Letter dated July 12, 1963, in Harrison: 181.

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. (1 -5 )

There is too much water rushing to the sea, too many clouds and a frenzy of activity, with water everywhere which the narrator finds overwhelming. Her other, more reflective self is less concerned with the scenery and concerned more with the moral significance of travel. She agonises:

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? (1 4 -1 7 )

In these four lines Bishop addresses three "traveller" issues: can imagined travel ever substitute for real travel? Can the pressure to be constantly on the move and see new things ever be justified? And can it be morally right to dip in and out of strangers' lives? While Bishop cannot answer her questions, she acknowledges the human spirit that keeps us endlessly curious and determined to see and do as much as is possible. So, she concludes, people will travel to the ends of the earth to see a rare species or a ruin and, in doing so, expect never to be disappointed. Travel is in part dream fulfilment:

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? (2 6 -2 9 )

Is there a limit to our travels. Bishop asks, and how many times we are prepared to be disappointed?

Bishop's answer is that one travels, in part, because one does not know until one sees it what it is one might have missed. As Dr Johnson said: "The use of travelling is to regulate the imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."67 Brazil, in "Questions of Travel", fulfils Bishop's most extravagant imagining, not just because of its spectacular natural beauty, but also because of its unique culture. Details that charm her are the "disparate wooden clogs / carelessly clacking over / a grease-stained filling-station floor". Bishop knows that, back home in the United States, the clogs would all be mass produced so that: "Each pair there would have identical pitch". The idiosyncratic detail of the ornate bird cage is precisely what could not have been imagined from afar. She delights in a Brazil which is not based on 67 Quoted in Goldensohn: 8.

technology and modernisation, but on century-old skills and workmanship. It was this side of Brazil that Bishop intended to celebrate in B ra zil and which would bring her into conflict with the Tim e-Life editors, who wanted more emphasis on the country's economic and political situation. In "Questions of Travel", Bishop's catalogue of souvenirs is tied to the domestic and the everyday. Even while buying petrol it is possible to experience a completely different life from the United States. Bishop ends her poem musing on why we travel, and why we leave home:

"Is it lack o f imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay a t home? Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about Just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there... No. Should we have stayed a t home, wherever that may be?" ( B O - 6 7)68

Unlike Pascal, Bishop has never been able to stay in one place and rely on her imagination alone for stimulation. She wonders whether her constant desire to see and travel is indicative of a personal failing. And then, having made the decision to travel, how does one decide where to go? Instead of answers Bishop serves up yet more questions and returns to her perennial query: where is home?

For some of the time she lived In Brazil Bishop was able to answer this question. The life she had In Petrôpolls and, to a lesser extent, in Rio de Janeiro was the family life she had so far never experienced. In a 1965 letter to Anne Stevenson, Bishop sketched her daily life: "I rarely seem to finish even a thought, or a good long look through binoculars, without something interrupting: the maid's problems, or the telephone ringing, or a political upheaval, or a dressmaker's appointment, or someone coming to dinner and I have to make the soup - since our maid isn't a very good cook."69

It is interesting to note how Bishop gives equal weight to political events and domestic concerns. Bishop's poems about Brazil from this time reflect her interest in her immediate surroundings. Her subject matter is either nature and landscape, the servants, or the ubiquitous poor of the favelas whom she could see from her eleventh-floor apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Bishop lived among two extremes of the class system: the tiny elite who ruled the country, of whom Macedo Soares was a member, and the servants 68 Blaise Pascal (1 6 2 3 -1 6 6 2 ), the French mathematician, physicist, theologian and man-of-letters dedicated himself to thought and prayer when he experienced a religious conversion in 1654, removing himself from the society life he had led so far.

69 Letter to Anne Stevenson, August 15, 1965, in Harrison: 27.