Poem of the week: Fiametta by John Peale Bishop

There is real music to this understated tribute to a young woman�s beauty by a poet
who has been unjustly neglected

Carol Rumens

Mon 19 Feb 2018 10.29 GMT Last modified on Mon 19 Feb 2018 10.30 GMT
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�She leans with her long slender arms / To pull down morning upon her�.
�She leans with her long slender arms / To pull down morning upon her�.
Photograph: Marc Ma/Getty
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.

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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.

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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?