The Moose

First published in the July 15, 1972 issue of the New Yorker, “The Moose” was inspired by a bus ride the poet Elizabeth Bishop took from Nova Scotia to Boston in 1946. Bishop took the next 26 years to write the poem, finishing it under a deadline when she agreed to read it at the 1972 Harvard commencement ceremony. The poem describes the Nova Scotia scenery and the uneventful atmosphere on the bus ride south until a female moose emerges from the forest and the bus must stop to let her pass.

While Bishop’s active writing years put her among Beat and Confessional poets, her work does not fit comfortably in any single literary category. Her signature style is reserved and highly polished. “The Moose” joins other poems in Bishop’s exploration of nature, such as “The Armadillo,” “The Fish,” and “At the Fishhouses,” where there is awe in the minute detail of the natural world. “The Moose,” however, is unique among these poems in that it details the geography surrounding the animal in the spotlight, and it conveys a deep sense of place and of awe in the encounter with the enormous beast.

Poet Biography

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died before her first birthday, and her mother experienced extreme grief and depression that led to her being institutionalized when Bishop was five years old, and they never saw each other again. Bishop was living with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia at the time of her mother’s institutionalization, but her paternal grandparents brought her back to Worcester shortly after. Bishop was a sickly child and was not often in school for most of her youth, but her maternal aunts nursed her back to health, and she succeeded well enough in high school to attend Vassar College in New York. While in New York, she met the poet Marianne Moore, whom she idolized, and they became close friends. Bishop traveled extensively in her adulthood, never staying in one place for very long. She still suffered with illness during this time, which was exacerbated by alcoholism, and she was in and out of hospitals frequently. When she turned 40, Bishop left for what was supposed to be an excursion around the world. However, when she got to Brazil, she fell in love with both the country and a woman named Lota de Macedo Soares, so Bishop spent the next 20 years there. Soares was a well-regarded Brazilian architect who also had a mental health condition. Bishop stayed in Brazil and enjoyed a 16-year long relationship with her until Soares died by suicide in 1967. Returning to the States, Bishop began teaching at Harvard and sustained a close personal and professional relationship with fellow poet Robert Lowell, whom she met many years before. Bishop eventually settled in Boston and met Alice Methfessel, whom she lived with until Bishop’s death in 1979. In 1946, Bishop published her first book of poetry, North & South. In 1956, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her second collection, Poems: North & South / A Cold Spring, published in 1955. She received a National Book Award in Poetry in 1970 for The Complete Poems, published in 1969. She also won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976, the same year she published her final collection of poems, Geography III. Much of Bishop’s time in Brazil was spent translating works from Portuguese to English, which was published in an anthology with Emanuel Brasil titled An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). Bishop was an artist as well as a poet, and her paintings were posthumously collected in the book Exchanging Hats: Paintings.

Poem Text

Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Moose.” 1972. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

“The Moose” begins with descriptions of the Nova Scotia scenery, which continue for four stanzas until a bus arrives. An unnamed individual then bids goodbye to seven relatives and a dog, then boards the bus. From this point forward, the narrative looks out on the scenery from inside the bus, though the speaker is never identified. The scenery is described in detail as the bus travels west from Nova Scotia through New Brunswick.

The conversation on the bus becomes “dreamy” (Line 87) as night falls. The speaker identifies the voices of the gentle but constant conversation as “Grandparents’ voices” (Line 96) discussing life, death, illness, employment, marriage, retirement. The travelers start to fall asleep as the bus continues on through “the New Brunswick woods” (Line 80), but they are startled awake as the bus lurches to a stop. Standing in the road is a moose. The driver turns off the lights of the bus, and the moose approaches, sniffing the hood. Everyone on the bus is enthralled by the creature, which they determine is a female moose because she lacks antlers, and all the conversation focuses on the huge animal. After several moments of reflection, the bus driver drives on past the animal, and the passengers, “craning backward” (Line 163), can still see the moose as the smell of her mixes with the smell of the gasoline from the bus.