Document View

Graves discusses not only John Peale Bishop's poem "A Recollection" itself, but also the hidden acrostic in the first letters of each line. The acrostic dominates the poem's tone and meaning, and seems to be the key to unlocking much other author-manipulated subtextual humor.

Famously she descended, her red hair

Unbound and bronzed by sea-reflections, caught

Crinkled with sea-pearls. The fine slender taut

Knees that let down her feet upon the air,

Young breasts, slim flanks and golden quarries were

Odder than when the young distraught

Unknown Venetian, painting her portrait, thought

He'd not imagined what he painted there.

And I too commerced with that golden cloud:

Lipped her delicious hands and had my ease

Faring fantastically, perversely proud.

All loveliness demands our courtesies.

Since she was dead I praised her as I could

Silently, among the Barberini bees.*

-John Peale Bishop

John Peale Bishop's "A Recollection" (1934)-a Petrarchan sonnet describing a red-haired woman in an unnamed painting-is accessible at first reading but piques mild puzzlement with its main allusion. The poem's publication history, including appearances in three successive volumes of Bishop's verse, helps explain why the text may be something of a riddle. It was first published in Minute Particulars (1936), one of what Allen Tate calls Bishop's "two most important books," then in Selected Poems (Scribners, 1941), a printing that Bishop himself supervised, and-most recently-in The Collected Poems,1 edited "with a preface and a personal memoir" by Tate. For some reason in Collected Poems, the poem's expository epigraph, "A response to Titian's Danae," is missing. That line clarifies Bishop's reference to a canvas by an "Unknown Venetian."

According to a myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses transmitted by Boccaccio, Danae was a King's daughter who was "seduced by Jupiter in the form of a shower of gold while she was held prisoner in the bronze tower."2 The sensual, naturalistic painting to which Bishop's sonnet refers surprises anyone who expects, as I first did, a lofty aerial scene showing a goddess descending. Titian's canvas (1545-46) depicts a voluptuous, full-figured female lying on an alcoved bed. Unclothed except for a gauzy drape over one protectively positioned thigh, she gazes up dreamily at a vague "shower" of what may be gold coins just overhead, while an armed-and-winged Cupid stands opposite, also staring up in surprise.

Given this scene, we deduce that Bishop's title refers to Danae's own "recollection" of her "descent" as a younger, slimmer goddess-that is, that it refers to the same "original" incident that the octave delineates. Thus, the sonnet re-creates its own view rather than describing Titian's. (The title is a pun because the gold "coins" in themselves form their own kind of "collection.") Unless Bishop means to imply that Titian did an earlier painting of his nowample subject when she was still "slender" (CP, line 3) or "slim" (5) and the painter was younger and "Unknown" (7), the poem is untrustworthy as history, for Titian (1490-1576) was in his mid-fifties, not "young," when he painted Danae.

A more tendentious and startling key to meaning in the poem-in particular to its tone-emerges from the left-hand perimeter of the text itself, where an emphatic acrostic seizes any scanning eye. Because the gods themselves did not magically inscribe such a ribald directive, a reader has to take Bishop's letter-string as an authorized and calculated part of the poem's studied formalism. It's an open question whether the vertical message targets Danae herself-indeed she might be viewed callously as "half-ass," given her posture-or aims at some coterie reader or group, or just at anyone who might happen to detect the author's crude defamation.

Although some readers may want to dismiss Bishop's left-handed clue as sheer bawdry, altogether too lowdown to merit sober attention, such a reaction is untenable, given the poet's respectable literary pedigree and the diverse implications his coterie codeline has for clarifying not only this single text but also the oeuvre it springs from.

The aristocratic photograph of Bishop by Carl Van Vechten (1942) that prefaces The Collected Poems epitomizes the poet's professional stature and ostensible demeanor: a patrician sobriety tinged somewhat with what Allen Tate calls "dandyism" (xv). As Tate's memoir recounts, Bishop (1892-1944) was a privileged Virginian and Princeton graduate who "published four volumes of poetry over twenty-four years" (ix), contributing verses to such topdrawer journals as Poetry, The Nation, and The New Yorker. Bishop edited Vanity Fair and, not long before his death, received an appointment by Librarian of Congress "Archie" MacLeish (as Tate calls him) to the post of Resident Fellow in Comparative Literature in the library. Along with Tate and MacLeish, Bishop's friends and colleagues included Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Ernest Hemingway. Bishop was himself a nominal figure in the Paris literary scene of the late 1920s (v, xiii-xvi). Tate speaks of the "noble diction of his verse" and notes with mixed feeling that Bishop never moved toward such "colloquial language" as was fashionable in modern poetry (xiii). The sonnet text at hand both confirms and questions Tate's evaluations.

In truth, the impact of Bishop's 14-letter directive on the verses is absolute, instantly transforming a late Romantic lyric-seemingly handed down directly from Petrarch by way of Keats, the pre-Raphaelites, and Yeats-into a zebra of another stripe. Superficially studied, the text shows careful iambics slightly roughened, in the modern mode, though the tetrameter intrusion at line 6 is, to use Bishop's word in that line, "Odder." The diction is lushly descriptive and subtly sensuous. Bishop's octave describes the "descending" female in her "recollected" younger beauty and dramatizes ambiguously her connection with the painter who "thought / He'd not imagined what he painted there" (CP, lines 7-8); the sestet of the poem turns inward, somewhat conventionally, to treat with restrained sexual innuendo the other "commerce" that the poet/persona says he initiated with the same "golden cloud" Titian's provocative beauty muses on: "I [. . .] / [. . .] had my ease / Faring fantastically, perversely proud" (9-11). Here, alliterative patterns and wrenched accents that echo Anglo-Saxon verse momentarily obscure, hemiola-like, the motion of the underlying meter. Finally, the closing tercet forges an aegis of general truth embossed with wistful mutability-"All loveliness demands our courtesies" (12)-before two verses worthy of Milton effect a quiet close. ("Barberini" seems to be an incidental private allusion, perhaps just an Italian place name to give the poem color. Bishop lived abroad off and on after 1922.) Overall, large and serious themes stud the poem's pretty facade: Mutability, life and art, the ineffable nature of beauty, and the variability of human reaction to it.

"[D]escended" ( I ) becomes an initial, gamy clue, foreshadowing the poem's downward "descent" in several senses. Indeed, the full line-pun encoded in the poem's opening verse can now be heard: "Famous lies, hid, ascended (hid a scent, Ed[itor?]), heard here" and/or "Famously, sh*t ascended, harder" (code: FAMOUS LYS HED ESCEND ED HERRED HAIR). The title, decoded as another coterie pun, similarly issues its own hidden directives: "Arise, Holy Satan," "Hairy collie see, shun," "Arsehole leak shun," "Our easy election," and/or "Erase old leg shown" (code: AREC OL LE C TION). The last bit of advice could have in mind the sprawling "old leg" that is prominent in the foreground of Titian's canvas. The painter's inability to "imagine what he painted" also gains grotesque new meaning, and Bishop's soberly asserted theme, "All loveliness demands our courtesies," reeks with new irony. Such pertinent puns as "all love (all low, allow) lines demon'd[,] sour courtesies" (encoded in 12) struggle to assert themselves, even as Bishop's "Silent" praise, offered "as I could"-perhaps "icicled" or "assy, cold"demands thoroughgoing reassessment. Other puns lurking include, "I praised her ass, aye cold" (13), "Silent layman got help harboring abbess," and/or "Silent leman [ME sweetheart], God help her-bare aye in abyss (help her bear 'runy' [rainy] B.S.)" (14).

If the "hid, ascended" acrostic code, SSA FLA HUOY KCUF, also has meaning-as the subtext of line 1 suggests it may-perhaps the upward capital-letter-string encodes "Safely you wake U[P]," "Safely, you awake, see, you f-," "Asses, a flock see you of [. . .]," "Assay flocks of [. . .] [Barberini bees, maybe?]," "Safely you work Queue F," and/or "Softly hiccough." Indisputably, then, Bishop's insistent acrostic letter-string dominates tone and meaning; it also seems to be the key to unlocking much other authormanipulated subtextual humor. Taking the poem at face value we read it naively, victimized by a deadpan wit not at all apparent in those poetic elements we conventionally examine. But the poem nonetheless winks, in lively fashion, through the wisecracks of crafty acrostics and contrived puns. We can only guess what discovering this acrostic does to modify meaning in Bishop's other poems: Just one such lead, whether representative or an aberrant red herring, can set players off on many endless chases.

Given Bishop's interactions with major writers of such "schools" of poets as the imagists, vorticists, and (putatively) the Algonquin Round Table,3 another implication of the findings here in "A Recollection" is that, in the stadium of Modern Poetry, the coterie game Bishop is playing surely had someone in the bleachers and probably didn't confine itself to the narrow playing field of the poet's own verses. Bishop's descending line-"re-collected" into something discrete and overt from its hiding place among fourteen disparate but adjacent verses-encourages us to look harder at other "serious" pieces by his near contemporaries.