are not white; her hair is like wires; her cheeks are not rosy; and she has bad breath. But we know that this is a form of praise whether or not we ourselves embrace those standards of beauty, and even before the “And yet” that signals the speaker’s making the praise explicit by declaring, “I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.”
Shakespeare’s poem inverts the familiar rhetorical device we call “faint praise.” If I ask a friend what she thinks of my latest book and she says, “The cover is beautifully designed,” she will have communicated clearly something she didn’t say. The same parastatement at work in “high culture” also functions in popular culture, as in Lucinda Williams’ country song “Jackson”: “All the way to Jackson / I don’t think I’ll miss you much”; “Once I get to Baton Rouge / I won’t cry a tear for you”; and so on. We know the speaker means something other than what she says. She is going to miss her ex all the way to Jackson; she is going to cry when she gets to Baton Rouge. In “One Art,” too, we know that the losses the speaker repeatedly insists are not disasters really are disasters, especially the “losing you” that the speaker introduces, with true parastatement, as “even losing you.”
Parastatement is understatement in the form of protesting too much. I call it tonal ambiguity because each aspect carries with it a tone: the Shakespeare sonnet has a tone of dismissal and one of admiration; the Lucinda Williams song has a tone of resolve and one of despair; and “One Art” has a tone of flippant unconcern and one of inconsolable grief. Parastatement plays on a first-order/second-order distinction, of the sort Lynne McFall makes in distinguishing second-order from first-order volitions. A second-order volition, she says, “is a complex desire: a second-order desire to have a certain first-order desire be one’s will: to be the desire that moves one to action.” McFall illustrates the distinction with smoking: “I want to want not to smoke, and I want this desire, rather than the desire to smoke, to be the one that is effective.” The dissonance between the first- and second-order desires enables me to make one desire present by stating the other. Stating the second-order desire (“I wish I didn’t want a cigarette right now”) expresses forcefully, without actually stating it, the first-order desire: I want a cigarette right now. That same dissonance is at work in “One Art.” The second-order desire, I wish I wouldn’t get upset over losing things I love, is the one that gets stated, but the first-order desire, I wish I hadn’t lost so many things I love, is more forcefully expressed because it is not stated.
Parastatement proves particularly useful for circumventing censorship. It is a way of saying the unsayable. Bishop, with her privileged economic background and powerful connections, may seem an unlikely victim of censorship, but her personal life bears on this poem. The “I” and the “you” in the poem are very open, and we as readers may fill in the poem’s “you” with whom we will. “One Art” reads beautifully and effectively if I know nothing about Elizabeth Bishop, and read myself as the “I” and my long-lost one true love as the “you,” regardless of my gender or that of my beloved. But in Bishop’s time the social pressure directed against homosexuality was so active and pervasive that her loves could not be named in her poems, nor her love affairs described explicitly. At least two of those loves, though, seem clearly to be among the losses lamented in “One Art.” Bishop lived in Brazil for more than a decade with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares; in 1967 Soares committed suicide by overdosing on tranquilizers. They lived in Petrópolis, at the convergence of the Quitandinha and Piabanha rivers. Even if Lota cannot be named in the poem, “two rivers” and “a continent” make her present in it. And the “you” addressed in the last stanza is apparently Alice Methfessel, a much younger woman whom Bishop met when she returned to Boston after her years in Brazil. “One Art” was written during a period when Methfessel was engaged, apparently soon to be lost to Bishop. Societally-imposed sanction forbade Bishop direct expression of grief over her same-sex beloveds, so Bishop chose a way to express that grief without stating it.
One additional ambiguity makes the last line of “One Art” an appropriate culmination to this inquiry. “Write it!” has a homophone, “Right it!” We write disasters when and because we cannot right them. We may extend to others of Bishop’s poems what might be said of “One Art,” and to others’ poems what might be said of Bishop’s: disasters she could not right, she wrote.
2.2: Poetry For Justice
In its robust use of a craft technique I’ll call “critical third,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Lovers of the Poor” demonstrates that craft decisions are not merely decorative, not ex post facto flourishes tacked onto the surface of a structure that precedes them, but that, to the contrary, craft decisions determine the structure, influence the function, and participate in the political orientation of the work. Through craft decisions we shape our ideas and emotions, enhance our best understandings, and enact our ideals.
Adrienne Rich recommends reflection not only on the means of writing but also on its ends, “not how to write poetry, but wherefore.” Brooks’s “The Lovers of the Poor” depicts one way in which that how and wherefore join, a way in which craft decisions have ethical/political valence. It offers a case in point to second Audre Lorde’s declaration that poetry is a “vital necessity” because of these two truths: that “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives,” and that the craft decisions we make in our work influence “the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” Brooks’s poem shows one way in which a poem can change “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives.”
From what we see in popular culture (and from what some of us were taught in school), it would be easy to arrive at the notion that poetry is good only for registering intense private emotions: it’s a fit vehicle for declarations of love or outpourings of grief, but for little else. “The Lovers of the Poor,” though, offers one counterexample to such constriction. “The Lovers of the Poor” reminds us that, in addition to its capacity to record “emotion recollected in tranquility,” poetry can also depict and critique injustice, speak to matters of social welfare and public policy, and so on. It reminds us that even our seemingly most private emotions occur in, and are shaped by, a broader context. It gives one answer to the question “How can poetry serve the interest of social justice at least as robustly as it answers the impulse toward self-expression?” In 1960, the year “The Lovers of the Poor” was published in book form, even though she had won the Pulitzer Prize ten years before, Gwendolyn Brooks, had she lived in, say, Memphis, could not have married a white person or shared a meal at a restaurant with a white person or even drunk from the same water fountain as a white person. Where she did live, Chicago, her society did not allow her to make even mundane life choices without attention to pressing civic concerns such as racial inequalities; it would be most surprising if she wrote poetry that did not attend to such concerns. But how does it attend to such concerns? Critical third is one of its means.
In “The Lovers of the Poor,” the point of view appears at first to be an instance of “close third,” or what, in How Fiction Works, James Wood calls “free indirect style.” In close third, the narrator moves fluidly between looking at a character from outside and reporting that character’s thoughts and feelings from inside: the narrator can report things that the character could not know (just as an omniscient narrator would be able to), and also report the character’s internal state with full acquaintance (just as a first-person narrator would).
Imputing to close third much power, Wood offers an account of why it is so effective. According to Wood, in close third “the narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character.” Wood makes up brief examples to contrast direct speech with indirect, and thus to show what makes “free indirect speech”
