May 17, 2007 - Sale 2114

Sale 2114 - Lot 293

Price Realized: $ 2,040
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
YOUNG BISHOP'S COPY (BISHOP, ELIZABETH.) Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Bishop's copy of the Modern Library Edition. 8vo, green cloth, rubbed, cocked. New York, [1927]
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

elizabeth bishop's copy with her signature and a poem. The Modern Library edition was published in 1927 when Bishop was sixteen years old. The neat, clear signature is on the front free endpaper. There are also several sentences or phrases that are underlined or checked in the margin. Most interesting are three lines and a poem penciled across the rear blanks in her hand. Several words are corrected or written over, and an entire stanza is erased and scribbled over.
On the left rear blank she has written three lines about sky gazing: "A halo of deep quiet in the wind / A twilit place for me amid the dark / a church without a god, between the clouds." Then, on the facing page: "I am neither here not there / Never can I be at home / Water claims me not, nor air / Nor the light of fairy foam / On the hills I cannot pass / Clouds are low / For me to roam.
As the sun upon the grass / As the water touched by air / Stirs life shadows in a glass / I shall come where you are fair / Quick, look up and see me there." / The handwriting is consistent with those on her letters in the John Malcomb Brinnin papers in the Rare Book Room at the University of Delaware and in the Vassar College Library, Department of Archives and Special Collections where her papers are housed. The book also bears a sticker from The Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, near where Bishop lived in Revere with her aunt and uncle in the 1920s. Due to great upsets in her family and personal life, homelessness was a constant theme in her poetry throughout her career. At the time she wrote this, she was a teenager living with her aunt and uncle. This arrangement was occasioned by her mother being institutionalized when she was five and her father's death when she was an infant. The second line "Never can I be at home" is particularly poignant in light of this. A wonderful peek into the early creative mind of a major American poet.