Proustian closure in Wallace Steven's "The Rock" and Elizabeth Bishop's "Geography III."

20 Benjamin concludes that:

This is why Proust finally turned his days into nights, devoting all his hours to undisturbed work in his darkened room with artificial illumination, so that none of those intricate arabesques might escape him.

(Illuminations 202)

21 The closing, structural reiteration in "Five Flights Up" of patterns familiar from "One Art" encourage speculation into Bishop's willingness to eschew closure (either in the form of the aesthetic, though resigned, affirmation of "One Art" or the Shelleyan playfulness of "The End of March") in favor of the poignancy of aesthetic - and social - failure. Counterpoised against the assured Keatsian trajectory of Stevens's "downward to darkness," Bishop's "Five Flights Up" would seem to lead but to oblivion. Either "One Art" or "The End of March" would have provided closure in the form of acquiescence. Bishop's willingness to resist closure through the agency of "Five Flights Up" revitalizes Geography III with the nervous energy and uncertainty of a master.

22 See my book on Bishop about the kindred tonal modulation in Bishop, esp. ch. 6, "Crusoe at Home."

23 Emerson's journal entry of spring 1864 anticipates the poetry and correspondence of his kindred "discontented pendulums," Stevens and Bishop:

Old age brings along with its uglinesses the comfort that you will soon be out of it - which ought to be a substantial relief to such discontented pendulums as we are. To be out of the war, out of debt, out of the drouth, out of the blues, out of the dentist's hands, out of the second thoughts, mortifications & remorses that inflict such twinges and shooting pains - out of the next winter, & the high prices, & company below your ambition - surely these are soothing hints. And, harbinger of this, what an alleviator is sleep, which muzzles all these dogs for me every day! Old Age. 'Tis proposed to call an indignation meeting. (516-17)

24 Nowhere is Bishop more forthright in this distrust than in her Mar. 21, 1972, letter to Robert Lowell regarding the "mixture of fact & fiction" in The Dolphin. She concludes with a judgment beyond the reach of the particulars: "One can use one's life as material - one does, anyway - but these letters - aren't you violating a trust? IF YOU were given permission - IF you hadn't changed them . . . etc. But art just isn't worth that much" (One Art 561-64). For Bishop, a poet who calls into question art's ultimate worth would surely resist celebratory closures to her career.

25 In comparing Bishop's "Quai d'Orleans" to Stevens's expression of poetic dominance and authority in "The Idea of Order at Key West," Brogan notes that "Bishop sees a space in which is configured not instances of creative domination but rather instances of modest disappearing, even extinction" (182). This subversive extinction can be liberating (Brogan argues that it liberates the poem's readers from the binary opposition of gender) in its negation of structure as well as its refusal of the responsibilities and consequences of assumed authority.