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Poem Review: 'It Was A Beautiful Day' By Elizabeth Bishop

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Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, arrived on the island of North Haven on the morning boat from Rockland on July 16, 1974. “It was a beautiful day . . . ” She was accompanied by Frank Bidart, a younger poet, and Alice Methfessel, her companion and lover, the energetic and very capable administrator of Kirkland House at Harvard. Elizabeth had returned to New England four years earlier following the death, apparently by suicide, of her Brazilian lover, Lolta de Macedo Soares, the intellectual and dynamic landscape designer with whom she lived in Petropolis and Rio de Janeiro for fifteen years. The poet whose Complete Poems, containing “Questions of Travel” and some of her best verse composed on Brazilian themes as well as an …show more content…

During her Vassar years she spent Christmas with a friend aton the island of Nantucket and later sailed to Cuttyhunk, a small fishing village off the Massachusetts coast. She often returned to Great Village and in 1952 made it the subject of her short story “In the Village.”

Journal Elizabeth’s journal, which she kept intermittently from 1974– to1979 in 4 x 6 composition books, makes difficult reading in the original, as her handwriting is often illegible. The content and tone of expression vary from day to day according to the poet’s mood. Typically she records the arrival and departure of visitors. Lloyd Schwartz and Frank Bidart are frequent guests. Kit Barker, the British artist, and his wife, Elsa; Celia Bertin, a French writer; and the literary critic John Malcolm Brinnin are among those who come to Sabine Farm to walk, picnic, and occasionally swim in the cold waters of Penobscot Bay. Elizabeth prides herself as a good cook and is the one who prepares fresh lobster and chocolate soufflés for her …show more content…

Elizabeth, who had, ironically, discouraged his visit to North Haven for reasons which are not entirely clear, began work on the poem “North Haven” soon after his death. The poem, “North Haven (In Memoriam: Robert Lowell),” went through many revisions and was finally published in the New Yorker on December 6, 1978. As an elegiac tribute to Lowell, the poem is an expression of Elizabeth’s deep sense of loss. At another level, it expresses her identification with the island and her acute sensitivity to the passage of time — an extended meditation on time. The schooner is the central, sustaining image of the poem as it passes silently by as if in a film or dream. The islands which seem to drift, but which are geologically bound by time to the floor of the bay, suggest the illusory nature of perception. The poem then shifts in perspective and scale to the meadow filled with wildflowers and to the plaintive song of the white-throated sparrow: “repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.” The final words suggest by contrast the infinite capacity of nature for renewal and the poet’s limited, finite ability to “rearrange” —

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