Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

I was sorting through old correspondence today in my dusty cluttered bedroom when I found an envelope with my name addressing the modern day me in left leaning purple letters. On the back of the envelope were excerpts from Elizabeth Bishop's poem Questions of Travel. I don't know who addressed the envelope, because it is now separated from the letter that was once inside, but I did enjoy reading these lines from the poem. Whoever wrote those words to me so long ago, thank you!

Think of the long trip home. 

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? 

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life 

in our bodies, we are determined to rush 

to see the sun the other way around? 

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? 

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, 

inexplicable and impenetrable, 

at any view, 

instantly seen and always, always delightful? 

Oh, must we dream our dreams 

and have them, too? 

And have we room 

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? 

 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. 

A Question of Travel: Poetry of Dislocation

Comments by Mick Delap

"Another Bishop poem, Questions of Travel, was quoted by Tim Kindberg as he edited the previous ‘Foreign Lands’ edition of Magma. Bishop wrote Questions of Travel soon after taking up residence in Brazil and in the poem she explores the detail of the foreign country she is experiencing for the first time, writing with a stranger’s, a traveller’s eye. But in the process of defining her reactions to a new country, Bishop also found herself opening up fresh perspectives on an old one, on the home – or homes – she’d just left. It was only when she got to Brazil that Bishop found herself able to start writing effectively about her early childhood in Nova Scotia. In Questions of Travel Bishop records this paradoxical process, how travel may throw new light not just on Here, but also on There. But in doing so, it may upset any comfortable preconceptions or assumptions about what Home was or is."