Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Zachariah Pickard

At the end of his chapter on natural selection, Darwin likens the natural world to a tree, the individual twigs of which represent variations, the larger twigs species, the branches genera, and so on. The "great branches" that stand for the classes and orders of the natural world "were themselves, once, when the tree was small, budding twigs" (176). In drawing this analogy Darwin goes beyond denying the simultaneous creation of all species and calls into question the idea of classification as a whole. Species, genus, family, order--all become little more than arbitrary stops on a continuum that begins with random variation of the smallest kind. In this way the origin of species (or genus or family or order) is an oddly satisfying metaphor for what Bishop is trying to say about the conscious and the unconscious. Variation is to species as observation is to abstraction as conscious is to unconscious. There is no split. Rather, there is a continuous spectrum, and there is the moment when a buildup at one end of the spectrum brings about a click at the other end, when accumulated observations trigger, in some mysterious way, a giddy epiphany. To read the world through Bishop's letter, the origin of species is in that moment when nature, her eyes fixed on minute details, sinks or slides "giddily off into the unknown."

Like Darwin, Bishop treasures a working interrelation of the conscious and the unconscious mind, a division of intellectual labor. Their work is done, according to Bishop, in sequence: the conscious mind begins with a "perfectly useless concentration" on "facts and minute details," and the unconscious mind follows behind with that "sudden relaxation," the feeling of "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown." Crucially, Bishop seeks to replicate this process in her reader, insisting that "What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same things that is necessary for its creation." Implicit in the Darwin letter, then, is both a statement of what she seeks in her own poetry and a guide for her reader. Her goal is to craft a set of particulars engrossing enough to draw the reader further and further into the poem so that, once entranced, the reader can be pushed out, half-conscious, into the unknown. She asks the reader simply to read with Darwin's rapt attention, to achieve a "self-forgetful [...] concentration." Ideally, by the poem's end, such careful scrutiny will have transcended itself, and like the speaker of "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," we will have "looked and looked our infant sight away" (Poems 59).

I thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the following permissions:

Letters written by Elizabeth Bishop to Anne Stevenson. Copyright [c] 2004 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate.

Excerpts from The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright [c] 1984 by Alice Helen Methfessel. The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. One Art: Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux. Copyright [c] 1994 by Alice Methfessel. Introduction and compilation copyright [c] 1994 by Robert Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.