Poem of the Week 2024/47

Dead

The Winter is her lover now,

    A brilliant one and bold;

And she has gone away from me,

    Estranged and white and cold.

He painted all the hills for her

    And laughed the skies blue-warm;

He rattled down the pears and plums

    And crashed a happy storm.

Then southward-swinging lines of birds,

    And chilly rains he sent,

And sharpness in the air to prove

    His serious intent.

And now at last her heart is won.

    She's gone – where did she pass?

For Winter holds his breath and see –

    This frost upon the grass.

– Elizabeth Bishop

This early (1930) poem by Bishop has the feeling of a classic English lyric – the ballad meter (4/3/4/3 beats in a quatrain, with regular rhymes on the second & fourth lines), the vivid evocation of a seasonal change, with metaphorical implications, the attention-catching details – yet it also has something modern & ambiguous about it.

Who is the she being described? On the most basic level, it's another human being, a friend or former lover of the poet. But you could also read it in a larger sense as the Earth (usually characterized as a woman; in many mythologies, the earth, the source of life, is a woman & the sun, which helps bring forth life in the warmer seasons, is a male) conquered by Winter. You could see the poem as describing the death of this woman, or perhaps as the death of her relationship with the narrator. The title Dead perhaps tips the scale too much, but what is dead could refer to a romance as well as to a once-living person.

The characterization of Winter, usually portrayed as an icy old man nearing his end, is unusual. Winter is quite a dashing figure here, dashing in both the sense of extremely, energetically active & also stylish & attractive. He is brilliant & bold, adjectives usually associated with sunnier times, but they make perfect sense in this poem's presentation. In the second stanza, like an artist he paints the hills (& leaves & grass do change color as Winter approaches; Bishop was always an accurate observer of the natural world) & it is his laughter, a distinctive way of describing Winter, that turns the skies blue-warm during second summer, the brief period of warm weather that usually occurs sometime in the Fall. He energetically rattles down the pears & plums, & though they're falling, the reference to them is a reminder of harvest-time abundance. Also, plums are a summer fruit, & pears ripen in autumn, so again the transition of seasons is underlined through precise observation of Nature. Then in the third stanza, Winter's energy turns a bit darker, a bit more threatening: he sends the birds migrating south, there is increasing sharpness in the air. There are chilly rains; storms, like the theatrically crashing one in the previous stanza, tend to be of shorter duration than rain, which can last steadily for days.

In the first stanza, the declaration that Winter is her lover now strongly (though maybe not definitively) suggests that the woman is a former lover of the poet's; estranged in the final line suggests (again, not definitely) that what is being described is the end of a romance instead of a life. It would be an unusual word to describe someone's physical death, but a standard one to describe a spouse or lover who had moved out or moved on. She has gone away from me could refer metaphorically to death, or to her departure from the narrator's life.

The final stanza both both summarizes & suggests. Bishop continues the metaphor of Winter as a successful wooer of the woman – at last, her heart is won; all the colors & falling fruit & increasingly serious signs of Winter have succeeded. She is gone. And where did she pass? Pass can mean to go in a certain direction or to leave behind; it is also a common euphemism for death. But the poem's question is not when, why, or how but where did she pass – where did the final act, whether it was moving on or dying, take place? It's an interesting emphasis that suggests the importance of place, & encourages a reader to think of the departed She as maybe not a single individual but, as I suggested earlier, the Earth itself, or as a sort of Persephone abducted to the Underworld, bereaving us of flowers & greenery. Whether an individual or more generally the Natural world, the phrase could also mean where did she pass to, suggesting our never-ending curiosity about & ignorance of what happens to our spirits when physical death strikes us (or, in the case of the Earth, where are the snows of yesteryear?). It's a resonant question.

Even the Winter, the successful wooer, is holding his breath to see what happens. Throughout the poem there has been a conflation of death & love; Winter, usually a time of endings, is here presented as a vigorous, appealing new suitor. The narrator's sadness is presented in a few lines, but the bulk of the poem is a quite appealing picture of an oncoming end: laughter, blue skies, fruit falling. Whether it is the end of a season, or a love affair, or a life that is being presented here, the process is shown as enticing, as seductive, though it ends in some form of death. The final line is powerfully evocative & mysterious. We are left with that sign of Winter, frost upon the grass. Does this represent where she "passed"? The growth (eternal renewal of Nature!) on her gravesite? Is the frost on the grass a sign of what happened to the Earth? A sort of Whitmanesque invocation of the power of even small manifestations of life force as a leaf of grass to move us beyond an individual passing? It is, appropriately for a poem titled Dead, a haunting ending.

I took this poem from Poems, Prose, and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Robert Giroux & Lloyd Schwartz for the Library of America.