Must all questions yield answers? Can there be wisdom even in the absence of resolution? In the case of Elizabeth Bishop and “Questions of Travel,” the very impossibility of answering the questions posed allows the poem to approach a more profound conclusion. The poem, which appears in her collection Questions of Travel: Brazil, spans five free verse stanzas of unequal length. It tracks the rumination of a self-conscious stranger in a foreign land, which is to say that it addresses the fundamental anxieties of travel. The speaker—a (genderless) avatar for Bishop, who lived in Petrópolis, Brazil, from 1951 to 1965—vacillates between belonging and alienation, inspiration and discouragement. Bishop’s talent for assiduous observation becomes even more pronounced in the face of uncertainty. The poem’s brilliance bears out in the lucidity of its central conflict, a lucidity that is only strengthened by a refusal to cede to the suture of an answer.

The first stanza of “Questions of Travel” begins with an observation of excess that is itself excessive—enjambed and spanning several clauses. Though she eschews rhyme and meter, Bishop is attuned to poem’s appearance on the page as it manifests the overabundance of her surroundings:

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
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

The first clause indicates a surfeit of waterfalls where the speaker is at present (“too many… here”). This implies an elsewhere, a “there,” that the speaker finds less overwhelming. Bishop communicates a general atmosphere of overactivity, with each chaotic image acting on the next: the “streams / hurry too rapidly down to the sea . . . the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops / makes them spill over the sides.” Though Bishop is presumably in nature—and with a fellow traveler, as denoted by the plural possessive adjective—this is not a comforting pastoral scene. The streams are overflowing, the rain converts to cascade too quickly for the speaker’s comfort.

Bishop employs a succession of natural images to initiate the questioning that runs through the poem. As the first stanza continues, these questions occur in conditional statements, signaled by an em dash:

—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.²

The landscape the speaker observes is rife with motion and unpredictability. Bishop anticipates the waterfalls yet to come, imagines a ceaseless proliferation of water that would render the mountains subaqueous, resembling “the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled.”³ Time and its passage are thus implied by the geography Bishop so carefully represents, suggesting that the speaker is distressed by the provisional nature of what they are observing. The roving topography mirrors the movement of the speaker’s mind and invites them to consider things further.

The observing mind begins a new stanza of interrogation with a simple command: “Think of the long trip home.”⁴ Again, there is an articulation of the space between “here” and “there” that conveys an overall indeterminacy, a sense that the speaker is continuously traveling. The speaker then rattles off a series of questions, once again invoking their traveling partner with a plural subject pronoun:

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 theaters?⁵

There is not only a general notion of doubt surrounding the decision to travel, but also an expression of moral reservation. Would it have benefitted the traveling pair simply to “have stayed at home” and imagined the site of their visitation? If not, where else should they be? And, finally, can the speaker abide by the voyeurism of their excursion? The traveler’s ambivalence is accompanied by the nervous thought that their journey might be unjustified and even exploitative. This self-consciousness leads to a question about fantasy: “Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?”⁶ The mind that anxiously questioned its surroundings now challenges its own motivation. Cataloguing experience—delighting in the “inexplicable old stonework”—relies on the compression of events into picturesque images, things to collect: “have we room for one more folded sunset . . . ?”^7,8 Bishop’s agitated subjectivity relentlessly cross-examines itself, exposing the superficial and ethical compromises of travel.

Once Bishop has enumerated these concerns she begins to develop a reply. The third stanza, although the longest of the poem, starts off tentatively. Bishop uses a negative formulation to broach these counterpoints, offering a measure of humility that also makes clear what would have been lost had the speaker not ventured to travel:

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.⁹

Bishop interweaves the natural world and its human inhabitants by engaging various aspects of sensory experience. There exists in the tree-lined road a kind of beauty, particularly in its mimicry of human expression in the trees’ “gesturing / like . . . pantomimists,” that includes and encourages the speaker. This encouragement redoubles, manifesting as sight and sound, gesturing towards a series linked by em dashes. Bishop writes:

 —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)¹⁰

With great care and subtle humor, Bishop attends to the small images and sound bites that distinguish “here” from “there.” There is joy in distilling the quaint specificity of the world— there is joy in noticing. Even framed by her speaker’s outward skepticism, Bishop delights in this process, rhyming internally in an almost singsong manner and using alliteration to conjure the clamor of those mismatched clogs.

The rejoinders offered from the speaker to themselves are predicated on transience. The speaker meditates “blurr’dly and inconclusively”; the rain that the speaker is glad to have listened to is contained in the past.¹¹ The transition from the third stanza to the fourth occasions an unusual shift. Bishop observes the speaker at a remove, as they write in a notebook. The reader is no longer privy to the traveler’s internal monologue and must rely on the notes for concluding information. This writing, rendered in italics, covers the final two stanzas and is encased in quotation marks.

“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
………………………………
Continent, city, country, society:
The choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”¹²

The tail end of the poem is significantly more compact than its first three stanzas. Bishop is once again entering into a dialogue with herself through the avatar of the speaker and their journal; she has shifted back to a mindset that distrusts the validity of its observations. One of the critical lessons contained within the poem is its confident return to questioning, even—perhaps especially—when the questioning is riddled with insecurity. Bishop is not afraid to revisit what she has seemingly already answered. The reappearance of the traveler’s self-doubt reflects the psychological necessity of negotiating and renegotiating one’s relationship with ineffability, with the eternally shifting concepts of “here, or there . . .” Continuously reorienting ourselves, however, need not preclude curiosity or imagination. The “home, wherever that may be” of the poem’s final two lines humbly offers up a space for possibility. Home may be on the other end of a journey.

In the essay “Bishop: Race, Class, and Gender” Kirstin Hotelling Zona reflects on the poet’s relationship with certain categorizations of identity that conditioned her worldview. Bishop did not like to identify as a woman poet or a lesbian poet, despite being a queer woman.

There are many failures of compassion in Bishop’s writing, for example when, in the poem “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop observes a photograph of  “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire … Their breasts were horrifying.”¹³ Zona importantly points out Bishop’s “willingness to interrogate her own discomfort in the face of otherness, a willingness necessitated by her restless desire to transcend the mundane exchanges of self versus other, or a one-way perspective”¹⁴ In her poetry, Bishop is a lucid and wholehearted inquisitor of all things, particularly herself. She does not pursue poetry to abdicate individual responsibility or avoid self-examination. That the “Questions of Travel” are never resolved—that they are articulated anew and thus remain ongoing at the poem’s conclusion—makes this abundantly clear.

1. Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters (New York: Library of America, 2008), 26-31.
2. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 6-9.
3. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 11-12.
4. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 13.
5. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 14-17.
6. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 26-27.
7. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 22.
8. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 28-29.
9. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 30-34.
10. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 35-41.
11. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 48, 55.
12. Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 62-67
13. Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room,” Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters (New York: Library of America, 2008), 26-31.
14. Kristin Hotelling Zona, “Bishop: Race, Class, and Gender,” 56.