Elizabeth Bishop is among the finest American lyric poets of the second half of the 20th century. She was adored (not too big a word) by her contemporaries Robert Lowell and James Merrill, her work was revered by John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney, also her contemporaries, and her genius was early recognized by fellow poets such as Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell.

February is Bishop’s birthday month, her birthday recalled many years later in the small, bracketed head note to ‘The Bight,’ a poem that appeared in the Pulitzer prize winning, “A Cold Spring” (1955). As is true for so many of her poems, ‘The Bight’ had its origins in something she actually saw. Writing in 1948, from Key West to Robert Lowell, she observed, “the water looks like blue gas — the harbor is always a mess, here, junky little boats all piled up, some hung with sponges and always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane. It reminds me a little of my desk.”

These words to Lowell were the seeds of ‘The Bight,’ which opens with this beautifully flowing line -

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.’

and continues -

‘The color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.’

And further on, as she said, reminding her of her desk -

‘Some of the little white boats are still piled up

against each other…..

Like torn-open, unanswered letters.

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

But let us turn back to the beginning, to the second line, ‘White, crumbling ribs of marl’ that ‘protrude and glare.’ The ancient world rises (or is dredged) up. One of Earth’s basic materials, marl has been used, since time immemorial, as a fertilizer and as clay for bricks. And here, in our world of poetry, we find an echo of marl, albeit ‘burning,’ in the ancient, the primeval, landscape of Paradise Lost.

Geography and water, along with travel, are key themes in much of Bishop’s poetry. The word ‘Bight’ itself is many-layered, with its own geology, and, as always with Bishop, every word is layered with meaning. When she read this poem in public, courteous as ever towards her readers and audiences, she spelt out Bight to avoid confusion with ‘bite.’ In the OED we find ‘byhte’ is an Old English word that means a shallow or slightly receding bay, also, in its non-geographical definition, an elbow or curve.

So when we read of ‘Pelicans’ who ‘crash/into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,/it seems to me, like pickaxes,/ rarely coming up with anything to show for it,/and going off with humorous elbowings.’, followed by ‘man-of-war birds’ who ‘soar/ on impalpable drafts/ and open their tails like scissors on the curves.’ we have Bishop’s — and our — joy in the play of words, or, as one critic wrote, her ‘magical illumination of the ordinary.’

For this reader, too, ‘humorous’ illumines, in all its significance, in perfect poetical construction, the poem’s final word -’cheerful.’

‘All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful.’

These last two lines became a mantra for Bishop in her, often, very difficult life. They appear on her gravestone (the last line at her request), and they can be seen today in Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Mass. Worcester, where she was born, is the scene of her other famous ‘birthday’ poem, ‘In the Waiting Room.’

Ordinary, and yet, not, ‘The Bight’ is a landscape of ‘untidy activity’, surprising sounds, similes and ‘correspondences’ — this last a word that makes us loop back again, this time to the color of the water, ‘the gas flame turned as low as possible,’ and, suddenly, we have the 19th century French poet, Charles Baudelaire (one of her three favorite poets, the other two being George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins) — Baudelaire who saw the world in terms of ‘correspondences,’ words in terms of music, colors in terms of scents and so on.

One can smell it (the water) turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock

already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.’

And o those, like myself, unfamiliar with marimba music, it is played on an instrument akin to a xylophone, hence those ‘perfectly off-beat claves.

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful.

These final lines contain a lifetime of humor and meaning, dredging depths but always lightly.

* * * *

To help celebrate Bishop’s birthday month, I thought an appropriate way would be through a brief conversation with Jonathan Post, whose “Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction” is due out from Oxford in March (June in the USA). As some of you know, professor Post and his wife, Susan Gallick, are members of the Stonington community. He taught initially at Yale and for many years after that at UCLA, where he is Distinguished Research Professor in English.

“Behind every book, there is a little back story, and this one says something about Bishop’s status as a poet,” he told me. “I had enjoyed writing the Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems in the same series. I like the compressed format and the idea of writing for a more general audience, plus the pricing. At $11.95 apiece, the books are a steal.”

Much of Post’s previous work, including the Shakespeare book, has been in the earlier fields of the English Renaissance and 17th century. But this is a more modern direction.

But Post noticed strong connections between the two historical periods, and Bishop participated in some of these.

“George Herbert was one of her favorite poets, as you know,” Post said. “In this, Bishop, like Merrill, participated in a long, literary continuum, thank heavens; so while she is wonderfully strange and unique, she is, like the best lyric poets, also available on her own immediate terms to general readers willing to think about these matters.”

Post emphasized the book’s introductory nature.

“At this late stage in Bishop studies, we’re at a point not of market saturation but of increased scholarly specialization, something that often follows the discovery or recovery of an author,” he said. “There are two societies named after her and now a new scholarly journal, three or four biographies, and more critical books than you can shake a fist at. But for all these good works, it’s hard to get both a sense of the general outline of her great gifts as a poet and also a detailed understanding of the poems themselves, which is why we want to read about her in the first place.”

We will all look forward to hearing more about Elizabeth Bishop, her poetry and her connection to this community on July 10 when Professor Post will be at the Library to deliver a talk in our Sunday Evening Lecture Series.

Belinda de Kay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.