(no subject)
Damn. Nice catch by Bromwich:
In a brief note, Bishop traces the title to a newspaper misprint for "mammoth," but the reason for its appeal to her is plain when one remembers the man-moth of Shelley's Epipsychidion:
Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth
I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,
And towards the loadstar of my one desire,
I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight
Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light,
When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere
A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,
[leaves out the last line for some reason:]
As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.
Surely I noticed that at some point? But wouldn't I have remembered? Perception and memory, sieves both.
Owlet light...so twilight? If an owl's light is night, a baby owl's is baby night? Didn't remember and/or notice that either.
She spoke in deep past tense of her Shelley/socialist period, apparently mid to late teens as was customary at the time, so this may have been involuntary. Though she was just c. 24 when she wrote the poem, and a couple years later published two Kafkan prose fables that pretty frankly face near-complete poetic indebtedness, In Prison and The Sea and Its Shore. And she tends to give the other Romantics a shout out where it's relevant. But of course with them she didn't have a period.
Her lower keyed urbanity and Chekhovian mosaicizing make her work look much quieter than Shelley's, but she's basically about totalizing hopes and total disappointments just like he is. Shelley you don't transcend with age, you bury. And Bishop never actually repudiated him, unlike Eliot and some others have. He became part of her bedrock. As probably did socialism.
In a brief note, Bishop traces the title to a newspaper misprint for "mammoth," but the reason for its appeal to her is plain when one remembers the man-moth of Shelley's Epipsychidion:
Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth
I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,
And towards the loadstar of my one desire,
I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight
Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light,
When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere
A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,
[leaves out the last line for some reason:]
As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.
Surely I noticed that at some point? But wouldn't I have remembered? Perception and memory, sieves both.
Owlet light...so twilight? If an owl's light is night, a baby owl's is baby night? Didn't remember and/or notice that either.
She spoke in deep past tense of her Shelley/socialist period, apparently mid to late teens as was customary at the time, so this may have been involuntary. Though she was just c. 24 when she wrote the poem, and a couple years later published two Kafkan prose fables that pretty frankly face near-complete poetic indebtedness, In Prison and The Sea and Its Shore. And she tends to give the other Romantics a shout out where it's relevant. But of course with them she didn't have a period.
Her lower keyed urbanity and Chekhovian mosaicizing make her work look much quieter than Shelley's, but she's basically about totalizing hopes and total disappointments just like he is. Shelley you don't transcend with age, you bury. And Bishop never actually repudiated him, unlike Eliot and some others have. He became part of her bedrock. As probably did socialism.