Vox Populi
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Elizabeth Bishop: Insomnia
The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper.
By the Universe deserted,
she’d tell it to go to hell,
and she’d find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.
~~~
Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Her poems are widely admired for their careful attention to craft.
From Poems: North & south: A cold spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
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Ah, Jesus, this so good!
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Bishop is great!
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Shallow fairy tales, the depth of reality…and the sleepless love that keeps trying to join them both. I’m mad for this poem and this poet!
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Me too, Louise.
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Reading the last sentence of her bio, I must admit that I so often miss the “careful attention to craft” in many of the poems published today. So thank you for this beauty and so many poems you publish in VP, Michael.
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Thanks, Laure-Anne. I feel my own work veers between the careful craft of Bishop and the wild ride of Kerouac. The poet is both a maker and an explorer.
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A favorite poet. Here, as in her more famous poems, she takes commonplace objects or what could be mundane situations, and turns them into a startle or a mystery. At its conclusion, Insomnia turns to a deeper place than just a random set of wonders or ponders of a sleepless night. I love the late transition.
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Thanks, Jim. I admire this poem as well. As you say, she takes a common experience and finds the depth in it.
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One of my (many) beloved poems by the immortal and inimitable Elizabeth Bishop. And yet, as often as I have read this poem–which is plenty of times–I never see those last four words coming…thank goodness.
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The poem always surprises me.
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