ELIZABETH BISHOP IS CONSIDERED by many critics to be one of the most important poets of her generation.[1] In August 1932, long before she began her professional career as a writer, Bishop, along with Evelyn Huntington, a classmate from Vassar, sailed from Boston to St. John’s to make a walking tour of Newfoundland, Britain’s oldest overseas colony.[2] The first of many voyages to interesting and unusual places, this trip to Newfoundland was Bishop’s first major journey. Though she had travelled regularly between Nova Scotia and the "Boston States" and had spent time on Cape Cod, the Newfoundland trip was the first time that Bishop, who would become famous for her sense of geography, ventured beyond her childhood world. As such, the Newfoundland trip initiated a pattern of travel to islands as far flung and as exotic as the Galapagos, Key West, and Aruba.

Popular promotional literature at the time referred to Newfoundland as "America’s Newest Playground" and a "Land of Picturesque Beauty and Romantic Charm."[3] Advertisements ran regularly in The Newfoundland Quarterly promoting the colony as an "unspoiled vacation-land" with a "stimulating climate" and "interesting people."[4] During her trip to the island, Bishop collected photographs of the people she met and postcards of some of the places she visited.[5] She also kept handwritten notes which at some later date she edited and typed, adding handwritten jottings in the margins. Among her papers at Vassar, this brief travel narrative is titled simply "Notes in Newfoundland, 1932." It begins 19 August (a day after she arrived on the island) and ends abruptly 3 September even though Bishop remained on the island an extra week (until 10 September). If Bishop kept notes during the final week of the trip, they have not survived. However, several photographs of people and scenes from Newfoundland and Labrador have been preserved, though it is not clear that Bishop travelled beyond the Avalon Peninsula.[6] Biographer Brett C. Miller describes the surviving journal entries this way:

The entries are recognizably and vividly Elizabeth’s in their intense observation on the landscape and its people and interest in why things are arranged as they are. But her position relative to the friendly strangers she meets on the island is the journal’s major interest. Here we see her for the first time as the touring foreigner, in the place but not of it, wanting to "stay forever" but finding it impossible. She does not yet ask her "questions of travel," but she presents them. (47)

When Bishop made her tour, Newfoundland was in the midst of great economic and political upheaval. The hardships created by the financial collapse of 1929 (resulting in the Great Depression) were compounded in Newfoundland by a political crisis in the government.[7] On 5 April 1932, just months before Bishop’s arrival, the frustration of the unemployed in St. John’s peaked during a public demonstration which quickly turned into a riot. Thousands of angry citizens marched on the Newfoundland House of Assembly, forcing the prime minister, Sir Richard Squires, to escape through a rear door.[8] In the outports, where people keenly felt the brunt of the collapse in world trade, fishermen broke into local shops to steal food for their starving families.

Walking around the Avalon Peninsula, hitching rides and taking lodgings in small inns and private homes, Bishop observed first-hand this traumatic moment in Newfoundland’s history and heard "a great deal more about the dreadful ‘conditions’." In Trinity Bay she met a young boy aged twelve whose family was "on the dole [welfare] — 6 cents a day, per person." Bishop poignantly describes the young outport boy as being "very old for his age — he is worried about his one pair of rubber boots that are wearing out." Deeply moved by the plight of the impoverished youngster, Bishop before leaving the community gave him money for new foot-wear. Practical and generous gestures such as this suggest that, sensitive to the needs of the people she met, Bishop recognized her own position of privilege as the granddaughter of a wealthy Massachusetts family. It is unfortunate that Bishop could not muster the same spirit of generosity a day later at a nearby community, where she encountered a group of curious children whom she described as "wretched" and seemingly "very stupid."

Bishop did not restrict her observations regarding economic hardships to the fishing villages. She described Harbour Grace as "a mysterious, rather black town, [with] poor little shops." She also remarked on the impact that the economic and political upheaval had in the capital city: "The Brownsdale [Hotel] is on the corner of Gower — Main Street — and Cochrane, an unpaved, muddy side street, very steep. Wooden houses two or three stories high, very narrow and compressed. They are painted mostly a sad gray-brown but there are a few dead greens, blues and reds — all very sooty-looking. Right across from us seem to be three brothels in a row — we’ve witnessed some squalid scenes and two street fights. The buildings on Gower Street are brick, low shop fronts all along, many of them boarded up (since the riots) or empty, or displaying nothing but black beer bottles and sheets of old flypaper."[9]

Bishop’s view of conditions in Newfoundland clearly conflicted with the government’s view of the island as an ideal tourist destination.[10] What compelled Elizabeth Bishop to make a walking tour through parts of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula? And how did she view this "other place," this "foreign" landscape with its diverse inhabitants? Did it in any small way contribute to or help shape her poetic vision?

Summer holidays often posed a problem for Bishop. Following the death of her father when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother, Gertrude, suffered a mental breakdown and eventually was confined to an institution in Nova Scotia, where she died in 1934. As a result, Bishop spent her childhood moving between relations in Massachusetts (her Aunt Maude and Uncle George Shepherdson and her wealthy paternal grandparents) and Great Village, Nova Scotia, the home of her beloved maternal grandparents, Elizabeth and William Bulmer. After April 1931, summer visits to Great Village, Nova Scotia, were no longer feasible, for that spring Bishop’s maternal grandmother had died. Bishop’s biographer Brett Miller[11] describes how difficult vacation periods were for her:

Holidays became horrible trials for her; deciding where to spend them was a weighing of obligations and impositions, rarely of desires.... She spent many lonely holidays at the school in makeshift quarters with makeshift meals got up by her sympathetic teachers. In summers, she passed among the homes of her friends.... summer cottages rented by parents and occupied by their daughters and shifting sets of friends; Boston hotels; and obligatory and miserable visits to the Bishop family estate.... The fear and hatred of holidays ... stayed with Elizabeth for the rest of her life. (Miller 32)

One way to avoid such situations was to plan a travel adventure of her own. The Furness Steamship Line provided weekly service from New York, Boston, and Halifax to St. John’s. So on 13 August 1932, probably on the Nerissa, Bishop and Huntington left Boston and, according to a letter to classmate Frani Blough dated 9 August 1932, they travelled second-class. In her notes for 25August [St. John’s], Bishop writes, "Ev gets up and goes out at 7 to see the Nerissa arrive and its handsome quartermaster."

Newfoundland was at that time a logical vacation choice for a number of reasons: a colony of Great Britain yet still an independent country, it was sufficiently foreign yet close enough geographically to be attractive.[12] In her 1966 literary critical study titled Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Stevenson described Newfoundland in the 1930s as "a primitive, unknown region of North America" (43). A similar lack of knowledge about the island is evident in Richard Ellman’s The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973), which republished Bishop’s "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" with a footnote identifying St. John’s as "a city on Antigua, an island in the British West Indies," an error which Bishop discussed in an interview with George Starbuck (Conversations 87) in 1977.

Yet it was well known to many Canadian and American sportsmen, aviators, and artists.[13] In her travel notes Bishop documents a strong American presence on the island. For example, at Mrs. O’Toole’s boarding house in Caplin Harbour, Bishop is delighted to find "a recent copy of the Mercury — seems that an American school-teacher left it." In Brigus she lodges with Mrs. Goshire, who "has four sons in Buffalo and New York, all out of work." In Dildo as Bishop signs the guest house register, Mr. Endymion George tells her "how he once signed one from ‘Ohio’ instead of Dildo, ‘for badness’." In Harbour Grace Bishop and Huntington stay at the Cochrane House "run by the famous ‘Rosie’ — Rose Archibald September 24, 2007."[14] In the guest register, they see listed "many famous aviation names ... including Amelia Earhart’s"; several months earlier Earhart had taken off from Harbour Grace, becoming the first woman to solo across the Atlantic Ocean.[15] Bishop learns that Mollison is expected the next day and that his mechanics have already arrived.[16]

In the 1930s travel to Newfoundland from Canada, the United States, and Great Britain was relatively easy, with direct steamship services to St. John’s as well as a railway link across the island. Even though Bishop had an independent income and had, since turning twenty-one, full control of her own money, the Newfoundland trip was economically feasible for two college students. For example, transportation and accommodation costs in Newfoundland were relatively inexpensive; four days lodgings at the Sea View Hotel in Topsail, Conception Bay, cost Bishop and Huntington $2.00 per night each with an extra 75 cents per meal and $1.75 for cigarettes.[17] In addition, Newfoundland was a place Bishop had often heard about from her Nova Scotian relations, so perhaps she harboured some romantic notions about the island and its inhabitants. Unlike the kind of conventional trips which her affluent friends took for granted, Bishop was more interested in odd, unusual places; naturally curious about the world, she actively positioned herself, through travel, to view it from unusual perspectives.

When she first conceived of the Newfoundland excursion, Bishop had hoped that Frani Blough would be her travelling companion.[18] Their correspondence prior to the trip suggests that Blough may have had her own reasons for wanting to go there. In an undated note Bishop playfully asked Frani, "When and where is L [not identified] to be in Newfoundland? Shall we meet in Dead Man’s Cove or Cutthroat Bay?" On 8 July 1932 as the departure time grew near, Bishop wrote to Blough again, imploring her friend to join her: "My dear Frani, I certainly wish you would join us as far as St. Anthony’s. I’m sure you’ll find L there — for after all isn’t St. Anthony the patron St. of lost articles? ... I’m going into training for a grueling trip with the mighty Ev, but I’ve a feeling I’d be thankful for some company."[19] On 9 August 1932 Bishop wrote a final letter to Blough before setting sail from Boston with "the mighty" Evelyn Huntington:

Ev and I are sailing Saturday ... [for Newfoundland on a walking trip]. The boat takes from then until Thursday to get there and we are going second class, so Heaven knows what shape we’ll be in when we arrive. I’ve collected a small knapsack, a small flashlight, a small flask....

American novelist, Mary McCarthy, another of Bishop’s Vassar classmates, remembers Huntington as a "very amusing character," someone fond of jokes and "slightly off-color songs, mostly borrowed from men’s colleges" (Fountain 43).

Several years earlier Bishop and Frani Blough had taken a three-day walking trip on Cape Cod. Many years later here is how Blough (now Frani Muser) recalled that spring vacation:

There was a little rooming house you could stay in. We had a three-day walking trip on the Cape with Miss Farwell [assistant head mistress of Walnut Hill School]. That was the kind of adventurous thing Elizabeth and I liked, adventurous because nobody else would have thought of walking anywhere. (Remembering 30-31)

It is quite likely that Newfoundland promised Bishop a similar sense of adventure but this time she planned a trip to a place rather farther afield and more "foreign," a trip without the proprietous presence of a college chaperone. Travel to such an insular location may also have allowed Bishop to indulge more freely in drink, for in her notes there are frequent references to the purchase of "bottled beer" and "strong black Newfoundland rum"[20] that tasted like "molasses & codfish." Or perhaps she hoped the trip would provide her with material that could be shaped into stories or poems, for when some of her friends warned her that the insects on the island would "eat [her] alive," she bravely replied, "even a trip to Hell could be talked about after, ‘Oh — why yes, I’ve been there,’ and everyone turns to look, and you’ve taken them all by storm."[21] Although Bishop’s travel notes were never exploited for commercial purposes (i.e., travel essay), we do, in fact, find that several descriptive sections of her notes did find their way into her published poems.

Shortly after arriving in Newfoundland, Bishop sent Blough a postcard depicting the entrance to St. John’s harbour with its distinctive "Narrows." On the back of the card she wrote,

This place is far beyond my wildest dreams. The cliffs rise straight out of the sea 400-500 feet (this picture is really very tame). I wish, and not just conventionally, that you could see them. The streets and houses all fall down toward the water — apparently supported on the masts of the sealers and the schooners below. The penetrating stink of fish and the after-effects of a sea voyage and floating and up-tipping all combine to make it very strange and frightening....

Later in a poem titled "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," Bishop imaginatively reconstructed the moment she sailed into the port city: "Entering the Narrows at St. John’s / the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship. / We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs / among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs."[22] This poetic passage resembles a section from Bishop’s travel notes dated 20 August: "That evening we took a wonderful climb up the hills on the other side of the harbor [Southside Hills near Fort Amherst] — chased the sun right up and over. The rocks are brown-bronze at that time of day — covered with butter & egg flowers — many goats."

Besides adventure there may have been another reason for Bishop’s trip to the island. Bishop’s great uncle George W. Hutchinson (on her mother’s side of the family) from Nova Scotia had gone to sea as a young boy. After he returned home from his travels, Hutchinson produced several paintings based on his memories of some of the places he had visited: the far North and Belle Isle.[23] In the poem "Large Bad Picture" from her first collection, North & South (1946), Bishop commemorates this great-uncle, his distant travels and his "primitive" attempts at preserving these memories: "Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or / some northerly harbor of Labrador, / before he became a schoolteacher / a great-uncle painted a big picture." In her notes Bishop suggests that some of her father’s "distant relations" may have settled permanently on an island near Topsail, Conception Bay.[24]

Although Bishop was disappointed that she and Huntington were unable to visit St. Anthony, a village which she described in a postcard to Frani as "inaccessible," several photographs in the Bishop Collection indicate that she had some knowledge of coastal Labrador. Perhaps the poem "The Imaginary Iceberg" resulted from stories she had heard as a child. Or could she have seen a copy of Rev. Louis L. Noble’s beautifully illustrated After Icebergs with a Painter (1862)? If she had taken a coastal boat north to White Bay or across the Strait of Belle Isle,[25] most likely she would have encountered a scene similar to the one recorded in her poem: "We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, / although it meant the end of travel. / Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock / and all the sea were moving marble. / We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship." Of course, Bishop was an avid collector of postcards, and Newfoundland postcards depicting distinctive icebergs and vast fields of ice floes were quite common in the 1920s and 1930s (in fact, they are still used to lure tourists to the province).[26] Or perhaps one of the sources of inspiration for Bishop’s poem was an early lyric (i.e., "The Ice-Floes" or "The Sea-Cathedral") by Newfoundland poet E.J. Pratt.[27]

On 19 August, shortly after arriving in St. John’s, Bishop and Huntington hiked out to Portugal Cove and took the ferry, the Maneco,[28] across the Tickle to Bell Island (identified incorrectly in Bishop’s journal as Bell Isle), where they found lodgings for the night at Mrs. Cahill’s Boarding House. Bishop frequently referred to communities by their previously known names, indicating perhaps that she was consulting an out-of-date map or guidebook. An anonymous contributor to The Newfoundland Quarterly (July 1901) recommended Bell Island as an ideal tourist site, a place where one could "forget the cares of this wicked world." Continuing to extol the virtues of the island, he writes,

From every standpoint the island is a most health-giving place, particularly in the summer season.... The beach provides many comforts for the bather, being floored in several places with a sand soft to the touch as velvet. And the green slopes which lie all about, basking in the bright sunshine, serve to give the panorama the appearance of a veritable Eden. (3)

As they explored this "veritable Eden," Bishop observed the vivid red colouring of the soil and recorded her first impression of outport life: "There is great poverty — prices are high — oranges 3 @ 25 [cents]."[29] In 1932 Wabana Mines was partially shut down for extended periods of time and the people on the island suffered great hardships. In the margin of her notes concerning the closing of the mines "except for two days a week," Bishop wrote, "the men get $4.20 for the 2 days’ work."

In 1966 Ashley Brown, interviewing Bishop at her home in Brazil, asked if her writing during the 1930s had been affected by her political experiences and if she believed that "radical political experience was valuable for writers" (Conversations 22). Bishop responded, "I was very aware of the Depression — some of my family were much affected by it. After all, anybody who went to New York and rode the Elevated could see that things were wrong. But I had lived with poor people and knew something of poverty first-hand. About this time I took a walking-trip in Newfoundland and I saw much worse poverty there." In that interview Bishop also told Brown that in her early travels she had a "taste for impoverished places" (Conversations 27).[30]

In fact, Bishop describes intimately how outport Newfoundlanders in their "lonely" and "cluttered little houses" suffered and struggled to survive those dark days of the Depression. Her notes record that most women in outports kept cottage gardens and some livestock (sheep, goats, cows) in order to supplement their fish diets with vegetables, meat, milk, butter, and cream. They also raised sheep to provide an abundance of wool, which the women then spun into yarn for sweaters, cuffs, and stockings. In late summer and early fall they gathered raspberries, marsh berries, squashberries, blueberries, and bakeapples to make jams, tarts, preserves, and wines for the winter months ahead and to provide local delicacies for tourists. More privileged women like Captain Bob Bartlett’s two sisters, who had been sent to Boston for schooling, ran boarding houses, small inns, and tea shops to supplement their income, while others ran general stores. In St. John’s, Bishop observed that less fortunate women resorted to working in downtown brothels.

Bishop also provides detailed descriptions of the inns and boarding houses where they lodged, many of which contained religious paraphernalia: "steel-engraved holy pictures"; "a statue of Jesus on a glass case"; another "with a Little Beauty Night Light, poppy red, burning in front of it"; and "a white plaster Christ holding out his arms off the roof" of a church. She sees chromographs, visual representations of historical events such as the sinking of the Lusitania; odd collections of books (D.W. Prowse’s History of Newfoundland, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s popular novel Mr. Marx’s Secret, Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, the classics, and Greek tragedies); and popular British and American magazines as diverse as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Mercury. In one boarding house Bishop and Huntington are entertained by two stereopticons: The Professor Gives a Kissing Lesson and King of the Belgians’ Conservatory. References to stereopticons later find their way, in altered forms, into Bishop’s short story titled "The Housekeeper," where the professor from Kissing Lesson is transformed into a postman.[31]

Bishop’s careful observations provide a rare glimpse into the lives of Newfoundland women.[32] Most of the establishments where Bishop and Huntington took lodgings were owned by women: Mrs. Cahill on Bell Island ran a "tiny, cluttered little house" with "2 or 3 men boarders"; Mrs. Costello in Bay Bulls had 22 boarders; Mrs. O’Toole at Caplin Harbour served wonderful "bread & butter, marsh berries, & Devonshire cream"; Mrs. Breen at Cape Boyle [Broyle], who kept "a rather odd place," openly yearned to live in St. John’s so she could go to the movies[33]; Mrs. Williams ran the Cabot House at Bay Bulls; Bob Bartlett’s two sisters ran the "elegantly furnished" Benville Tea Room in Brigus, which Bishop describes as very like "a tea room on Cape Cod — a fancy one — flowers in vases, Vogue, Vanity Fair, etc., paintings and etchings ... [and] Sofa cushions"; the "famous ‘Rosie’ — Rose Archibald," who operated the Cochrane House in Harbour Grace, is described by Bishop as "very rough and cheerful and [she] wears trousers." Many years later in "Exchanging Hats," an odd poem about cross-dressing and gender stereotyping, Bishop notes the "complexity" of "costume and custom."

How did Newfoundlanders respond to Bishop and Huntington, two rather unconventional women travellers? Not all inn-keepers welcomed the odd couple. Mrs. Costello at Calvert, who was "rather disagreeable" toward them, had no room for them at her Boarding House. Another Mrs. Costello at Ferryland "didn’t like [their] looks & [they] didn’t like hers" so they pushed on to Cape Broyle, where they found more welcoming lodgings. Mrs. Williams at Bay Bulls was initially "very cool, then more friendly." In many of the small communities along Conception Bay and Trinity Bay, the two young women attracted unwanted attention. At Spaniard’s Bay when they stopped to rest, "The people ... were ruder than any before — they followed us through the street.... and gathered a real mob. We fed the children molasses candy ... but the older boys were awful, all sniggers." Between Chapel Arm and Norman’s Cove, they were "followed all the way by several children." Mrs. Green at Norman’s Cove gave them lodgings but the crowd would not disperse. Bishop writes, "I play the parlor organ — it’s near a sort of bay window that’s open, and the crowd (the children from Chapel Arm are still there too) in the twilight gets larger & larger. It is sinister. They just stare, don’t say anything, at least 20 people."[34] In Questions of Travel (1965), Bishop asks, "Is it right to be watching strangers?" Here in these small Newfoundland communities the tables are turned and the traveller experiences the discomfort of being the person watched.

Did Bishop’s visit to the island contribute to or reflect in any small way her poetic vision? Can we view her travel journal as a portrait of the artist as a young woman? In That Sense of Constant Readjustment, Lloyd Schwartz identifies dramatic tension or an "awareness of ambiguities" as a crucial element in Bishop’s work. I am not sure how developed that awareness is in her travel notes, but I do believe that the seeds or the beginnings of what will be the major tensions in her work are already evident, as are some of the key images that Bishop will later rely on. On her first excursion, she looks around Bell Island, then describes it this way in her handwritten notes: "Barren town — East, West, South." In the typed version she writes, "There are North, South, East, and West ... all barren" with the word "North" crossed out.

In an interview with Ashley Brown in 1966, Bishop discussed the creative process: "A group of words, a phrase, may find its way into my head like something floating in the sea, and presently it attracts other things" (Conversations 25). Her travel notes contain many stray images and phrases that later Bishop incorporated in her poetry. The "brothels" on the corner of Gower and Cochrane reappear "in Marrakesh" ("Over 2000 Illustrations"); the "wild road" between Portugal Cove and St. Phillip’s surfaces in "Cape Breton"; the "palings" in the O’Toole’s garden figure into "The Monument"; the "wonderful coffee and toasted rolls" that she enjoys at Brigus later appear in her Depression poem, "A Miracle for Breakfast." Bishop’s description of outport "fish houses on stilts" creeps into "At the Fishhouses," a poem inspired by the sights and sounds of Ragged Islands in Nova Scotia and also from her memories of fishhouses along the Parrsboro shore road near Great Village; and her description of "paper roses" and "lonely little [outport] houses" anticipates the setting of "Roosters." Some of the other images that occur in her notes are "mackerel" and colours such as orange, red, green, and grey.

When Bishop was teaching in Seattle in 1973, she told her students, "When you use a metaphor or simile, don’t use it casually. It should clarify, not just ornament. Make it accurate" (Remembering 208). In her notes we see several examples of Bishop’s own search for apt and accurate figures of speech. On 20 August, she and Huntington go exploring the cliffs near St. John’s. Her notes contain a brief description which, with its images, near rhymes, and figurative language, may easily be viewed as an embedded prose poem: "we took a wonderful climb up the hills on the other side of the harbor — chased the sun right up and over. The rocks are brown-bronze at that time of day — covered with butter & egg flowers." Late one afternoon near Cape Broyle, she compares the cliffs covered with "orange and grey" lichen to a fiery "sunset." At Bay Bulls, she and Huntington stay at the O’Toole’s guest house: "There is a green and red glass over the front door — going downstairs [is] like going underwater." The men in the community fish in "clear, clear water, like dark ice."

Bishop’s careful attention to names, especially place names, is evident throughout her notes (e.g., in her earlier references to imaginary places: Dead Man’s Cove and Cutthroat Bay; and the particularly evocative Cupids is underlined). Frequently she uses original place names, for example Bell Isle [for Bell Island] and Tickle Harbour for Calvert, as if she were consulting an outdated map.

Also Bishop’s delight in strange or peculiar objects like stereopticons, chromographs, and mechanical toys ("Cirque d’Hiver") is evident when Mrs. Ambrose Williams at Bay Bulls winds up and displays a toy mechanical seal for her. She also reveals her own playfulness and quiet sense of humour. At the Cabot House in Bay Bulls, there is a "little iron stove" in their bedroom, for Bishop "too suggestive of the human form" so, before retiring for the night, she dresses the stove in her own clothes "from underwear up." In one establishment, Bishop spies a first edition of Prowse’s History of Newfoundland and wonders, "Should I steal it?"

Bishop’s ear for different dialects is also evident in the fragments of conversations that she carefully records. At Heart’s Desire a young boy with a strange air of formality asks the girls, "Have ye gone astray?"[35] An old woman near St. Phillip’s stops to chat with them about the "hile" [oil] under the ground.[36] Other phrases that she records are to "piddle around," to "jig" fish, to be "put up" for the night, "me dear man," and to "bile [boil] your kettle out."

In her travel notes Bishop often shifts from past tense, which she uses to recall the general sequence of events, to present tense when she wants to develop a particular moment or impression, "to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose" (Conversations 26). For example, here is a segment from her notes dated 21 August: "Walked from St. John’s to Bay Bull’s. We were given a ride by a ‘mail-car’ — two rather drunken men, the driver all dressed up, with a large dead rose in his lapel. We went as far as Calvert with them.... we were directed up around Caplin Harbour to Mrs. O’Toole’s.... This is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. The sides of the harbor are steep & rocky — but the thin grass is deep emerald green. It is foggy & rainy — the fog drifts back & forth.... Everything is very irregular."

Did Bishop find in her Newfoundland trip whatever it was ("commerce or contemplation") that brought her there? Her travel notes indicate that certain segments of her trip were very rewarding. For example, she describes Caplin Harbour as "one of the most beautiful places [she had] ever seen." In an entry dated 21 August, she writes, "We would like to stay forever."[37] Described in idyllic terms, this small Newfoundland outport and others like it may have reminded Bishop of Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she had spent her earliest and perhaps happiest years.[38] As David Staines suggests, Great Village "offered Elizabeth Bishop a first world of family affection, simple dignity, and life close to the soil and the sea." In "In the Village," a prose work written in the early 1950s, Bishop describes the geography, people, places, and events of Great Village in ways similar to her descriptions of Newfoundland and its inhabitants. Women like Mrs. Naomi Hopkins in Heart’s Content, described as "a nice old lady," may have reminded Bishop of her own Nova Scotian relations, women like her maternal grandmother and her aunts, Grace and Maude, who had struggled to make do with the little they had.[39]

In an acceptance speech for a literary prize delivered at the University of Oklahoma in 1976, Bishop said, "all my life I have lived and behaved very much like a sandpiper — just running along the edges of different countries, ‘looking for something’" (Collected Prose viii). Newfoundland was just one of the many "sad and still and foreign" places that Bishop was drawn to during her lifetime. In An Un-spoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (1995), Utah naturalist Terry Tempest Williams writes, "Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend" (12). For Bishop, this imaginative homeland (or "motherland"[40]) was a composite of all the islands and safe harbours she had ever visited, "felicitous places"[41] all echoing back to her first "real" home, her grandmother’s house in Great Village, Nova Scotia.

The writer wishes to acknowledge the very helpful suggestions made by two anonymous readers.