The dirtiness is mere appearance, underneath which they are the reality. Love does not contest an ultimate disorder; it manifests an ultimate order. Love is not something we do for one another to contest the world, but instead is what the world itself does for us. We are used to thinking of these as mutually exclusive possibilities: if we must console ourselves for the dirty world’s indifference, then the world can’t care for us and arrange things on our behalf. Yet in the poem both worldviews are equally present, just as the duck and the rabbit are equally present in the one figure.
Yet a third kind of ambiguity in Bishop’s poetry, temporal ambiguity, is an important element of “The Fish,” in which the speaker catches “a tremendous fish,” but ultimately decides to “let the fish go.” Everything in the poem happens in past tense: I caught a fish, I held him up, I looked at him, and so on. In the last line, though, let is conjugated differently from the other verbs in the poem. “Caught,” for example, is only the past tense of “catch,” not also the present tense; “held” is only the past tense of “hold,” not also the present tense; and so on. “Let,” though, is not only the past tense of “let,” as in “Yesterday at lunch I let Susie cut in line.” As that past tense form, “let” describes a one-time event. But “let” is also the perpetual present tense, as in “When my little brother and I play ping-pong, I let him win.” As this perpetual present tense form, “let” describes a recurring or continuing event. Context typically chooses one tense for us. If I say, “I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I might mean I did it once, or I might mean I do it always. Context chooses. If I say, “We had a fight yesterday before he left for work, so when he got home I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I mean to describe a one-time event that occurred in the past and has been completed. If I say, “His parole officer says it’s best not to upset him, so I let my roommate have the best parking space,” I mean to describe a recurring event, still going on, not yet complete. In Bishop’s poem, though, the context does not enforce a choice, but allows either reading: at the past moment I have been describing, I allowed the fish to go, or as an ongoing condition I continue to allow the fish to go.
As a result of this ambiguity, I occupy two different relationships to the release of the fish: I did it once, on that day I am recalling from the past, and I am always releasing the fish. The event happened once, and the event is always happening. To reiterate why all of this matters: if “let” were not ambiguous, if it were only the past tense form, it would refer to an event and a thing, the release of the fish. Because it is ambiguous, because it is also the perpetual present tense form, it designates also a relationship between a self I was in the past and the self I am now.
It confirms the recognition that Bishop does not restrict herself to one form of ambiguity per poem, that the temporal ambiguity of the line is complemented by syntactical ambiguity. “I let the fish go” can mean “I let go of the fish” or “I allowed the fish to go.” In one case I perform the action, and in the other I authorize the action. In one the fish got his way, in the other I got my way. Thus is the relationship between myself and the fish made more nuanced.
Bishop’s “First Death in Nova Scotia” exemplifies a perspectival ambiguity: it offers the point of view of a child experiencing a funeral, limited to her child’s understanding, and the point of view of an adult looking back with an adult’s understanding on the child’s experience. An adult speaker recalls an event from her childhood, the funeral of her infant cousin Arthur. On the one hand, the descriptions all are calculated to place us in the child’s head, so that we look out on this domestic interior through the child’s eyes. As the reader, I see the stuffed loon as the child sees it, and from the position of the child. I experience being lifted up, so that I see the coffin from below at first, and then from above after I have been lifted up. And so on. Yet at the same time I see the whole space and the whole experience from the point of view of the adult narrator, looking onto the scene through her eyes. I look at the child being lifted up, I look at the child looking at the coffin, and so on. Duck and rabbit both are present in one figure, and similarly the child’s point of view and the adult’s point of view both are present in this poem.
Like the other forms of ambiguity, perspectival ambiguity matters: it is a condition for morality. If I cannot imagine myself in the way Bishop imagines herself in this poem, as both an interested agent and an impartial spectator, then I cannot assess the moral worth of a decision or action. Neither perspective by itself is enough. If I can see myself only as an agent, I can act only out of greed. If I can see myself only as a spectator, I cannot act at all. Only the dynamic tension of both perspectives together, the relationship between my agent and spectator selves, enables me to think and act morally.
The particular perspectival ambiguity in this poem, the simultaneous presence of a child’s point of view and an adult’s, may resonate especially strongly for readers steeped from childhood, as Bishop herself was, in the language of Christianity. It might call to mind, for instance, these words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Or, again, these words of Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Whatever credence one does or does not accord those texts from that particular religious tradition, and whatever interpretation one puts upon them, they at least involve some form of interaction, some dynamic tension, between the perspective of a child and the perspective of an adult, and they advise some form of attention to both perspectives.
In “One Art,” the speaker declares that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” a proposition she expands on by enumerating things one might lose (door keys, places, names, intentions…), and by then enumerating things she herself has lost. The list of losses, possible and actual, culminates in “you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love).” “One Art” compactly and perfectly illustrates all the forms of ambiguity identified so far. Lexical ambiguity is at work in the word “master,” which can mean “get good at” or “overcome.” This gives two very different readings to the first line and its variants. “The art of losing isn’t hard to get good at” establishes one aim, but “the art of losing isn’t hard to overcome” establishes an opposite aim. In the former reading, I am trying to do more and better losing; in the latter, I am trying to stop losing. Syntactical ambiguity occurs in the penultimate line, itself one of those variants of the first line. The line might be read to mean, “the art of losing is not so difficult that it cannot be overcome,” or “it is not difficult to get good at the art of losing.” In the one case, what is not too hard is the art of losing, and in the other what is not too hard is the mastering of it. Temporal ambiguity, too, is present in the last stanza. Has the losing of you already occurred, or is it inevitably going to occur? I lost my mother’s watch, and I lost two cities, so the first reading of “Even losing you” would be that it has happened already, in the past. But then the next verb tense is in the future: “I shan’t have lied…” That makes “Even losing you” read as “Even when I have lost you” (i.e. even in the future when I lose you), I will not have lied. As in the last line of “The Fish,” this temporal ambiguity establishes a relationship between a self I was and a self I am or might be. Finally, there is perspectival ambiguity in the use of the second person: in the third stanza, the “you” in “where it was you meant / to travel” seems to be the reader. But in the last stanza, the “you” in “Even losing you” is the beloved. So, as in “First Death in Nova Scotia,” I the reader am given both points of view, that of the beloved and that of the neutral bystander.
To those forms of ambiguity, “One Art” adds tonal ambiguity, which arises from its use of a form of understatement I’ll call “parastatement,” familiar from its presence, for instance, in such canonical works as Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, with its declaration that “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts
