at it. And Elizabeth Bishop is very good. Her ambiguities are a form of truth-telling, a very rich and apt means toward better understanding ourselves and our world. The various forms of ambiguity in Bishop’s work matter, because they enable her poetry to reveal — to clarify — a truth about Being (the world, and human experience in the world) that the very grammar of our language works to distort and conceal.
The first form of ambiguity to note in Bishop is lexical ambiguity: double entendre, using a word (or words) in a way that enables it (or them) to sustain more than one meaning. One example occurs in Bishop’s poem “The Bight,” with her use of the word “correspondences.” The poem presents itself as little more than a quiet (if quirky) description of the bight at a particular moment, identified by its being at low tide. The speaker simply observes the bight with all her senses. She sees the colors of “the little white boats” and the “[b]lack-and-white man-of-war birds” and the “[w] hite, crumbling ribs of marl”; she hears the “little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock” as it noisily “plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves”; she smells the water “turning to gas,” as if to match its visual resemblance to “the gas flame turned as low as possible”; by identification with the birds, she feels the crash of diving “unnecessarily hard” into the water, and (despite her declaring them “impalpable”) the drafts of rising air above it; and indirectly, by extension from “the blue-gray shark tails” that “are hung up to dry” on the “fence of chicken wire along the dock,” she tastes the sharktail soup in a Chinese restaurant. But the poem’s very first line alerts us not to think that the water’s surface exhausts the bight. “At low tide like this” we can see into the water, under its surface, because it is so sheer, and of course we can see a great deal that at high tide is submerged. The reader is invited to recognize that if there is much going on beneath the surface of the water, there may be much going on beneath the surface of the poem, too.
Lexical ambiguity creates some of that sub-surface activity. When the poem declares the bight “littered with old correspondences,” the word “correspondences” can be taken in at least two ways. Bishop has just introduced the metaphor of letters: the previous line describes piled-up, unsalvaged white boats as resembling “torn-open, unanswered letters,” so the most obvious meaning of “correspondences” is letters, as in “I still maintain regular correspondences with two friends from school.” The bight at low tide, strewn with all those boats on their sides, resembles, Bishop suggests, a desktop strewn with letters. But “correspondences” also designates ways in which things resemble or reflect one another, as in “There are many correspondences between poetry and film.” Both meanings are “live” in the poem, and the double entendre is not just a gimmick, a flaunting of verbal dexterity. It inflects the rest of the poem: the fact that this word has two meanings entails that the whole poem does, also. In one, the unsalvaged boats alone are the correspondences: they litter the bight as unanswered letters litter a desktop. We could specify this meaning by rewriting Bishop’s sentence to read, “Some of the little white boats are still piled up… like torn-open, unanswered letters. / The bight is littered with these old correspondences.” On this reading, we are told what the correspondences are. On another reading, though, the boats are representative correspondences. They themselves are correspondences, but they also suggest the presence of additional correspondences. We could specify this meaning by rewriting Bishop’s sentence to read, “Some of the little white boats are still piled up… like torn-open, unanswered letters. / The bight is littered with old correspondences like these.” On this reading, we are told that the correspondences are numerous, but not told what they are. We must discern for ourselves what items participate in correspondences, and what they correspond with or correspond to. The poem is closed (in telling us what to think) and open (in leaving us to decide for ourselves 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
