A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination.
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0:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal. Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild?
1:12 Wes Alwan: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous.
1:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, perfectly harmless.
1:24 Wes Alwan: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you?
1:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: I have not. And I. Actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish.
1:52 Wes Alwan: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see a moose?
1:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: I don't know.
1:57 Wes Alwan: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild, really?
2:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to. But maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see a moose. Like, I just, I. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees 1996 World Series sweatshirt.
2:42 Wes Alwan: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it?
2:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a mousse on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm going to see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I bought a moose sweatshirt in I think Grand Teton. And I was like, I'm going to see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah and things would happen and everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw a baby moose and its mom. And I'd get all excited and I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me.
3:32 Wes Alwan: So you don't want to see like a magic white heart or something like that?
3:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, I just want to see him. But even the garden variety moose. No, no, just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it.
3:49 Wes Alwan: Because they are a goofy. Right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking or are they both?
3:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think they're both. And I think that kind of quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand.
4:22 Wes Alwan: Interesting.
4:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. They're not majestic.
4:25 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal.
4:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's. That she's grown up in and that she's a part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on.
5:16 Wes Alwan: Okay, so maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right.
5:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah.
5:27 Wes Alwan: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading?
5:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower, middle, upper five islands, five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the Passengers lie back, snores, some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises. An old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned. Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store. And finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half grown, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, Dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly. Sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel this sweet sensation of joy. Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit McAdam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.
11:05 Wes Alwan: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. Read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background?
11:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about more. But yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hoffman, who wrote quite a bit about her. And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a. In a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sistina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England. But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified.
12:53 Wes Alwan: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it.
12:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. She started this in, I think, 1946.
13:01 Wes Alwan: And then she finished it when this
13:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: was published in Geography 3. So she finished it in the 70s.
13:07 Wes Alwan: Okay.
13:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Geography 3 came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, geography three is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that.
13:24 Wes Alwan: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there.
13:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem.
14:04 Wes Alwan: Yeah.
14:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: Low rate of productivity is great to.
14:08 Wes Alwan: You know, I can relate to that.
14:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live large and die with a slim collected is kind of a.
14:19 Wes Alwan: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro.
14:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right.
14:29 Wes Alwan: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it? This is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony.
14:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me.
14:44 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while.
14:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Absolutely, absolutely.
14:49 Wes Alwan: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip, and there really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven relatives. Yeah.
15:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage.
15:30 Wes Alwan: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right.
15:36 Erin O'Luanaigh: Her.
15:36 Wes Alwan: Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized.
15:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right, yeah.
15:41 Wes Alwan: At the age when she was 5.
15:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right.
15:44 Wes Alwan: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead.
15:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from the bite on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar.
16:22 Wes Alwan: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general?
16:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes a scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefooted on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals. And they took her to. Back with them to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema and really, like, I think Almost died of both at one time or other. Very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved seeing her hand and her little. In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up.
18:14 Wes Alwan: Wow.
18:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Macedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years. She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography three, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian poems. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, the sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed. Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich.
19:43 Wes Alwan: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. Are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you Add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, well, begins with the tides, but.
20:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and just the necessities. And a place we learn that maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it.
21:16 Wes Alwan: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward. It's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and. And brought along with it towards her destination.
22:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there.
22:31 Wes Alwan: Well, I was gonna say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my Finger on it. Exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now, then? What's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image.
23:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or of just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant considering that she's talking about a tide.
23:25 Wes Alwan: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But.
23:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: And boundaries, too.
23:41 Wes Alwan: Right.
23:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that, too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border.
24:18 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But. Yeah, I had the same thought, too. Yeah. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall of brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there.
24:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big suddenly reduced in size to the handheld. But Coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are, in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, sort of springing out of the fishing industry.
25:42 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide.
25:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's great.
25:52 Wes Alwan: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus.
26:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. The bus flashes. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content.
26:56 Wes Alwan: Right.
26:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Of the road itself. So we get that combination of something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area.
27:07 Wes Alwan: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Greene, who I've been reading on the show soon. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses. So from the red clay. And you can make homes from them as well. And common in Sierra and Leon. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up and went, all right, there must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah.
27:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: So that's the mineral. The.
27:44 Wes Alwan: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay. Type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering.
27:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.
27:57 Wes Alwan: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the.
28:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, it's coming.
28:13 Wes Alwan: The redness of the soil.
28:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling.
28:40 Wes Alwan: It's such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading, well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more vivid, definitely.
29:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image.
29:52 Wes Alwan: And.
29:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, you talked about momentum too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with. And Akali supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak. Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I E Y e of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the
30:48 Wes Alwan: capital I We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop?
31:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass river. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's.
31:48 Wes Alwan: As far as the content. Content goes.
31:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups. The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peas clinging, one of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from. Certainly from a moving bus.
32:43 Wes Alwan: Yeah. The point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important, which is the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very beautiful.
33:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, they Compound. And then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boots and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on the red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment of tent. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens poem, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so probably no real connection there.
34:07 Wes Alwan: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it means. Or. It means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and evening is approaching in a kind of mini winter. Right. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves as evening commences. It's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening. That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see. Okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the. The light reflecting off the enamel bus or. Right. Not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark. Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah. The shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime.
35:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right? Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To autumn you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence you get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind.
36:07 Wes Alwan: Right.
36:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Because there's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of the evening. Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is. It's got to be like August. Maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development.
36:40 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter, it's called. It gets colder. And we see the.
36:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: Definitely.
36:47 Wes Alwan: We see the effects of it. But yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season.
36:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, right. Yeah. And that point, or that point in the transition from summer to autumn, where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, you know, the evening temperature. Right. Is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get.
37:09 Wes Alwan: Shall we take a. Shall we? Oh, yes, let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two.
37:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: She'll have to wait.
37:18 Wes Alwan: Let's not let her on the bus yet.
37:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinals rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you.
37:30 Wes Alwan: Thank you.
