Fiametta
Fiametta walks under the quincebuds
In a gown the color of flowers;
Her small breasts shine through the silken stuff
Like raindrops after showers.
The green hem of her dress is silk, but duller
Than her eye’s green color.
Her shadow restores the grass’s green
Where the sun had gilded it;
The air has given her copper hair
The sanguine that was requisite.
Whatever her flaws, my lady
Has no fault in her young body.
She leans with her long slender arms
To pull down morning upon her
Fragrance of quince, white light and falling cloud.
The day shall have lacked due honor
Until I shall have rightly praised
Her standing thus with slight arms upraised.
John Peale Bishop (1892–1944) has achieved considerable recognition as a Southern novelist (see, for example, Leslie A Fiedler’s appreciation). But, on the whole, he seems to have fallen into unredeemed neglect as a poet. I should admit to having read only a few poems by this “other” Bishop – the older, formally inclined male poet, that is, and not the rightly loved and revered Elizabeth. Those few I have recently discovered, mostly online, I’ve found persuasive. If John Peale Bishop is a minor artist, perhaps he’s minor in the way of some of the English Elizabethans, whose power falls short of a Shakespeare or a Sidney, but without whose sonnets and songs our poetry anthologies would be much the poorer.
La Fiammetta (little flame) is a character in a novel by Boccaccio and the subject of a painting and accompanying sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But this Fiametta – with only one “m” – is Bishop’s own. By appropriating the name, he seems to be tactfully concealing a real person while evoking a genre. The woman referred to as “my lady” could be posed photographically in a modern, private, domestic pastoral. It’s tempting to infer a homage to Bishop’s wife, and date it to the period he spent with her in France, but that would be speculation. The tone and energy of the writing, as it evolves towards the courtly largesse of its final compliment, certainly suggest a more than aesthetic impulse.
There’s a fine, fluent music to its three stanzas. They hover around the metrical path they’ve been almost secretly set on – iambic tetrameter, sometimes interspersed with trimeter – like expertly sprung vehicles. The rhyme scheme hints at the sestet of an Italian sonnet, a more skimpily rhymed variant (abcbdd) that draws the looser threads together in a final couplet.
The poem’s melody is partly that of sonic texture. In the first stanza, the density of “quincebuds” (a well-judged compound) and “silken stuffs” contrasts with the broken transparency of the word “raindrops”. These words are images, too, of course, differently lit or light-resistant. Fiametta’s nipples are suggested but tactfully avoided by the “raindrops” simile and the knowing proximity of the quincebuds. Bishop plays with ideas of the seen and the unseen, the said and the unsayable. The rhymes are spare and glancing and the final couplet is delightfully unexpected in the first stanza. “Duller” and “color” (American spelling has been retained) don’t look as if they should rhyme, but in most pronunciations they do, and become a newfound pair of rhyming opposites, lively additions to the exhausted stock of death/breath, womb/tomb, night/light, et al. The repetition of color, first heard in the second line, is perfectly judged, too, and adds to the impression of simplicity and clarity.
The play of antithesis becomes more complex and perhaps less purely aesthetic. A poet’s muse might traditionally be expected to brighten rather than darken the scene, but here she is praised for casting a shadow that “restores” the grass to its natural colour, as if the sun’s “gilding” were artificial. Perhaps this movement is aesthetically driven: the grass looks better when it’s green, matching Fiametta’s dress and eyes. But there’s something else going on, which is at the core of the poem’s originality: a statuesque image, and the conventional mannerism of a genre, are mobile, naturalistic, and perhaps ultimately a little hazardous. In the lines, “The air has given her copper hair / The sanguine that was requisite,” the internal rhyme is a miniature discord that reminds us of the action of a gust of wind. Outdoors, lighting is never static: what’s more, there are hints of pleasurable danger in this idea of a “sanguine” colour, the necessary infiltration of blood. The symbolism of the red gleam enhances aesthetic satisfaction. The “flaws” alluded to in the couplet emphasise the turn taken, and sustain that note of query into mere aesthetics. Obviously, the woman’s “flaws” are deemed moral and not physical. The speaker may be implicated by consenting to overlook them.
The nocturnal visitor remembered in Thomas Wyatt’s They flee from me haunts the final stanza’s dominant image: “She leans with her long slender arms / To pull down morning upon her.” There’s no comma (apparently) after “her”, so the sentence continues “her / Fragrance of quince, white light and falling cloud”. If this punctuation is correct, the fullness of the morning is not only transformed by the woman’s presence but identified with it. The sensuous loading, almost an overload, and the movement of the “pulling down” suggest an embrace. So the red and green of the “flame” disappear into whiteness, transcendental, perhaps, but with enough natural life to it to evoke a real morning. The cloud doesn’t seem to be falling away from the scene, but falling into it, like willing flesh, bringing conclusion and perhaps also erasure. After that, the conventionally showy compliment seems a justified and almost euphemistic retreat: “The day shall have lacked due honor / Until I shall have rightly praised / Her standing thus with slight arms upraised.” What else is left for a gentlemanly lover to say?
