after too many years, i have finally finished reading through elizabeth bishop’s first published book of poetry, north & south. reading poetry is a painstaking and laborious task for me—i spend at least a few hours on each one, sometimes across multiple days (which is very much not to brag; i’m just not very efficient). also, as an extrovert and victim of capitalism, trying to find the calm and quiet necessary for reading poetry at all, instead of feeling vaguely lonely or experiencing productivity guilt is… well, by a miracle i sometimes manage it.

one, i think rather understated, poem in this first book particularly struck me, and i was moved to say something about it—in the form of writing about a poem, as opposed to writing a poem, say, or shitposting loosely in response to a poem (my preferred form of writing). and when we write about something, in fact we are often unavoidably writing about ourselves, something which bishop makes urgently clear in many of these early poems, as she likewise makes clear in “cirque d’hiver”.

here’s the text of the poem (scrollable on mobile):

Cirque d’Hiver

Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back.
A little circus horse with real white hair.
His eyes are glossy black.
He bears a little dancer on his back.

She stands upon her toes and turns and turns.
A slanting spray of artificial roses
is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.
Above her head she poses
another spray of artificial roses.

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.
He has a formal, melancholy soul.
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.
He is the more intelligent by far.
Facing each other rather desperately—
his eye is like a star—
we stare and say, “Well, we have come this far.”

“cirque d’hiver” is, most immediately, a poem about closing a gap. the little toy horse begins its journey a distance away from the poet, spatial and even temporal—both “across the floor” and of a design apropos for “several centuries back”. by the end, it has cantered, stopped, and cantered again to stand in front of the poet and meet her gaze.

in doing so, it also seems to traverse the gap spanning the artificial and… perhaps not the real so much as the feeling. after all, the horse is bestowed with “real white hair” from the start. what is revealed along the way is that he not only possesses a soul, but also the capacity to both feel and feel for the little dancer—whom he “bears” with great care and gravity, and who is skewered by the brutal spear of artifice, in the striking last line of the third stanza.

this capacity of the horse to transcend the artificial is contrasted with the little dancer, who lacks awareness of her position. just a stanza break after the horse “bears [her] on his back”, she stands not on her mount, but only “upon her toes”, bereft of the horse’s transformative capacity for empathy. she “turns and turns” on her axis without reaching the celestial alignment the horse does, as his eyes which are “glossy black” at a distance become “like a star” up close. the exact phrasal repetition of “spray of artificial roses” suggests a certain obliviousness of the figure to her own tackiness. the dancer cannot cross the gap that the horse seems to. she too has a soul, but he feels her soul for her.

there is a certain urgent—literally “desperate”—identification that bishop makes between herself and the horse. their reciprocal gaze, and the only two instances of that insistently conjunctive, first-person pronoun “we” in the very last line of the poem: bishop too tries to close a gap, that between the representer and the represented. as the horse bears the soul of the little dancer on his back, so does she carry the weight of his ensoulment, of feeling for the toy horse in his stead. and she, too, is “pierced” by the connection between them, the delicate thread which connects poet and subject.

what i love most about “cirque d’hiver” is how easy it is to stop here. it is such a tidy little poem, and its lyricism is so innocent and soothing; we are invited to accept the conclusion thus far, that it is a poem about a poet’s deep longing to close the metaphorical gap between herself and her subject, just as the subject closes the physical gap between them. there is simple tragedy in this longing, of not quite being able to reach the other side, but still having “come this far”, together.

but what moves me most about this poem is how criminally bishop seems to suggest that she comes up short in this endeavor. that her relationship with the horse is perhaps more disgraceful than it is tragic.

after all, the horse starts off already suspended somewhere in the space between the “mechanical” and the “real”. in order to reveal his “soul”, bishop piles onto him the additional artifice of her poetry. she admits this readily: the horse’s soul is “formal”; that is to say, it emerges from the poetic form itself. the “real white hair” of his “mane and tail” are made less real by comparison to giorgio de chirico’s surrealist depictions of horses (whose hair is anything but “straight”). even his movement is saddled with this indirection of representation—the horse canters, a word derived from the pace by which pilgrims made their way to canterbury, a pilgrimage which can hardly be imagined without aid from chaucer.

beneath bishop’s pen, the horse is made to bear not only the weight of the little dancer, but also the immense weight of poetry, of art itself. in assuming that burden, the horse reveals to us the true identification of the poet within her poem: bishop longs to meet the gaze of the horse, to cross the gap between her self and her subject—but in truth she is the little dancer which the horse props up.

in her attempt to venerate the toy horse, she forces the weight of metaphor upon him. in doing so, she “has turned her back” on the real subject of her work. the horse’s soul is displaced by her own; so that he can meet her stare, bishop must put the star in his eye. the little dancer’s tacky, oblivious “spray of artificial roses” is bishop’s condemnation of herself—that she cannot create art without imposing cringing artifice. that she poses it proudly “above her head” is just as farcical, and worth of ridicule. that careful, tentative connection between poet and subject is revealed as the indelicate rod which impales the horse.

but, of course, unlike the little dancer stuck in her own little world, bishop is fully aware of all these things. after all, she wrote the poem.

what does bishop mean when she says of the horse, “he is the more intelligent by far”? certainly, not simply that the horse is the greater figure for its capacity to feel—a capacity which she imbued him with, a capacity which is her own aspiration. perhaps this irony-laden line is, ironically, her most honest reverence for her subject—that while she turns away, his eyes are fixed forward, in full recognition of his position, bearing bishop’s poem with the same care and gravity she portrays him as bearing the little dancer.

one of the most prominent formal artifacts in “cirque d’hiver” appears in stanza four, where bishop breaks her A A’ A rhyme pattern of lines two, four, and five: back / black / back, far / star / far, etc.:

and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

this glaring schematic identification of “me” and “key” borders on hubristic at first glance, even more so than the superficially reflexive “he is the more intelligent by far”. except!—it’s a big tin key, the most self-evidently artifactual component of the toy horse. look as the poet winds up her subject and makes him go! see her fashion for him his own compassionate soul! to bishop, this is a profound dishonesty, i think, and not something to be proud of.

except… is she not essential here, after all? without her poem, we would not bear witness, however faulty and indirect, to the toy horse and his burden at all.

how do we write honestly? how can we be faithful to the subject of our writing? these questions trace their way through many of bishop’s early poems. they infest my own writing here, today. how much of the weight of my thoughts do i make the poem bear? just how much of what i say is a projection of myself only? how accurately do i represent knowledge others have offered me (e.g., wisdom from peter sacks at harvard, whose poetry classes have centered some of bishop’s poetry)?

and how do i myself write poetry about something? how much do i warp my subjects to bring them together; how much do i warp myself?

i read “cirque d’hiver” and i try to understand: maybe it is impossible to do it right. we just bear the burden and try to cross the gap anyway.