Grandfather’s Bible

When Elizabeth Bishop was a small child in Great Village, Nova Scotia, her mother’s family gathered in the parlor of her grandparents’ house after dinner while her grandfather read aloud from Robert Burns and the Bible. He read the poetry with a touch of Scottish accent—“a drop of red wine into the clear yellow of the lamp-lit evenings,” as Bishop puts it in “Reminiscences of Great Village,” an unpublished story. “There was just enough [accent] to give it a Scotch flavor,” she writes, “like the Canadian regiment in our village which wore, above the regular soft kahki [sic] uniform, a sort of tam o’shanter with a bit of Scotch plaid grogram ribbon on it, and a feather.” “His Bible reading, though,” she continues, “did just the opposite. We became quite stolidly a family when he read the Bible,” sober and serious. The windows in the room turned black and “became more impenetrable and confining than even the walls,” “giving back to us darkened and jagged reflections of ourselves.”

Bishop’s grandmother, Elizabeth Hutchinson Bulmer, was short, square-jawed, fretful, and kind. Bishop, who called her “Gammie,” recalled her in the kitchen “groaning and rocking, wiping her eyes with the edge of her apron, uttering from time to time the mysterious remark that was a sort of chorus in our lives: ‘Nobody knows…nobody knows.’” The old woman had a glass eye; it was blue and disarmingly like her natural one, but not reliably coordinated with it. “Quite often, the glass eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you.” The glass eye made her seem “especially vulnerable and precious” to the child. “Until I was teased out of it,” Bishop writes, “I used to ask Grandmother, when I said goodbye, to promise me not to die before I came home.”           

Grandfather was the man most beloved by fatherless Elizabeth. William Brown Bulmer was seventy years old in 1916. He had a working man’s blocky body, bald head, round face, and thick white moustache—a “walrus moustache,” Bishop calls it in an unpublished poem in which she imagines him trudging after death over terrible ice and snow, “broadbacked & determined” “on splaying snowshoes” while the Aurora Borealis flashes on high. A deacon in the Baptist church, “Pa” (as she called him) liked to slip his granddaughter a peppermint with “Canada” written on it when he came to collect the offering. He worked as a tanner, until factory leather put him out of business. Now he drove his cow to pasture, cleaned the Baptist Church, and did odd jobs. When it was time to scythe the cemetery grass, his granddaughter came with him and played among the headstones.

“Lucius” is the name of the child-narrator, Bishop’s surrogate, in these “Reminiscences.” The name she gives to her mother is odd: “Easter.” Was it meant to evoke the religious mania gripping Gertrude Bishop before her breakdown in 1916? Was it an ironic comment about that approaching collapse, the opposite of resurrection? Or was it only a way to mark her mother’s singularity and mystery, her difference from everyone else? 

Easter liked poetry. One evening she asked Grandfather to read “Oh wert thou in the cauld blast,” where Burns promises to comfort his beloved even “in the wildest waste,/Sae black and bare, sae black and bare.” Otherwise, Easter remained withdrawn during these family occasions. Still wearing mourning clothes five years after her husband’s death, “she lay on the sofa with an arm across her eyes, her other arm hanging down so that the white hand lay on the floor,” while “Betsy lay across her feet.” Betsy was Gertrude’s dog, a dachshund; Bishop doesn’t give her a fictional name. It’s Betsy, not Easter, who communes with the child, “rolling up her eyes at me, so that the whites showed. As it got later, you could smell her more and more clearly.” 

Betsy’s smell, after a day nosing about in the marshes behind the house, would have filled the pocket-sized, low-ceilinged room. The space was crowded with objects and images. Crocheted throw blankets, antimacassars, doilies on side tables and the couch’s arms, hooked rugs, a clock, a pedal organ or harmonium. On the walls hung gaily painted fans from Bishop’s great-uncle’s time in India, a seascape by another great-uncle, chromograph portraits of the British royal family, and a pair of oil portraits of Gertrude and her brother Arthur from the late 1880s by a traveling painter. The children’s stiff poses, derived from generic models, were joined a bit awkwardly to their likenesses, which had been done from life, suggesting an imperfect fit between body and soul.

The most important object in the room was Grandfather’s Bible. As large and splendid as the parlor was small and simple, the Bulmer family Bible weighed over ten pounds. Bound in leather, the cover had panels and embossed designs, like the coffered door to a noble house, with “Holy Bible” printed on a floral pattern of shining gold. The National Publishing Company, an American firm, were the makers of this “SUPERFINE EDITION.” The book’s bustling title page advertised it as a “New Devotional and Practical Pictorial Family Bible containing Old and New Testaments, Apocrypha, Concordance, and the Psalms in Metre,” numerous “chronological and other useful tables and treatises, maps, etc.,” and all of this “Embellished with over 2000 Fine Scripture illustrations.” 

This wonder was purchased from a salesman traveling by horse through Nova Scotia’s fields and forests. It may have been a gift from Bishop’s great-grandmother to her grandmother Elizabeth on the occasion of her marriage in 1871. Into its history of the world, at the center of it, the book bound the Bulmers themselves by providing pages to be filled in with the names of family members when they were born, married, and died. This information was duly recorded by different hands across the generations, but with missing pieces. Elizabeth’s birth was never recorded, nor the death dates of her parents. 

The Bible is a compendium, the book of many books, to which this Bible added more books annotating the scriptures and supporting pious study. As a concordance, dictionary, and encyclopedia, it identified historical persons, distant places, and all manner of things (jewels, food, tools) mentioned in the sacred text. It contained timelines, synopses, architectural plans, and a key for converting ancient Hebrew money to “the American standard.” As a field guide, the book described the flora and fauna of the Holy Land, with painstakingly realistic depictions of Syrian bears, the Chamois, Hoopoe, Turtle Dove, scorpion, Balm of Gilead, mandrakes, and other marvels. 

Floral borders and brilliant painted pages made it a modern, mass-produced Book of Hours. Even before she could read, a little girl might admire—and touch—the book’s delicately colored maps (pale pink, yellow, green, blue). There were epic full-page illustrations to linger over: the Miraculous Draught of the Fishes, Babylon Taken by Cyrus, the animals entering the Ark, Christ Blessing the Little Children, or grieving Hagar and her forlorn child alone in the wilderness. Grandfather’s Bible was Bishop’s first art gallery, museum of natural history, novel, and atlas, a cinema and a cabinet of curiosities. It declared by example that history and geography, art and information, the sacred and the everyday, were part of one story, and belonged in one book.

It is tempting to trace Bishop’s lifelong fascination with the materiality of books and other printed matter, including maps, to her childhood experience of this mighty object. The Bible must have encouraged her passion for images and piqued her interest in faraway lands and exotic peoples. It glowed in her grandparents’ parlor, like a hearth. But the book’s aura, the overwhelming charm it exerted on the little girl, was bound up with qualities that the writer she became would distrust and resent: its monumental scale, its claim to bind, define, and complete, and its sacred authority, with the power to command, to tell the reader what to believe and how to live. 

Bishop’s ambivalence about that Bible is apparent in the poem she wrote about it, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.” Seeing the book on her return to Great Village in 1946, after an absence of sixteen years, was the starting place for the poem. That homecoming and then a second summer visit in 1947 were nodal points in Bishop’s life. Looking backward and forward in time, these visits returned her to the charged world of her early childhood, reactivating powerful memories, while providing new perceptions and experiences to be worked into her prose and poetry over many years. 

The generative effect was instant and long-lasting. Bishop finished “At the Fishhouses” in the winter of 1947. “Over 2,000 Illustrations” was published in 1948, “A Summer’s Dream” and “Cape Breton” in 1949, and “The Prodigal,” a parable about making up her mind to return home to Nova Scotia, in 1951. “The Moose,” recalling the bus ride that Bishop took to Boston when she left Great Village in 1946, was completed in 1972, twenty-six years after that night journey through the great north woods.

Bishop spent most of her childhood in Massachusetts. May 1915 to October 1917—those are the dates of her one extended stay in Great Village. “This whole period in my life was brief—but important,” she told Anne Stevenson in 1964. During those years, beginning when she was four years old, Elizabeth saw her mother struggle with mental illness, then enter Nova Scotia Hospital in June 1916. “I never saw her again,” Bishop says matter-of-factly to Stevenson. At the same time, the child was learning to read, attending her first year of school, and gaining her first independent orientation in the world. In this period, and probably only in this period, she felt securely part of a family.

Bishop returned to Nova Scotia regularly as a teenager. The brevity and periodic nature of these visits made the place matter more, not less. Great Village was a traditional community, closer in character and tempo to the early nineteenth century than to the early twentieth. There was no plumbing in the Bulmers’ house; they made do with pitchers, basins, and a privy. Gammie churned her own butter. Carts were more common than cars. Evenings were spent with Burns and the Bible rather than the radio. 

In 1934, in her Vassar yearbook, Bishop listed “Great Village, Nova Scotia” as her home. This was a complex gesture. It pointedly erased her birthplace in Worcester, Massachusetts, as well as what had been her primary residence with her aunt and uncle in Revere and Cliftondale, Boston suburbs. It named Great Village as the place she came from, despite the fact she wasn’t born there, and had lived there only briefly. By 1934, her Bulmer grandparents were both dead. The family that had gathered in the parlor while Pa Bulmer read aloud no longer existed. Elizabeth had last visited in 1930 and it would be twelve more years before she returned.

Beginning in 1935, she traveled widely in Europe and North Africa. In retrospect, her itinerary became blurry and confusing to order and narrate. The problem is represented in the middle section of “Over 2,000 Illustrations,” where a collage of vignettes and images drawn from her travels (“at St. Johns,” “at St. Peter’s,” “In Mexico,” “at Volubilis,” “In Dingle Harbor,” “in the brothels of Marrakesh”) is assembled without obvious chronological or geographical logic, let alone a concordance. Her travels, as pictured in the poem, were a matter of accident and arbitrary juxtaposition: “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’”

Why did Bishop finally go “home” to Nova Scotia in 1946? She was struggling with asthma, heavy drinking, and depression. She spoke, a little wildly, of going to Brazil. She was selling the house in Key West she had bought with her lover Louise Crane in 1938, the one home she had owned up to this point. The sale was managed in her absence by Marjorie Stevens, with whom Bishop had been living after she and Crane broke up. Now her relationship with Stevens was fraying. Where was her home? It was an old question, urgent again. 

After a decade spent putting her manuscript of poems together and searching for a publisher, Bishop was about to publish her first book, North & South. This meant she would have a book to point to if anyone asked her what she had been doing with her life: she would return to Nova Scotia as a published author. But she was not at all sure the book would be a success; and by being far from New York she could avoid the moment it arrived in shop windows and was reviewed (although, as it happened, she was back in the city when the book appeared).

These were all factors in Bishop’s return to Nova Scotia. But she wouldn’t have made the trip without the encouragement of Dr. Ruth Foster, the psychoanalyst she began seeing in 1946. Their connection was immediate and easy. Foster had been born in Boston and educated in private schools: Bishop was familiar with the world she came from. A question must have presented itself to Bishop early on: Was Dr. Foster a woman like herself, who loved women? The three letters Bishop wrote to Foster during February 1947 are extraordinary for their self-exposure, intensity, and affection. They make it clear Bishop trusted Foster not to censure or “correct” her sexual orientation. Bishop was ready to explore deep secrets and conflicted feelings, and even finally to go “home.” 

But her journey to Great Village was not direct. She stopped in New Hampshire and stayed for a week. Recalling those days eight months later, she told Dr. Foster: “when I wasn’t at the hotel unconscious or trying to read detective stories, two or three times I took long bus rides in various directions—just to the end of the lines around Keene and back. I was more or less drunk all the time.” Aching hangovers and looping bus rides delayed the trip north. “I couldn’t seem to stop,” she said about her drinking. But she couldn’t go on either. 

In her solitude and drunkenness, she remained in a state of reverie, as if the journey were a continuation of the psychoanalysis it had interrupted. One drunken morning, dozing on a bus, Bishop “had a dream in which everything was wild & dark & stormy and”—she writes to Ruth—“you were in it feeding me from your breast.” The dream-figure of her analyst appeared to Bishop “much bigger than life size, or maybe I was just reduced to baby size, and it seemed to be very calm inside the raging storm.” Dr. Foster—a foster mother.

Bishop made her way to Nova Scotia eventually. She passed Great Village without stopping, continued east to Halifax, and took a room in the Nova Scotian, a grand hotel on the waterfront, which directly faced Nova Scotia Hospital across the harbor in Dartmouth. Gertrude Bishop lived inside its walls from 1916 until her death in 1934. Elizabeth had come to Halifax to learn about her mother. The Bishop family had made a point of never speaking of Gertrude to Elizabeth; probably the Bulmers did not say much more. What exactly was her diagnosis? What had her life in the asylum been like? Was there in her history any explanation for her daughter’s present difficulties? At thirty-five, Elizabeth was just the age Gertrude had been when she was hospitalized for her first breakdown. 

Bishop visited the Department of Health looking for her mother’s medical records—which were not there. She visited the hospital too. Or did she only study the structure from the street? A series of pages in her notebook, the first one headed “from Halifax,” contain drafts of a poem addressed to Dr. Foster. The first page is addressed to her mother in the hospital.

            I see you far away, unhappy,
                       small
            behind those horrible little green
                        grilles
            like an animal at Bronx Park

The “horrible little green/grilles” are three stories of ivy-covered porches on the south face of the hospital. Gertrude is “far away” because she is far in the past, where she lived inside that “horrible” cage, like a zoo animal. 

Bishop traveled from Halifax to the Atlantic coast. She took a room near Lockeport, two hundred miles from Great Village. She had dreamed of her analyst nursing her not with milk but “some rather bitter dark gray liquid.” The image returned as she looked at the ocean. She wrote in a notebook: “Description of the dark, icy, clear water—clear dark glass—slightly bitter (hard to define). My idea of knowledge. this cold stream, half drawn, half flowing from a great rocky breast.” This was the start of “At the Fishhouses.” 

She gave a draft copy of the poem to Foster. “The day I saw this poem,” she explained, “I was in Lockeport and I had been very unhappy and lonely the night before and got somewhat drunk.” She sat on the rocks at the shore, “cried for a while,” and watched a “big old seal.” Then “I bicycled out to the fish houses” and “started feeling very ex haltedly [sic] happy and knew it was something I’d remember and I immediately connected the appearaence [sic] of the water with my dream on the bus.” 

By August Bishop was ready to return to Great Village. She stayed with her aunt Grace. Grace had married a local man, William Bowers, a widower with six children. The couple had a daughter and two sons of their own, and lived in his parents’ house, a farm called Elmcroft. “It is always described as the most beautiful farm on the Bay of Fundy, and I think it must be,” Bishop wrote to Marianne Moore after her visit. 

Great Village is situated on a tidal river that feeds Cobequid Bay in the Minas Basin. The tides in this easternmost corner of the Bay of Fundy are the world’s highest. Twice a day the sea slips in and out across great tracts of glassy sand that reflect the sky. With land turning into water, and water into land, over and over in the course of a day, the bay is a scene of dramatic, perpetual change, of borders and boundaries constantly redrawn, and all this activity is framed by mild farmland and bristling, thick pine forests. “The soil,” Bishop told Moore, 

is all dark terra-cotta color, and the bay, when it’s in, on a bright day, is a real pink; then the fields are very pale lime greens and yellows and in the back of them the fir trees start, dark blue-green—it’s the richest, saddest, simplest landscape in the world. I hadn’t been there in so long I’d forgotten how beautiful it all is.

Bishop’s depth of feeling for the place was colored by her awareness of how long she had been away from it and how soon she would leave. With a flashlight and swinging lantern, the Bowers family and a collie came out to the road in the gathering dark to hail her bus. Grace had fed Elizabeth “a drink of rum” while they chatted in the kitchen, “& I think I took a sleeping pill.” On the bus, she began to dream of her aunt and Dr. Foster talking quietly together in a seat behind hers. Near dawn, “just as it was getting light,” Bishop was jolted awake when the bus stopped “for a big cow moose who was wandering down the road. She walked away very slowly into the woods,” studying the bus and its passengers before vanishing. 

It was on this visit that Bishop saw Grandfather’s Bible again. Grace had inherited the book from her parents. She inscribed her husband’s and their children’s names in it. One day her daughter would inherit it. The book archived generations. It carried the family forward, one household after another. Elizabeth, however, was not part of that succession. She had made no family of her own.

Bishop called her aunt “one of the best and nicest people I know” and “my favorite relative.” Grace was devoted to her niece and did not judge her. But her way of life was very different from Elizabeth’s and an implicit rebuke to it. Grace lived in the small town where she was born, firmly rooted in her home and family and supported by religion and custom in a routine organized around farm work, church-sponsored activities, and her children’s progress in life. She wasn’t prim or pious. Yet even her name, Grace, called to mind divine goodness and the demand for the believer to be grateful to God and faithful to the church’s teachings—which promoted temperance, disapproved of pleasures as mild as dancing, and judged homosexuality a sin meriting damnation.

Grandfather’s Bible embodied those teachings. “Over 2,000 Illustrations,” stimulated by Bishop’s reencounter with the sacred book, is an act of stock-taking, in which she evaluates her life in relation to the Bible and its claims on her. What have all these years spent far away from Great Village added up to? By the measure of the Bible, the answer is: very little. 

“Thus should have been our travels:/serious, engravable,” Bishop begins, pointing to the book’s illustrations. The life she is leading is frivolous and directionless. That critique of her way of life implies also a critique of her way of writing. That her writing would be dismissed as insufficiently “serious” was a persistent worry. She knew very well how good her poems were: she couldn’t have produced work of such power and originality without sufficient judgment to recognize the quality of it. But she also knew many readers would view her poetry as mere description, too little concerned with politics and history, and lacking in ideas. 

The contrast in Bishop’s mind was between her poetry of description and works of canonical authority (epics, histories, treatises), of which Grandfather’s Bible was for her the prototype. But the judgment could be turned back on the Bible. The title is a joke, suggesting that the big book is pretentious, self-important, a bully; and there is plenty of irony in “serious, engravable.” As she studies the illustrations, Bishop grows impatient, bored, even angry. “The Seven Wonders of the World” and “The Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher”—these clichés reduce the sacred to objects of touristic consumption. “Often the squatting Arab,/or group of Arabs, plotting, probably,/against our Christian Empire,” she says, ventriloquizing the prejudices of her family and their neighbors. 

It must be stressed that the book she is describing is not exactly the Bible Grandfather read from. It is based on that book, and her feelings have been aroused by seeing and holding the family treasure again, but the book in the poem is imaginary, a dream-object compounded of all the books in her grandparents’ house and the Christian literary and cultural traditions that they represented. The imagined book stands for an ideal of completeness and coherence that oppresses Bishop even as she recognizes its authority. Part of its power is epistemological: it is confident that everything is connected and meaningful in the light of Christian revelation. It enjoins the believer to live a serious life of good works, centered in the family and reproduced in the sacrament of holy matrimony. It claims authority to judge how Bishop is living and to condemn her for it.

Bishop resists that authority, as she makes her points about the book’s domineering self-confidence. But something strange occurs as she contemplates its pages. Her attention moves from the scenes represented to formal elements of page design: “circles set on stippled grey,” “a grim lunette,” “the toils of an initial letter”—the sort of decorative detail that might charm a child and stir her imagination. Then, no longer standing in a superior position, Bishop seems to fall into and through the book into flashing perceptions of the natural world:

            The eye drops, weighted, through the lines
            the burin made, the lines that move apart
            like ripples above sand,
            dispersing storms, God’s spreading fingerprint,
            and painfully, finally, that ignite 
            in watery prismatic white-and-blue.

This sublime passage enacts a fractal way of seeing as it leaps between parallel forms observed at vast and small scale. Under the pressure of the eye drawing close to the page, the lines made by the engraver’s burin begin to “move apart.” They are “like ripples above sand,” which are like “dispersing storms,” and both are like “God’s spreading fingerprint”—only the word “like” has fallen away, and the images run together until they “ignite.” 

The vertiginous play of scale in this sequence of images involves shifts of perspective of the kind that a magnifying glass produces in the hand of a reader raising and lowering it above a text. Bishop remembered using just such a glass, in childhood, to study Grandfather’s Bible. The memory is reported in the blurb she wrote for Robert Lowell’s Life Studies: 

As a child, I used to look at my grandfather’s Bible under a powerful reading-glass. The letters assembled beneath the lens were suddenly like a Lowell poem, as big as life and as alive, and rainbow-edged. It seemed to illuminate as it magnified; it could also be used as a burning-glass.

“Over 2,000 Illustrations” returns to this thrilling early experience of seeing. But Bishop’s eye needs no lens here. It is itself “a burning-glass,” setting Grandfather’s Bible on fire. When the page combusts “painfully” “in watery prismatic white-and-blue,” the past is present, the dead are alive, and the poet, we have to assume, is crying.

The Great Village Bishop knew as a child was a community centered in religious belief and practice. As Bishop explains in her story “The Baptism,” “the village was divided into two camps, armed with Bibles: Baptists and Presbyterians.” The Presbyterians had come first. These were Scots-Irish families who built their house of worship at the center of the village. When that church burned, they replaced it with another, Gothic Revival in style, with a bell tower rising 112 feet—which made it the tallest building for many miles around.

The Bulmer house stood catty-corner to the church. The spire loomed over the house, watching Elizabeth and her family through their northwest windows. The little girl liked to play hide-and-seek on the church grounds and swing on the slack chain fence around its lawn. “I was as familiar with it as I was with my grandmother,” Bishop remembered.  

Both sides of Bishop’s maternal grandparents were Baptists. The Bulmer family came from Yorkshire and settled in Nova Scotia. The Hutchinsons, Bishop’s grandmother’s line, also came from England. Pages from the Bible that had belonged to Mary Hutchinson, Bishop’s great-grandmother, recording the births of her children, were cut out of another family Bible and inserted in Grandfather’s. Sepia-toned carte-de-visite photos of Mary, a strong, round-faced woman, corseted in the 1880s, draped in heavy black a decade later with white lace cuffs and a prayer book in her hands, indicate her piety and her physical power. The roundness of her soft face reappears in the faces of her daughter Elizabeth Bulmer and great granddaughter Elizabeth Bishop: a physical, visual marker of the poet’s connection to her family’s Victorian past and Baptist faith.

Mary had three sons. George Wylie Hutchinson left Nova Scotia as a teenager and established a career in England as a portraitist, landscape painter, and the illustrator of popular books by Kipling, Stevenson, and others. The church had a part in the lives of the other two brothers. John Robert Hutchinson brought his young family with him on a Baptist mission to India. After five years he abandoned his wife and children for a scandalous romance with a young woman. William, the youngest, was notable in an upstanding way. He became a Baptist minister, educator, and eventually the president of the Baptist college near Great Village in Wolfville. 

The three Hutchinson brothers’ diverging life-courses unfolded from the same church where Elizabeth worshiped with her Bulmer grandparents. This church was smaller than the Presbyterian. Elizabeth spent Sunday afternoons there, listening to scripture and to sermons, kneeling alongside her family in prayer, and singing hymns. 

Uncle Arthur sang in the choir. As a child, he was renowned for having read the Old and New Testaments three times “straight through.” Yet Arthur was “wild,” there were rumors of a dalliance with “a widow”—and this despite “the round of family prayers morning and night, the childhood Bible-reading, choir practice, Sunday School…church itself, Friday night prayer meetings, and the annual revivals” at which he came forward and repented of his sins. 

Many years later he could still recite the temperance pledge which he had broken “heaven only knew how many times by then”—despite the fact that the nearest liquor for sale was fifteen miles from town, which, back and forth, meant most of a day on horseback. Bishop remembered the pledge, or perhaps composed her own exuberant version of it, in the 1960s:

            Trusting in help from heaven above
            We pledge ourselves to works of love,
            Resolving that we will not make
            Or sell or buy or give or take,
            Rum, Brandy, Whiskey, Cordials fine,
            Gin, Cider, Porter, Ale or Wine.
            Tobacco, too, we will not use
            And trust that we may always choose
            A place among the wise and good
            And speak and act as Christians should.

Great Village: it was a beautiful place, a gentle landscape of pink tidal flats and rolling farmland. It was also a place of poverty, material hardship, and unforgiving cold, where death came suddenly to the young as well as to the old. The people born there were honest and good. They were also zealots, missionaries, temperance crusaders, adulterers who fled their families, and drunken ne’er-do-wells. 

In “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop sings Baptist hymns to a seal who is “like me a believer in total immersion.” But that simply wasn’t true. Bishop was not a believer in “total immersion” or any other church doctrine. Elizabeth went to church with her grandparents in Great Village, but she didn’t join it, and she was never baptized. As a teenager, Bishop shocked her new friend Rhoda Sheehan who wrote to her mother from Walnut Hill School about this girl “who does not believe in Christ or the Supreme Power.” Elizabeth was “the only girl in the school who didn’t sign the pledge” of the Christian Association.

Bishop would always look at belief with some mixture of resentment, envy, longing, defensiveness, and pride in her own unbelief. In 1977, at a party, she turned to Richard Wilbur, and said, “‘Oh, dear, you do go to church don’t you? Are you a Christian?’” Wilbur replied that he was. She pushed him: “Do you believe all those things? You can’t believe all those things.” She noted, Wilbur recalled, “points of Christian doctrine that she thought it intolerable to believe. ‘No, no, no. You must be honest about this, Dick. You really don’t believe all that stuff. You’re just like me. Neither of us has any philosophy. It’s all description, no philosophy.’” Then, changing course, opining that a lack of belief had weakened her poetry, she lamented “that she didn’t have a philosophic adhesive to pull an individual poem and a group of poems together.” 

Clearly the argument at the center of “Over 2,000 Illustrations” was still going on in Bishop’s mind thirty years later. She remained angry about the church’s irrational, oppressive authority. Yet she had nothing to replace it with. She wrote to Lowell in 1950: “I wish I could go back to being a Baptist—not that I ever was one—but I believe now that complete agnosticism and straddling the fence on everything is my natural posture, although I wish it weren’t.” It is a wonderfully, characteristically twisty sentence. Bishop wishes she could go back to being what she never was. “Complete agnosticism”: the phrase suggests she was completely committed to believing nothing for sure. (She doesn’t say she is an atheist, which would have been simpler.) Yet she straddles the fence on this and every other question; and although straddling is her “natural posture,” she wishes—of course—that “it weren’t.” 

When “Over 2,000 Illustrations” was published in Partisan Review in June 1948, the editors placed it first in the issue, followed by a piece by Jean-Paul Sartre titled “Literature in Our Time.” Sartre’s essay assesses the situation of Western literature after the “cyclone” of the war during which the reality of absolute evil, which the West had stopped believing in, was reasserted by torture, mass destruction, and the Holocaust. “How can one make himself a man in, by, and for history?” Sartre asks. 

Philosophical discourse like Sartre’s is so remote from Bishop’s style, lacking in any pretention to a “philosophic adhesive” of its own, that the juxtaposition is a jolt. But as the Partisan Review’s editors seem to have sensed, “Over 2,000 Illustrations” is a self-consciously postwar poem confronting in its own idiom the desolate spiritual landscape Sartre describes. That the poem spoke to its historical moment is clear from the response of younger poets. At twenty-one, John Ashbery insisted that his friends read the poem; then, with no introduction, he wrote Bishop his first fan letter. The twenty-two-year-old James Merrill was so “bowled over” by the poem that he re-typed all seventy-four lines for a friend, then summoned his nerve to ask Bishop out to lunch.

Ashbery and Merrill were responding to how “Over 2,000 Illustrations” confronted the challenge facing them as poets and young gay men at the dawn of the Cold War: how to invent a morality and an aesthetic, a style of life and writing, when the sacred had been discredited by history, and traditional models of home, family, and community were no longer available or attractive. The poem pivots from the vertical authority of Grandfather’s Bible to the horizontal plane of “travel,” where everything is a matter of “relativity” and “perspectivism” (these are Sartre’s terms), and poetry becomes a practice of what Bishop called “geography.”     

In “Over 2,000 Illustrations,” Bishop’s seemingly haphazard travel notes begin with a memory of her first adventure on her own—a summer journey to Newfoundland with a Vassar classmate—when she heard “the touching bleat of goats” “leaping up the cliffs among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs.” That animal energy contrasts with the deathly quality of the Bible’s engravings. So do the images that follow: the sun shining “madly”; those glistening volcanoes; the jukebox playing “Ay, Jalisco!”; poppies splitting Roman mosaics; the “dripping plush” of “rotting hulks”; the giggling prostitutes, pleading for cigarettes. But the pace of her observations is restless and frantic, and because there is some dimension of decay, decadence, or dehumanization in the various images she holds up, the emphasis teeters between vitality and morbidity. 

When the first person singular emerges for the first time, and Bishop says, “It was somewhere near there”—in Morocco—“I saw what frightened me most of all,” we realize that everything she has noted so far has frightened her, and probably should frighten us. The most frightening thing is “A holy grave, not looking particularly holy,” “open to every wind from the pink desert.” Bishop elaborates:

            An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid
            with exhortation, yellowed 
            as scattered cattle teeth;
            half-filled with dust, not even the dust
            of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there.

The carved “exhortation” of this trough images the end of sacred injunctions and demands, the end of prophecy and religious authority. The scene could be in The Waste Land, but it would be accompanied there by a note indicating a source that would lead us into a network of literary allusion, an alternative system of cultural authority. Here there is only wind and dust. 

“In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused,” Bishop notes, winding up this anecdote. Watching her guide watch her, she assumes a “smart,” self-conscious pose of her own, acknowledging her compromised position as a Western tourist. She sees and accepts that she is an object of resentment and amusement to this man who is paid to take people like her to that empty grave every day and he does well enough by this work to dress smartly, never mind a little wind and dust.

But worldliness is no consolation for the emptiness Bishop has discovered. She turns back to the Bible at the end of the poem as if it might be possible really to go home again and start over. Following the steps of an improvised spiritual exercise in which the activity is merely seeing, rather than prayer, she gives herself instructions: “Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges/of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)/Open the heavy book.” That gilt rubbing off the book and pollinating her fingers—it’s a beautiful image. The homophone implies that to touch the book is to become guilty. Yes, to be born into a Baptist family can be punishing. Even living as Bishop does outside the family and the church, unbelieving, it is possible to feel guilt; in fact, living this way, it is very hard not to feel guilt. But pollination is generative, and the way the heavy book stains her skin is tender and magical, an anointing, giving her golden fingertips. By implication, she will pass that bit of glitter on to whatever she touches—or writes about—next. 

What Bishop sees when she opens the book is hard to define. As Ashbery remarked in 1969, the conclusion of “Over 2,000 Illustrations” is “undescribable and a continuing joy, and one returns to it again and again, ravished but unsatisfied.” “Ravished but unsatisfied”: reading the poem over and over seems to have produced in Ashbery the same experience of seeing that it describes. In 1997, he read “Over 2,000 Illustrations” as his contribution to a group reading of poems in New York City. When he reached the last stanza, Ashbery, not normally a sentimental man, in public anyway, began to cry. 

                                    Why couldn’t we have seen
            this old Nativity while we were at it?
            —the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
            an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, 
            colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
            and, lulled within, a family with pets,
            —and looked and looked our infant sight away.

The phrase “this old Nativity” suggests not just that this is a picture of the Nativity in an old Bible, but that the idea of the Nativity is old, part of a cultural and personal past that is now outdated and obsolete, no longer to be believed in. 

But that idea is no sooner suggested than modified. Bishop herself was present “at this Nativity,” she says. She was once in the presence of the heavy book with a family of believers surrounding her, but she could not properly see or appreciate it at the time. The phrase “infant sight” suggests a seeing prior to speech. That immediacy is lost now, but not the longing for it.

The figures Bishop is looking at in her poem are not the Holy Family, but the first family she knew in Great Village, the one that assembled in the parlor when Grandfather read aloud from the Bible, and Betsy curled up on Gertrude’s feet like a blanket, the little dog’s smell slowly filling the room. Looking at the book, Bishop looks back at that scene—which had been revived for her by her visit to Grace’s Elmcroft and its “family with pets.” Such a scene, illuminated by the steady, “undisturbed, unbreathing flame” of a candle in an engraving, can be seen only from outside it, the door of the dark “ajar” but not fully open.

Significantly, this “old Nativity” is an imaginary work of art: there is no comparable illustration in Grandfather’s Bible. The only image of the Holy Family in it represents Joseph, Mary, and the Baby Jesus attended by a lamb. Bishop has invented her epiphanic depiction of a miraculous birth. But there should be nothing surprising about that. Her poem is a rival to the heavy book—smaller, improvised, personal, secular—a critique of the sacred text and an alternative to it.