How Poetry Works

This is National Poetry Month, and so I’ve been reading the works of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, two of the foremost American poets of their generation, and lifelong friends. I’ve long been fascinated by Lowell’s poem “The Scream,” which he said he “derived from” a short story by Bishop that was published in 1953 in the New Yorker. In his 1964 book For the Union Dead, Lowell acknowledges again that his  poem “owes everything to Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful, calm story, ‘In the Village.’”

            Bishop’s story isn’t all that calm. It takes place in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where Bishop lived with her grandparents from the age of six until she was eight, from 1915 to 1918. Her father had died when she was eight months old, and her mother was in and out of asylums and finally confined to an insane asylum in Boston 1916. In her story, a silent scream hangs over the village, an image eerily reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s famous painting, “The Scream,” which Munch painted in 1893, shortly after his sister was admitted to an insane asylum in Oslo. Bishop’s story fairly vibrates with the suppressed terror of a young girl caught in an adult world she cannot possibly comprehend.

“I tried versing your ‘In the Village,’” Lowell wrote to Bishop in March 1962. The poem, he said, “is merely your prose put into three-beat lines and probably a travesty, making something small and literary out [of] something much larger, gayer, and more healthy.”

Bishop later wrote to Lowell that she was “surprised” that he had written a poem that so closely followed her story. What was the point? she must have wondered. And did he actually believe that her story was healthier (what did that mean?), and that his poem was more literary? Clearly, something in the story spoke to Lowell so forcibly that he wanted to say whatever it was in his own way, if not in his own words. What was it?

            Here’s the opening of Bishop’s story:

“A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that travellers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon….”

            And here is the first stanza of Lowell’s poem:           

A scream, the echo of a scream,

            Now only a thinning echo…

            As a child in Nova Scotia,

            I used to watch the sky,

            Swiss sky, too blue, too dark.

Lowell picks up not only Bishop’s words, but also her style, which relies for part of its effect on repetition. He has identified with Bishop’s child narrator, the daughter of the woman whose scream is suspended over the village, and has brought the first-person up into the opening stanza. In the story we don’t know who’s telling it until almost half-way through.

Many of Lowell’s poems are about his family, one of the old Boston families. “Easy-going, Empire State patricians,” he calls his forebears, whom he traces back to the Mayflower and of which he was extremely, if complicatedly, proud.

Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and was hospitalized twelve times between 1949 and 1964, often for several months at a time. “I fear the frequency of these things,” he wrote to Bishop after being hospitalized again in 1976, “fear becoming something that must be categorized as a burden.” He was ashamed of the shadow his illness cast on both his historical and immediate families. (“Everyone’s tired of my turmoil,” he wrote in an early poem.) During his bouts of depression, he seemed unable to distinguish between metaphor and reality: as Dan Chiasson wrote in the New Yorker, “the ‘like’ and ‘as’ of metaphor dropped out of his mind.” When he was ill, according to the late Jonathan Raban, “the metaphors took over,” and Lowell “became, in his mind, Christ, Hitler, Napoleon, Dante, Milton, Alexander the Great, John the Baptist, and many others.” Including, one suspects, Elizabeth Bishop, who struggled with alcoholism and depression.

But why that particular story? I think the answer lies in that silent, oppressive scream that hangs over the village as palpably as Munch’s vermillion sunset looms over the bridge in his painting. In the story, the narrator’s mother screams “because in Boston, she had not got any better, in months and months – or had it been a year? In spite of the doctors, in spite of the frightening expenses, she had not got any better.” Lowell, too, was treated for months and months, in Boston, and he, too, had not got any better. It seems likely that when he read Bishop’s story, the distinction between metaphor and reality fell out of his mind, and he sat down to remake Bishop’s beautiful, calm story into an agonized poem of his own.