Forms of Strangeness

...I knew each nick and scratch by heart, the bluish blade, the broken tip, the lines of wood-grain on the handle Now it won't look at me at all The living soul has dribbled away Bishop's work hangs in perfect suspension between the poles of the familiar and the unexpected The tension that hums along the wires bet ween them fills her art with its special resonance She knows that one is nothing without a place where one belongs and people who care about each other, and how these joys too easily become dull and constraining without the jolt of the unfamiliar to take us out of ourselves Bishop's outlook is broad enough to encompass a number of worlds She charts them all, and her delicately colored maps remain something beautiful and strange in modern poetry...

...Writers & Writing FORMS OF STRANGENESS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL When I was in high school, "poetry" meant Robert Browning Once a year, our class would take a vacation from fiction and plays to tackle "My Last Duchess," "Caliban uponSetebos," "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed's Church,' or some kindred spirit in Browning's teeming rogues' gallery It was not only the pathology that appealed to our adolescent morbidity The ideas about art, music, history, and theology were intriguing enough for us to tolerate the extensive glossing that unfamiliar or obscure references required Other poets we occasionally read seemed anemic compared with Browning's enthusiastic and multifarious range Although the New Criticism was still in full swing and as a result the poet's life was deemed irrelevant to his work, I used to wonder how on earth this overstuffed Victorian, husband of the refined Elizabeth Barrett, came to invent characters as complex and varied as Shakespeare's Donald Thomas demonstrates in Robert Browning A Life Within Life (Viking, 334 pp , $18 95) that the same question perplexed Browning's contemporaries Mary Gladstone (daughter of the Prime Minister) wrote in disgust, "He talks everybody down with his dreadful voice, and always places his person in such disagreeable proximity with yours and puffs and blows and spits in yr face I tried to think of ' Abt Vogler' but it was of no use—hecouldn't ever have written it " Henry James told sister Alice that Browning's interests were entirely philistine—scandal and the sports pages Yet this hearty vulgarian was the same romantic who had eloped with Elizabeth Barrett from her sickbed, and lived in loving solitude with her for 15 years He was also the puritanical worker who sometimes wrote a poem a day, and created characters ranging from the serene Rabbi Ben Ezra to the demonic Count Guido of The Ring and the Book Thomas points out that "others might resemble an accepted model, whether of moderate conformity, like Tennyson, or of bourgeois rebellion, like Shelley or Swinburne Browning stood apart, independent of conformity or rebellion alike " Largely self-educated, he had read so prodigiously that "those who met him in later life were apt to come away stunned by the ease and range of his expertise " His indulgent father, a man with intellectual leanings, had been forced into banking by his father and so was determined to allow Robert to choose his own course At 14, the young man discovered Shelley, his "Sun-treader," and knew he wanted to be a poet His first book appeared when he was 20 Not one copy sold After several minor critical successes, he produced Sordello, an epic whose name became a byword for unreadable obscurity It took him years to live down this disaster A lasting resentment led him to insist, "I'm not a literary man " Thomas adds that "those who met him casually would take him for a banker or a bon viveur an impression he cultivated " Nevertheless, there were those who saw beneath the public mask One was Elizabeth Barrett, already a famous poet, who mentioned the "veined humanity" of his poems in one of her volumes Browning dashed off an impetuous thank you "I love your verses with all mv heart, dear Miss Barrett and I love you too " He thus inaugurated one of the great literary marriages The young pre-Raphaehtes took him for a model, too, so in old age he achieved such tame that he saw the founding of a "Browning Society " \\ hen a London hostess asked if he didn't find this adulation tiresome, he cried, "Object to it No, 1 have waited 40 years tor it and now...

...like it'" Browning's preoccupation with scoundrels, madmen and hypocrites was not merely his ow n obsession Victor Hugo observed that Romanticism broke down the classical dichotomy between tragedy and comedy by combining both in the grotesque This matched Browning's credo that "no thought which ever stirred / The human breast should be untold " He enlarged the acceptable scope of subjects for verse both with his "Madhouse Cells" (as he labeled some of the more macabre depictions) and with his analyses of such sane figures as Andrea del Sarto, called "the faultless painter," or the composers Abt Vogler, Baldassare Galuppi and the pseu-do-Bachian Master Hughs of Saxe-Gotha Even his lunatics are gemuses of sorts, creative albeit malign Since to Browning the cardinal sin was "purposelessness," his poems are always energetic and directed The haunted Childe Roland sticks with his doomed quest for fear that he will have nothing if he gives it up This dread was shared by the poet, and his oft-expressed optimism (the "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world" side of him) only partly concealed his anxiety Thomas captures the flashes of doubt that sometimes broke through in his subject, and shows that Browning's triumph in his poems was his ability to face his hesitations squarely and transcend them Reading Robert Browning A Life With in Life, I was glad I began my study of poetry with his work His breadth and depth still astound Besides the lessons he gave his own age, he taught ours that it is possible to bring the reader up to the artist's level of difficulty, a lesson most profitable to the schools of both Eliot and Stevens Browning was a humanist of phenomenal complexity Donald Thomas' portrait is a timely, entertaining reminder of this larger-than-life poet Elizabeth Bishop's voice when she read her poems was barely audible, and audiences strained to catch every luminous phrase Her career was watched just as closely She published only four slim volumes in 30 years (together with a collection prematurely called The Complete Poems) This modest output did not obscure her importance, however Now, four years after her death, the new edition of The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 276 pp , $17 50) really contains everything, unlike the 1969 version In fact, the book is positively hagiographic in its preservation of juvenilia and "occasional" pieces—including a verse inscribed on the flyleaf of Fanny Farmer's Boston Cookbook* While we are hardly richer for such inclusions, they do prove that whatever Bishop did, she did gracefully Her light verse, though, is merely stylish, in her best poems she has a sublime instinct for the right diction For a writer as quiet as Bishop, the grotesque would be too melodramatic Instead, she uses its country cousin, the uncanny, or unheimlich I prefer the German word, because "unhomelike" conveys exactly the sense of strangeness that periodically ruffles her domestic scenes Well-traveled, she was at home in many different places, and few poets are able to evoke the comfort of loving surroundings better These qualities come through very clearly in a late poem, "The Moose," a description of a journey to Boston from Nova Scotia Many cozy vignettes are glimpsed in passing?this is the way we entertain ourselves when we have nothing to do except look out a window At one stop, everyone waits, "patient, while/a lone traveler gives/kisses and embraces/ to seven relatives/and a collie supervises "Then, "Goodbye to the elms,/to the farm, to the dog /The bus starts The light / grows richer "The feeling of family security intensifies with nightfall From the dark seats, the murmur of "Grandparents' voices uninterruptedly talking in Eternity Talking the way they talked/in the old featherbed" makes the poet sure that "Now, it's all right now/even to fall asleep/ just as on all those nights " This idyll is interrupted by a strange apparition "Towering, antlerless, / high as a church,' a moose wanders into the road, causing the driver to brake hard To the drowsy passengers, the beast is as unearthly as a friendly alien from another planet "Taking her time,/she looks the bus over, /grand, otherworldly /Why, why do we feel/(we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy''" The trip continues, enriched by this surprising vision Not all manifestations of the uncanny are so benign In "The Armadillo" Bishop recalls the dangerous illegal fire balloons she saw in Brazil These weird lights, though pretty in the sky, often crash to earth to start fires One lands in a tree behind her house, incinerating the homes of the animals who live in the vicinity The poet is caught between the beauty of the firelight upon the escaping owls, rabbits and an armadillo, and the horror of their anguish and fear Nemesis, like the fire balloons, lurks in the wings of many of Bishop's poems She believes that this instability gives places and objects their special value "Crusoe in England," for example, is a Browmn gesque monologue, spoken by the aging adventurer Crusoe remimsces about his desperation, loneliness and boredom on the desert island Yet back home and bored, '' drinking my real tea," he realizes that away from his exile he has lost his sense of purpose The knife there on the shelf-it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix It lived How many years did I beg it, implore it not to break...