Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Zachariah Pickard

In "The Country Mouse," the waiting-room episode comes at the very end of a long series of memories, all centered around the experience of being taken at the age of six from rural Nova Scotia to Worcester, Massachusetts. The details of the episode are mostly the same as they are in the poem, but with a few key differences: the National Geographic plays a much smaller role--she only looks at the cover--and there is no "oh! of pain" to trigger her epiphany (Poems 160). Instead, the feeling comes of itself, quite suddenly:

     I looked at the magazine cover--I could read most of the words--
     shiny, glazed, yellow and white. The black letters said:
     FEBRUARY 1918. A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came
     over me. (Prose 32-33)

This "awful sensation" is "like coasting downhill [...] only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree" (33). The unpleasantness of this sensation is a significant difference between the story and the poem. "The Country Mouse" is a long story about a child's unhappiness, and in that context this particular episode functions as a sort of summation of all the many unpleasant and unsettling things that take place over the course of the story; the episode consists essentially of the grim realization that "you are going to be you forever." "In the Waiting Room," on the other hand, comprises a discrete experience and functions as an ontological epiphany rather than an existential crisis, a visionary shift based on the one she ascribes to Darwin.

The speaker of the poem "carefully/studie[s]" the contents of the National Geographic (159), and the things she sees in it--volcanoes, cannibals, "Babies with pointed heads"--take the place of the accumulated events of "The Country Mouse." By replacing the many miseries of an individual with the collected observations of natural history (of which National Geographic is devoted to a popularized form) Bishop lays a foundation for a larger leap. The stakes are raised; the poem is not autobiography but epiphany, and her hero is no longer a mouse but a figure based on Darwin. Like "the lonely young" Darwin making "observations," the solitary six-year-old begins by observing "arctics and overcoats,/lamps and magazines" (Poems 159). Just as a "forgetful phrase" sends Darwin "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown," an "oh! of pain" sends her "falling off/the round, turning world," with the waiting room "sliding/beneath a big black wave" (161). As Darwin slides with "his eyes fixed on facts and minute details," she falls with her "eyes glued to the cover/of the National Geographic" (160). And just as Darwin's slip reveals "the strangeness of his undertaking," the speaker knows "that nothing stranger" than this epiphany "had ever happened" or "could ever happen."

Beyond these resemblances, there are also similarities in intellectual structure between the poem and Bishop's understanding of Darwin. The poem dramatizes an abrupt recognition of what one is to oneself--"you are an I"--and an equally abrupt understanding of how one is thought of by others--"you are an Elizabeth"--and in doing so it conflates the first, second, and third person. But it moves even further, into the third-person plural, declaring that "you are one of them," and it is here that the abstraction of the natural historian truly begins. The speaker glides from her own point of view to the view of those who know her name and on to a fully abstracted, classified view of herself as simply one of "them." The effect is of a movie camera pulling back from a closeup to a long shot and on to a view of all humanity--she has fallen off the world and can see it whole. In a very few moments, the speaker recognizes herself both subjectively and objectively; she is, in Paradis's terms, both "at the center of the whole and at its distant periphery." And like Darwin, from that distance what interests her is the question of species, the "similarities" that "held us all together/or made us all just one?" (161). She makes a few half-hearted suggestions--"boots, hands, the family voice"--but leaves the question essentially open. It is, after all, the "unknown" into which she is sliding; Bishop's interest is not in the Darwin who sclves the question of species but in the Darwin who first imagines it, who catches "a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important."