Questions of Travel.

I never heard of Elizabeth Bishop until this morning, when I listened to Andrew Motion's brilliant essay on her poem 'Questions of Travel' in his series The Path and The Poem. I wanted to paste it up here because it's the best poem about Brazil I've yet read. It captures absolutely the simultaneously enchanting and frustrating irregularities of the lifestyle (e.g. the discordant clogs) and the country's mind-bending natural beauty (the cloud-swaddled mountains and waterfalls remind me of approaching Ilha Grande by boat, during an afternoon storm, and the precise duration of a summer deluge is spot on; we are just now entering the season when you can almost set your watch by them). I also like her open, unanswered questions about why we succumb to the longing for other places (the programme reveals that the poet lived a determinedly itinerant life), and whether travel constitutes an a priori virtue or a form of escape. I also relished Motion's point about the poem espousing a view of the imagination as a positive force which requires mediation or correspondence with lived experience, with the mundane matter of existence; seen in the right way, i.e. with the eyes of the imagination, the mute phenomena are revealed as a wellspring of wonder and, as Motion puts it, 'a proof of life'. This reminds me of Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford' and another wonderful poem, whose title I can't remember now (how I miss my books, entombed in a shed near Ipswich!), which somehow manages to find a harmony between his dream of 'a bue Cycladic dawn' and the soap suds in his Portrush sink. I also think that the likening of fireflies to bubbles in champagne, from another poem by Bishop, is incredibly exciting. Anyway, here's the poem with, below it, a link to Motion's radio essay (which will be taken down in six days and which does a much better job of describing the poem).

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over

a grease-stained filling-station floor.

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

--A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

--Never to have studied history in

the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.

--And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politicians' speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"

Andrew Motion Essay from The Path and the Poem

http://bbc.in/c5kSIR