… embroidered nature… tapestried landscape.
-- Landscape into Art, by Sir Kenneth Clark

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs:
every square inch filling in with foliage—
big leaves, little leaves, and fiant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a stain under leaf turned over;
monster ferns
in sliver-gray relief,
and flowers, too, like giant water lilies
up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves—
purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,
rust red and greenish white;
solid but airy; fresh as if just finished
and taken off the frame.

A blue-white sky, a simple web,
backing for feathery detail:
brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel,
a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;
and perching there in profile, beaks agape,
the big symbolic birds keep quiet,
each showing only half his puffed and padded,
pure-colored or spotted breast.
Still in the foreground there is Sin:
five sooty dragons near some massy rocks.
The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts
splattered and overlapping,
threatened from underneath by moss
in lovely hell-green flames,
attacked above
by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and neat,
"one leaf yes and on leaf no" (in Portuguese).
The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes
are on the smaller, female one, back-to,
her wicked tail straight up and over,
red as red-hot wire.

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting,
in creaking armor, came and found it all,
not unfamiliar:
no lovers' walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no lute music,
but corresponding, nevertheless,
to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of style when they left home—
wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
L' Homme arme or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself—
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.

…繡成了花樣的自然…織進了花氈的風景。
─《景觀融於藝術》坎尼斯•克爾克爵士

每年一月，大自然迎上我們眼前
恰如那年在他們面前展現：
每坪方英呎都被覆滿樹葉
大片葉、小片葉、巨型葉身，
藍、藍綠、還有橄欖綠，
調進隨機漸淺的葉脈與葉緣，
或是綢緞般的葉子底面；
畸形如妖的蕨類
從銀灰色中現形，
花叢，同是那樣妖魅，巨人般的荷花
佇立在空中—在高處，更高聳，至葉林間—
若紫、若黃、另兩種黃、若粉紅，
亦或赤褐沾上淺綠；
如此鶩立卻無慮；新穎恰似方才完成的藝品
脫下裱框。

碧空，一張自然簡樸的網，
襯托輕軟如鳥羽的枝節毫末：
簡潔的弧光、一座淡綠色破敗輪座、
幾株棕櫚、黝黑地，蹲聚陸上，但也小巧精緻；
之中更有鳥群棲息在側身的輪廓，張著鳥喙，
但這些別具意義的飛禽卻保持緘默，
唯獨各自吹捧墊步，
炫耀胸前那單色或斑斕的羽毛 。
在這前景中依然潛藏罪惡：
五隻烏黑的惡龍盤據亂石附近。
岩石與地衣相生，迸發月光的灰階
飛濺後交雜重疊，
被苔蘚簇擁而上
在秀麗的鐵青色火焰中，
向上突擊
一旁旋轉如梯的藤蔓，扭曲歪斜卻交織緊密，
「一葉是一葉非」（用葡萄牙這樣說著）
蜥蜴們屏氣斂息；所有的目光
都落在那嬌小、媱嬈的女體，並追尋
她那蛇蠍般凌空挺起的尾部，
猩紅一如赤熱的鎢絲。

也就是那群基督徒，如鐵釘般冷血，
卻也如釘芒般藐小，光芒閃動，
盔甲唏嗦作響，登陸後也才發現一切，
倒也不是人生地疏：
此處不見情人幽會漫步，尋不著涼棚遮陽，
沒有櫻桃可採，也無聽聞琴聲，
相對的，即便如此，
那富貴奢華的舊夢
早於離家之際過時—
此處的豐饒，增添嶄新的歡愉。
等 彌撒 一結束，就隨意哼唱
〈那勇士征戰〉之類的曲調，
他們拆解詩歌並縫進懸掛著的布疋，
人人外出為自己搜捕位印第安人—
那些發狂的矮小婦人則不斷呼喚，
呼喚彼此（或喚醒那些鳥禽？）
之後退出，永遠退隱，隱蔽在那曲調之後。

"Brazil, January 1, 1502" was first published in 1960 and collected in Questions of Travel that was published in 1965. The detailed descriptions of selva and Indian women are based on Elizabeth Bishop's trip to Amazon with Aldous Huxley and his wife, Laura Archera, in 1958. This trip inspired Bishop a lot and rescued her from the tedious daily life. It is this trip that made Brazil novel, and to be more specific, exotic again for Bishop. As Peter Brazeau mentions in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, Bishop saw Indians in this trip to Brazilia and Amazon. "They delighted Bishop. Here was the fresh, primitive Brazil with which she had lost touch. The Indians were a friendly, happy, peaceful, even sweet-smiling people." Fusing what she saw and what she had read about Amazon, she wrote " Brazil, January 1, 1502" with "dense foliage, giant flowers, and elusive Indian women who retreat in to the jungle, 'calling to each other' like birds (Brazeau 164).

Bishop, in fact, had ever read the image of the Indian women that communicate with each other with the voice of bird before. When she was a teenager, she read descriptions about the bird women in W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions. In Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, Lorrie Goldenshon quotes Bishop's review of Hudson's book to show how Bishop was attracted by the exotic descriptions of the Indian women: "I wished that the book had been twice as long when I put it down, and I was filled with longing to leaver for South America immediately and search for those forgotten bird-people" (Goldensohn 203). Bishop was impressed with an Indian girl, Rima. According to Hudson, Rima's "native language resembles birdsong" (Goldensohn 204). The little Indian women speaking like birds in " Brazil, January 1, 1502" are definitely based on her impression of Rima.

This poem is historical. The title, " Brazil, January 1, 1502," indicates to the invasion of Portuguese colonists in 1502. They entered the Guannabara Bay and named their future city, Rio de Janeiro that means " River of January " (Goldenshon 196). The speaker, especially in the first and second stanza, speaks like the Portuguese colonialists. Both the speaker and the colonialists are attracted, but at the same time afraid of the mysterious rain forest and strange creatures.

Primary Text:

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

Secondary Texts:

Bromwich, David. "Elizabeth Bishop's Dream-Houses." Elizabeth Bishop. Harold Bloom. Ed. New York : Chelsea House, 1985. 159-73.

Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge : Harvard UP, 1991.

Fountain, Gray and Peter Brazeau. Eds. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst :The U of Massachusetts P, 1994.

Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York : Columbia UP,1992.

Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy. New York : Cambridge UP, 1993.