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Mar. 14th, 2015 10:51 amFrom Bishop's diaries, I assume sometime between 1935 and '38:
The window this evening was covered with hundreds of long, shining drops of rain, laid on the glass which was covered with steam on the inside. I tried to look out, but could not. Instead I realized that I could look into the drops, like so many crystal balls. Each bore traces of a relative or friend: several weeping faces slid away from mine; water plants and fish floated within other drops; watery jewels, leaves and insects magnified, and strangest of all, horrible enough to make me step quickly away, was one large drop containing a lonely, magnificent human eye, wrapped in its own tear.
A much better fit for Ashbery's "Wet Casements" than the bit from very early Kafka he brings in as epigraph. Seems unlikely he'd have read her youthful diary by its writing c. 1975, but he of course knew the poems partly quarried from this well - "The Weed," "Sestina," and "The End of March" which I think had been in The New Yorker by then. But none are quite as close as this passage. Go figure.
Her optical stuff has been making me think I should reread "Self-Portrait," too, though it's not really time to go off-course.
The window this evening was covered with hundreds of long, shining drops of rain, laid on the glass which was covered with steam on the inside. I tried to look out, but could not. Instead I realized that I could look into the drops, like so many crystal balls. Each bore traces of a relative or friend: several weeping faces slid away from mine; water plants and fish floated within other drops; watery jewels, leaves and insects magnified, and strangest of all, horrible enough to make me step quickly away, was one large drop containing a lonely, magnificent human eye, wrapped in its own tear.
A much better fit for Ashbery's "Wet Casements" than the bit from very early Kafka he brings in as epigraph. Seems unlikely he'd have read her youthful diary by its writing c. 1975, but he of course knew the poems partly quarried from this well - "The Weed," "Sestina," and "The End of March" which I think had been in The New Yorker by then. But none are quite as close as this passage. Go figure.
Her optical stuff has been making me think I should reread "Self-Portrait," too, though it's not really time to go off-course.
