this. Let's not tell anyone else. Yeah, very sweet.

8:01 Erin: Oh, I love that. Wants to preserve everybody else's innocence.

8:05 Wes: But I've always. Yeah, but I've always wondered, well, is. Am I just fabricating that story in my head? I forget. There is an typical age, I think, that they say that children start being able to comprehend death, but I don't remember.

8:20 Erin: It must have been in a movie for me.

8:22 Wes: Yeah. So she may be at an age here where the significance of death can't really be communicated to her.

8:27 Erin: Right.

8:28 Wes: Or she may be just at the point where she is learning that death is possible. And this is like the first real confrontation.

8:36 Erin: I mean, I think come and say goodbye is kind of your typical. You know, what else is this woman going to say?

8:41 Wes: Okay.

8:42 Erin: You know, it's kind of a typical thing for someone to say. And presumably these two children are around the same age. Because this. I mean, that's what makes this so extraordinarily tragic. That Arthur was very small. And this maybe is a desire on the part of the mother to give the child a sense of the need to say goodbye to this relationship that she might have had with Arthur as a playmate and recognize that he's not going to be your playmate in the future. I'm just reading into this, but this leads me into. I don't know if you had the same reading, but the strange wedding imagery that subsequently comes up in this stanza.

She gives him a lily of the valley. This is a flower traditionally associated with weddings, especially royal weddings. Royals always carry lily of the valley at their weddings. Though I think it can also be. It's unclear to me if just white regular lilies, which are actually an entirely different kind of flower than lilies of the valley, which are actually in the asparagus family. I saw. Anyway, white lilies, association with funerals versus lily of the valley, perhaps not being typically associated with funerals. Here they are. But they're typically associated with weddings.

And then we get Arthur's coffin as a little frosted cake. In my mind's eye, this is a white cake, so that's obviously a wedding.

10:06 Wes: It's funny, I was thinking of it as a chocolate cake because I'm drinking chocolate. The coffin is black or brown.

10:13 Erin: I don't know. I don't know if they have other types of. I mean, this would have to be a specially made coffin.

10:19 Wes: It could be a white coffin. It was just. It made me think of that show where they make things out of cake and you have to try to tell if it's, like, the real thing of the cake. First thing I would do is I would see if, is that a coffin or is there actually frosting on there? Dip my finger into it. But, yeah. No, I like this idea that you're introducing that because of the lily of the valley, we might think of this as a wedding cake.

10:45 Erin: I hate to speculate about this. I feel like I'm in a John Mulaney special talking about children's coffins. But would it be more likely to have a coffin for a child be white as a symbol of innocence, just as the lily of the valley? I don't know if in 1915 they were making white coffins or if they were only making white coffins for this specific purpose, or if you could only get one type of coffin in Nova Scotia, I have no idea.

11:15 Wes: It could just be a pine coffin. You know, it could be where it'd be white. Ish. But I like to think if his name is Arthur and he's got kings above him, he's got a nice fancy coffin there.

11:27 Erin: But who knows, right? This, I think, started off the chain of associations that made me realize, okay, we have these two children that are roughly the same age. They're cousins. We have this theme of royalty and of course we know. I mean, this is a stretch, but of course we know that cousins can marry in royal. You know, it's usual for cousins to marry in royal families. And there's a bit of inbreeding in the list of the figures in the chromograph, including King George with Queen Mary, which this might be their wedding portrait, we don't know, but they were of course a married couple.

And we have this idea that the speaker being of the same age, same size, there's just an idea of the pair of the pair of them together. And the wedding imagery maybe highlights that or it highlighted that for me that there was an implied closeness which isn't expressed in the poem, but which seems to come through via these angular means. Also, the idea of Arthur being a page, of joining the court as a page. I did look up in what circumstance? Because I associate royal pages with royal weddings. Right. You have the little boys serving as pages in the wedding.

And I looked it up and that is indeed the most common use of pages in attendance at royal weddings. That older boys in their teens would serve as pages in other types of official capacities, but that particularly young boys. So presumably boys of Arthur's age would serve as pages at a wedding. So just a further. You know, this is mysterious to me. I'm not sure why this is, but it's definitely. It's ringing wedding bells for me.

13:09 Wes: Well, funerals tend to do that, you know. But isn't that what they do at funerals, they throw an article of the dead person behind them and then the first person to catch it is gonna be the next one? Mary.

13:23 Erin: No, I was taking you seriously for a second.

13:27 Wes: You know, it occurred to me while you were talking, because the coffin is a little frosted cake and the red eyed loon eyed it from his white frozen lake. Loons really do have weird red eyes in real life, right?

13:38 Erin: Mm.

13:39 Wes: And the loon is white breasted, but mainly they're black.

13:43 Erin: Right, right. And this is, I'm assuming, the child's interpretation.

13:48 Wes: Right.

13:48 Erin: And so now the child is ascribing a kind of desire or appetitiveness to the loon.

13:54 Wes: Yeah.

13:55 Erin: Being hungry.

13:56 Wes: Yep. So that the coffin becomes something that could feed the living as opposed to something that is just a vehicle for the dead to the underworld or to the royal court or wherever it is you're gonna go.

14:13 Erin: Arthur is like a doll. You know, one thinks of the figurines at the top of a wedding cake. One thinks of the fact that little girls may play wedding with their dolls.

14:23 Wes: So that's it. This is interesting. Yeah. He was very small. So there's these different references to littleness of Arthur. One is the come and say goodbye to your little cousin. The coffin was a little frosted cake. And then Arthur was very small. Right.

14:39 Erin: Maybe he's even younger than the speaker. Gosh. Maybe he's only two.

14:42 Wes: Yeah. So that's. Is that enough cake for everyone? Just kidding, Sorry.

14:47 Erin: Oh God.

14:50 Wes: It's just thinking of the tininess, how tiny the coffin must be.

14:55 Erin: Yikes.

14:56 Wes: Substantial reduction in the cake, the amount of cake. But. But seriously. So yeah, I think we're meant to think of a very small coffin and we have this doll like figure in it who hasn't been painted yet and so is pale. But this is the part I was going to have you to explain to me. Jack Frost had started to paint him the way he always painted the maple leaf forever. All right. Yeah. So I'm getting the image of something like limned around the edges with color or something that's just been something unpainted that's has been painted a little bit. But I don't know what the reference here is.

15:34 Erin: Okay, so this is what I was going to actually begin the episode with. I wanted to ask you about this because I had only ever associated Jack Frost. Tell me if you identify with this with the ice on the window pane, with the frost on the grass or on leaves.

15:53 Wes: Exactly.

15:54 Erin: So I associated him in other words, with just with coloring things white. Yes. Then I looked him up because I was like, wait a minute, I never noticed this before, but he's doing, it seems the opposite of what he should be doing. So he's actually adding color where one would think that she would say, oh, the boy was normal. And then Jack Frost had painted the whiteness on the rest of the body. But in fact, Jack Frost traditionally does both. Paints the leaves red in autumn. So he colors the leaves and he is responsible for coatings of ice and snow, etc.

So this is related to the false warmth or the false promise of aesthetics or aestheticized objects, I should say, because there's warmth here with the red, which is the hot color. But like the glass eye of the stuffed bird, it's a deceptive red. It's not the red of vitality, but it's red as a signal of death. Because the leaves are preparing to fall by turning red and then will be either before or after they fall, coated in white again. So it's a short lived red. And then they're going to turn brown and Then Jack Frost is going to do the second phase of his painting project and turn everything, I guess, back to baseline, just white, blank.

17:15 Wes: What is this painting of the Maple Leaf Forever? What is that again?

17:20 Erin: I looked this up. Maple Leaf Forever, no parentheses, is the title of a patriotic British Canadian song. And obviously the maple leaf is the symbol of Canada. So it's sort of using Maple Leaf forever as they're saying, like, Canada is immortal. Rah, rah, Canada. In context here, it's obviously pointing out that it was kind of an ironic object to associate with foreverness when leaves are quite transient, you know, it's not like plutonium forever or something like that.

17:53 Wes: And then the red strokes on the hair. So that's an odd. Another odd image because presumably his hair isn't white. His hair probably isn't red either. And I considered blood, but that seems very unlikely, implausible.

18:08 Erin: I think that Arthur is a redhead.

18:10 Wes: Okay.

18:11 Erin: That has to be the only thing. And so she's sort of imagining that he's.

18:15 Wes: He has the red hair, but his. Yeah, his skin is white. Okay. That's what it is.

18:20 Erin: Right, Right.

18:21 Wes: That's the only color that's left to him. Okay.

18:23 Erin: Right. And so she's not really thinking. This is interesting. She's not really thinking of Arthur in his former state. She's seeing him as an unpainted doll, not living Arthur, who's now turned white. She's seeing him as a sort of like brand new unpainted doll, Arthur.

18:43 Wes: So it's not that he's just lost his color, it's that he's about to get his color. It's an interesting reversal.

18:48 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And there's an intervention that's been made and then abandoned by Jack Frost to paint him.

18:55 Wes: Poor Arthur.

18:56 Erin: The act of painting itself is this touch, this aesthetic touch. But there's still sort of contact, Right. In this poem's repeated references to the desire to touch, the desire to, in the case of the cold breast of the bird or maybe the marbles, the desire to touch and hence warm up. And so here, the imagination of the child, anyway, tells us that Jack Frost has touched the hair with this red, vital color, but then otherwise abandoned the project. And anyway, the red is associated with a maple leaf. And so this red is actually a signal of death. So there's a dead end, so to speak, for vitality.

19:41 Wes: There's the opportunity to return to color, the color of the chromograph, to the royal court, where they're wearing their red and ermine. Ermine. Ermine. Ermine.

19:52 Erin: Ermine.

19:53 Wes: Ermine. Wow. And warmth again, Right. Feet wrapped up, invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court. Right. So another. Again, another reference to his smallness, his diminutiveness, and I guess to his youth, his age. But he can't go because his eyes are shut up tight and the roads are deep in snow, so his passage is barred. And in any case, he wouldn't be able to see where he's going. And maybe the eyes being shut. Right. The significance of color is not even available to him. He's beyond the ability to comprehend color versus no color. So it's a very poignant image.

Right. So the whole arc of the poem is that, right, in the color of the chromographs, she sees life or afterlife or transcendence of a sort, Right. With the royal aspect of it. And so there's. There's some hope set up for Arthur for what's going to happen to him in the wake of his death, which is cut off at the very end of the poem.

21:00 Erin: The associative logic that I mentioned in the previous part between the stanzas. I especially love it here because she's talking about Jack Frost being a painter and coloring. And then we get the return to the chromographs, of course, which are colored, highly colored on the walls. So it makes her look back up at them, too, as she's sort of realizing that there's nothing bright left for her to look at on Arthur's body, which is plain. And so she drifts up again to the thing that would capture her attention, the colored photographs. And then the royal couples are warm. Here we get explicitly told, you know, that color and red is warm, and

21:40 Wes: ermine is reminiscent of the feathers of the bird.

21:43 Erin: This is a chromograph of ermine. Right. So literally, the ermine may look warm to the speaker, but of course, if you touched it, it would be cold. This is not real ermine. It's an aestheticized ermine that can't offer warmth.

21:59 Wes: If you can't stuff animals, wear them.

22:03 Erin: Right.

22:03 Wes: I just looked this up. There's stoats. It's made from stoats. Ermine. Have you ever seen a stoat?

22:10 Erin: Yes, I've seen ermine, too. Yeah?

22:15 Wes: Have you?

22:15 Erin: What's it like? Ermine? It's very warm.

22:18 Wes: Fabulous.

22:19 Erin: Very.

22:20 Wes: Very.

22:20 Erin: Yes, very fancy. Very. I do not condone the wearing of fur, but I have seen.

22:25 Wes: Oh, you know, real ermine. I didn't know you had a position on that.

22:28 Erin: Yeah, I think it's. It's really? Actually really nasty and horrible. What's. These farms where they. Yeah, I don't even want to think about it.

22:38 Wes: So. Yeah. Something I don't know anything about. All right, so don't do that. People don't shoot loons and stuff. Don't move her. And don't make the mistake of thinking the coffin is a frosted cake, because I did last time and that did not go well.

22:57 Erin: Wasn't enough to go around. I'm sure there was plenty of cake at President Taft's funeral.

23:05 Wes: Wow. I haven't laughed that hard about the 19th century since 19th century. Reference going over. Yeah.

23:17 Erin: Yep. I try to keep all my comedy very au Courant.

23:22 Wes: He's 1909 to 1913.

23:24 Erin: Right, Taft?

23:26 Wes: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay. I'm calling it 19th century.

23:30 Erin: It was probably an urban legend that he was buried in a piano case. Right.

23:33 Wes: You know, he was born in 1857. So. All right. No, I'm just. Just, you know, catching myself on saying 19th century, but okay, I know.

23:41 Erin: Yeah. I was like, ah, early 20th century. Same. I mean, he was still reigning in.

23:47 Wes: You gotta reign me in. These bad facts.

23:50 Erin: Sorry.

23:51 Wes: Jump on them.

23:52 Erin: I don't mean to be a. Know it all that, you know. Oh, I know my presidents and when they were around. Anyway, do. Do you agree with my idea or, you know, I don't know if I agree with it, but. But do you think that they invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court is an idea that's been lent her by the mother? Or is this something that occurs to the speaker or that the speaker imagines?

24:15 Wes: I think it's more poignant if this is just a child's imagination trying to deal with death. But what would the adults be explicitly doing?

24:26 Erin: Well, the mother might say, oh, Arthur's going to go. You have to say goodbye to him because he's going to go off now to Never Never Land.

24:34 Wes: Yeah. So certainly a possibility. But even. Even if it hasn't been explicitly stated, I think it is kind of implicit. Right. In the scene and in the. And in the social dynamics. It's certainly that idea that he's off to royal heaven or might be off the royal heaven seems to be implicit, but. Yeah. So you seem to like the reading that she's been told that.

24:56 Erin: I don't know which I prefer, but I think it's interesting that it's so immediately refuted with that. But. So it's almost as though she's been told this and then that's the moment when it kind of hits when the Reality of this hits her as we've been kind of leading up to that. She finally kind of understands that what's gone on here and what's impossible here, she looks out and realizes, wait a minute, this story, right, that she's either invented or that she's been given by the mother can't be true. So, in other words, life isn't a fairy tale. He's not going to be a page at court. This is real life. He's really dead and he's not coming back.

25:36 Wes: Yeah. The royal figures, the couples are. They're inviting Arthur. Right. So there's a call and response here. So she's recognizing them as inviting Arthur. And then her thought is a response to that invitation, which is not to say, you know, she might not also have been told this, but in the fantasy that we have in the poem, she's responding to this invitation.

26:00 Erin: Well, and perhaps this is a stretch, but I thought of the fact that there's this immediate friction here at the end between these competing thoughts. The imaginative fancy that Arthur is going to be a page at court and the reality of the snow on the roads contradict. So within the speaker's mind, there's a kind of. Again, I'm using friction because, you know, I'm thinking that while friction is kind of a warm. It's a warm idea, there's a discursive and imaginative conflict there, or an internal argument between her fantasy and the reality. And this is also the moment, I think, where there's a kind of closeness to Arthur, which is further evidence for my idea that in her mind now, internally, there is this true moment of warmth both from the friction between these two ideas.

And then because she occupies, in a way, the perspective of Arthur in order to put together that he wouldn't be able to go out. And his eyes are shut up tight. I mean, they're partly shut up tight to keep her out. He's in a world. He's in a state of his own. He's not looking at her. He's not. There's no obvious. Of course, there's no communication going on there, but she's sort of occupying Arthur's perspective and then pitying him, pitying the impossibility of this. And that, too, to me, is creating a closeness with him, really, for the first time, because she's.

Because I think prior to this, there's emotional distance where she's not getting it.

27:26 Wes: Absolutely.

27:26 Erin: So there's sort of a redeeming warmth at the end, strangely, with this moment of impossibility and of the tension or the friction between imagination and reality.

27:36 Wes: Yeah, this is a really good point. We really don't have any direct sense of her sentiments until the end. Right. She doesn't say my. My cousin. Right. It's Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. And she's disassociated maybe a little bit. Right. And there's the movement to the loon. We hear some narrative of what her mother is saying. And the mother calls him little cousin Arthur. And then she picks up that word in the fantasy. Right. The little frosted cake. And Arthur was very small. We get the beginning of some sentiment towards him in this. But otherwise it's very.

Yeah, it's. It's quite distant. Right. For the most. For most of the poem. And then at the very end, I suppose it's in. You know, again, it's not a direct statement of feeling. Right. Of grief or sadness or something like that. But it's such a poignant question. How could Arthur go. It's a great way to capture the feeling. Right. That you might get when someone has died.

28:39 Erin: That's right.

28:40 Wes: Originally, the end of the poem was. And she was sad. And that she rewrote that line many, many times. So finally she settled upon. But how could Arthur go. Anyway. Sorry.

28:52 Erin: No, no, no.

28:53 Wes: Or I was sad. Was it she was sad? Or I was sad and I was sad. Sorry. Yeah. Do you have any. You want to give some last words?

29:03 Erin: No, just. This is such a. Yeah. All speech, I guess, in this. So in this poem is memorial. Yeah. Just the poignancy of the ending and the irregular rhymes. Or even the perfect rhymes. Right. With repeating words. Say in the stanza above. Forever. Rhymed with forever here. It's such a simple rhyme. Go and snow. Which at the same time, like, there's a. There's such a finality with that last rhyme. We get this perfect juxtaposition between the two ideas that we've been talking about.

29:37 Wes: Go.

29:38 Erin: Which is indicative of vitality, movement, aliveness and snow. The frozen and static, the dead.

29:46 Wes: Very good. Yeah. So next time we'll be doing. The logical successor to this poem is Planet of the Apes. Of course.

29:54 Erin: Of course. It's an anti taxidermy movie. Right.

30:01 Wes: That's true. The animals have revolted, just like the peasants. They're revolting. It's 1968. That. That version, as listeners to the show can imagine, it's one of my favorite films. Just because it's 1970s adjacent,

30:17 Erin: spiritually 70s

30:20 Wes: and Charlton Heston, you know. Yeah. So it'll be Planet of the apes and then the power and the glory. Graham Greene.

30:27 Erin: Just more. More logical progression. Okay?

30:30 Wes: It all fits together somehow.

30:34 Erin: We always find it. We always find a connection. All right. Thank you.

30:38 Wes: Thank. You.