Revisions ✏️ & a moment with Elizabeth Bishop

One of my favorite poets is Elizabeth Bishop and one of my favorite poems of hers is North Haven which she wrote to her friend (and fellow poet) Robert Lowell. I’ve included it below courtesy of Poetry Atlas, but the reason I am thinking about it today is that I am up to my eyebrows in manuscript Revisions — with a capital “R”.

There is a line:

Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

That runs through my head as I go through this process. Revision is painstaking and tedious. Some people love revision; I am always astounded by how many ways there are to tweak something to make it better, or another typo to catch in the net. Oh, that errant period!

But then the last lines of this poem are what stop my complaints:

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue...And now--you’ve left
for good. You can’t derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

We are the lucky ones 🙏🏻 who are here today and who can make these adjustments and refinements.

In college, a poetry professor of mine commented that I was “very sympathetic to Bishop”. In fact, I very much am.

North Haven

Elizabeth Bishop

In Memoriam: Robert Lowell

I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse¹s tail.

The islands haven’t shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have--
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south, or sidewise--
and that they¹re free within the blue frontiers of bay.

This month our favorite one is full of flowers:
buttercups, red clover, purple vetch,
hackweed still burning, daisies pied, eyebright,
the fragrant bedstraw’s incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.

The goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the white-throated sparrow’s five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first “discovered girls”
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer.
(”Fun”--it always seemed to leave you at a loss...)

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue...And now--you’ve left
for good. You can’t derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.