This watercolor painting/drawing is a word-by-word representation of Bishop’s Poem “The Moose,” portraying a bus driving through the countryside. It has passed the bay, the “sugar maples”, “clapboard farmhouses,” and the church (verses 20-22). It is stopped next to twin silver birches, in front of a farmhouse where “a lone traveller gives / kisses and embraces / to seven relatives / and a collie supervises” (33-36). We can see the cabbage roses, the lupins, the elms, and the hen, but the fence is not white like in the poem; it is brown, soiled by the idea of departure, the strong desire to leave but the dreadful pain of doing so. The traveler knows that he will not remember his home exactly as it is.
This drawing showed me how the traveler’s separation from his family mirrors the speaker’s own separation from childhood, an important yet painful one. Indeed, we can see the bus’s journey as a journey through life, driving somewhere, truly east but in thought west, towards discovery, towards the unknown. The poem says that the bus is driving from somewhere further south, through New Brunswick and “all the way to Boston” (77), but that direction is east, not west. She is aboard a bus, following it, confused in the directions, riding along, secure in her knowledge that the bus is driving west. This shows that even when she chooses a direction, she is again like a child on the bus, riding calmly, observing the world through the window, with no idea of where she is going. We understand that we can never truly know where we are going and cannot escape childhood. It seems that the bus knows where it is going; the passengers do as well, like the one who announces she is going to Boston, but the poet does not know. Like the poet, the passengers may very well be confused as well, as we all think that everyone around us knows their direction but we are all on the same bus that is simply driving into the distance. To show this confusion in the drawing, the bus is driving towards the setting sun, which is west, but it is moving from the left to the right of the page, a direction associated on a map with east. The bus is supposedly driving her into adulthood, further away from childhood, yet she keeps getting trapped in childhood again.
Driving into new life, Bishop leaves behind the family home, yet along the way she cannot seem to escape her childhood. The drawing shows the iron bridge connecting the house where the “a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper” (59-60) – a motherly action that can paint the house to be a family home – with the land. Like “the loose plank” on the bridge that leads to the mother and her tablecloth, childhood “rattles / but doesn’t give way” (65-66) and Bishop is unable to break free as it constantly catches up with her even in her dreams in “Grandparents’ voices / uninterruptedly / talking, in Eternity” (96-98). This conversation is written over the drawing, indicating that although the conversation is distant and drifting away, it is still very present and has a hold of the poet.
This desire to escape from childhood resonates with another one of Bishop’s poems, “In the Waiting Room,” where she wants to prove herself worthy of being an adult, and wants to abandon her childhood at all costs. It seems that this poem is in a way a continuation of “In the Waiting Room,” but with more nostalgia and contradiction. This nostalgic tone is noticeable in the constant observations and descriptions of the surroundings of the bus, which, if taken to be an analogy for life, are observations and descriptions of memories. The grandparents’ voice call bishop to childhood once again, yet they seem welcome. She does not rebel against them. A contradiction forms between her desire to break free and the comfort of her memories. Though she is driving away from childhood in her thoughts, west, she is actually maybe driving back towards it, towards grandparents’ voices and the moose, in her subconscious, the part of herself she doesn’t know, the part of her journey she does not realize. The grandparents are a comforting presence that accompanies Bishop through her travels.
There is a shift in the poem when the speaker encounters the moose. At the end of the poem the “dim smell of moose, an acrid / smell of gasoline” (167-168), the plainness of the moose, shows how life is so much more banal than we imagine, so much less dreamy. The recurrence of the concept of home in the poem illustrates the earlier inner contradiction between returning to childhood and leaving childhood as we read how the bay is the “home of the long tides” (3) but “the bay not at home” (12), and we see the bus the family home but then being called back to another one through the bridge later on. Here, however, the concept of home is present differently. The moose is described as calm, plain, so much less impressive than we would think it to be, and yet still providing awe and joy. It is portrayed in the drawing as zoomed on in a bubble, a sight to contemplate. It is “homely as a house” (141), and we can notice a play on words between homey and homely, potentially meaning that home is there, normal and plain, but welcoming and we still care for it. The sense of affection towards the moose, it's homey and homeliness, show that we love it any way and that the author finally accepts the banality of life and the common passing of time. Even in observing the moose she can’t get away from being a kid, as we can see in all the amazement she feels at the creature, but this acceptance of the banal seems to say that, although she questions it and is conflicted, she finally accepts this childish part of her that she was so fiercely fighting earlier in the poem and in the poem “In the Waiting Room.” She understands that she may leave childhood behind, seeing the plainness of the moose, but not necessarily forget all of its joy, and this brings her peace.
It is as if her mind was peacefully sorting out this battle in a dance, in a drawing. This may be a confusing and conflicted, yet calm, goodbye to her life as a child, understanding that you do not need to forget in order to move forward.