I grew up in the 1940s and my father ran a construction
company in Worcester.
When I was eleven and twelve I played Peewee hockey at Webster Square Arena,
just down the street from where the original Bishop house stood. One team
sponsor, and one of my father’s competitors, was the contractor J.W. Bishop, so
the Bishop name was familiar early on if still unconnected in my
eleven-year-old self to the poet.
When I started teaching at Wachusett
Regional High
School outside Worcester,
I always included two Bishop poems in my sophomore honors syllabus: “The Fish”
and “In the Waiting Room.” I would ask each sophomore to memorize at least one
poem.
Jill Lepore, now a history professor at Harvard, told me she still can
recite
Stanley Kunitz’s “The Layers.” And I remember how Mathew McCabe quivered
when he flawlessly recited
Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” at fifteen. One student,
whose name I cannot recall, chose “The Fish.” The “brown skin in strips/like
ancient wallpaper” and “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” have been indelibly embedded
in my memory since that moment.
I have worn eyeglasses since I was five. To have my eyes
tested my mother would drive me to Worcester to
Dr. Whitney’s office in the Slater
Building on Main Street. Of
course there were National Geographics in the waiting room. After my first
reading of “In the Waiting Room” I have always associated my five-year-old self
with seven-year-old Elizabeth
waiting for her Aunt Consuelo. I can still hear the clicks the lenses made in
the wooden box as Dr. Whitney raised and lowered his arm asking “Is this better
or worse?” And I remember the cold slushy streets leading to the Slater Building
past J.C. Freeman the optician on the corner, Ware Pratt the clothing store,
and Barnard, Summer, and Putnam across the street.
I went on to earn graduate degrees in American Literature and
taught English for forty years, but I have always prized those early
connections to Bishop on the ice at the Webster Square Arena and at the eye
doctor’s in Worcester
in 1946. When my wife and I spent a week at the Great
Village house in April 2014, I felt a
unique intimacy with her from my Worcester
childhood.
Thomas R. Moore
Belfast,
Maine
November 5, 2015
**********
After Tom’s visit to the Elizabeth Bishop House, he wrote
the poem below, which was published in The
Dalhousie Review, Autumn 2014 issue.
GREAT VILLAGE HOUSE
The house was oxen-rolled downtown
before its present fame, before Miss Bishop
led Nelly past the brook. Tin-roofed,
it sits on the corner across from
the village church. Starlings knock
the cornice trim askew. A crow hops
through blue scilla disturbing April
snow. Rhubarb nubs show.
High tides and spring rivers can
urge Cobequid
Bay beyond the berm,
but today the meadows unfold
to the aboiteau. Logging rigs rev,
downshifting for the turn, and upstairs
the scream echoes in the papered room.
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