Elizabeth Bishop: Sandpiper

Elizabeth Bishop: Sandpiper When I went to Hamilton College all the students were men. I was an English major. All the English professors were men. In four years, I don’t think I read a single woman author other than Virginia Woolf. I went on to do graduate study in English at conservative, southern Duke University . We read Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Eliot. It was unavoidable: along with Dickens and maybe Hardy, they were the greatest British novelists of the nineteenth century. I did not read women poets other than Emily Dickinson. Also unavoidable, since she along with Walt Whitman was the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century. (Samuel Johnson had said to his companion Bosworth, “Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.” Johnson was quoted with a wink and a nod, as if he were outrageous but, well, right. That was long ago, though not so long ago that those of my generation don’t remember Johnson’s statement.) When I began teaching, I taught in large part what I had been taught when I was a student. I did include contemporary novelists who had never been part of the curriculum I had encountered, and ventured into women poets who had never been taught to me: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin. It took me twenty years to come to the realization that “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova was the greatest poem of the twentieth century. I had been taught that the honor should go to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot was many things, one of which was that he was a misogynist… It took me thirty years of teaching to wander into some poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Of her earlier poems, well, the word ‘meh’ would represent my reaction. The poems of the middle of her career and her later years were to me, to put it mildly, a revelation. No poet writing in English in the twentieth century, save the two great Irish poets Yeats and Heaney, had the mastery her poems exhibited. Both Irishmen seemed at ease in their poems. (Yeats’ great early poem,” Adam’s Curse,” makes clear that he worked hard achieving that ease.) That was never the case, for me, with Bishop. She worked, worked, to attain the mastery over words I encountered in her poems. More power to her. I now think Bishop is the finest poet to write in English in the middle years of the past century, finer than Auden, more moving than Roethke, deeper than Ginsberg or Plath. When I pondered on what to send out after writing about Neruda, it seemed obvious that I should turn to Bishop. And, because she has more breadth than any poet since, well, Whitman, I thought I would send out two poems, first a shorter lyric, here, then a longer poem that moved from the intensely personal to the universal: “In the Waiting Room.” What follows is an appreciation of her poem describing a shore bird, “The Sandpiper.” Sandpiper The roaring alongside he takes for granted, and that every so often the world is bound to shake. He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake. The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet of interrupting water comes and goes and glazes over his dark and brittle feet. He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes. --Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs, he stares at the dragging grains. The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear. The tide is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which. His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst. I had originally thought at Thanksgiving to send out a poem about a family dinner. But it did not quite synch with my mood. Wallace Stevens ended one of his poems hilariously: “Happens to like is one of the ways things happen to fall.” I love how irreverentially he notes that our emotional lives and our desires are often governed by accident. In this instance, as I was thinking about a poem to write about, I was on a beach. I saw a sandpiper, only one as it turned out, and my thoughts turned to a wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop. One beach, one bird, the accident of my being there: and here we are, considering Bishop’s poem. The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an extraordinary group of poets emerge in Britain and America: Yeats was hitting his peak years; T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens1 were constructing a body of poetic work marked by such high achievement that it rivaled any era in the six hundred years in which poetry has been written in English. Perhaps only the later years of the Elizabethan period and the following decades, and the upwelling of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, equal the profusion of modernist poetry for preeminence in English verse. What to make of the period which followed the modernist flowering2? In hindsight, I would hazard that there were three preeminent poets of the immediate post-modern period, W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop, and of those three, Bishop seems to me the largest and most important figure. Born in New England, she lost her father at a very early age and her mother as well (to mental illness). She was raised by relatives, first in Nova Scotia, then in New England. Bishop was often beset by personal tragedy. She was often uncomfortable fitting into the contours of her own life. An inveterate traveler, she for two decades lived in Brazil. She won prizes, taught later in life at Harvard, and compiled a body of work that stands as the great poetic monument between the moderns and the emergence of her close friend and near contemporary Robert Lowell and other so-called confessional poets3. We’ll look at two poems by Bishop, “Sandpiper” and, in a future mailing, “In the Waiting Room.” They are very different poems. 1 I hope it is not off-putting to be mentioning other poets, and later in the paragraph to compare modernism to other eras. It is not bragging, ‘hey, look at me, I know a lot of poets,’ any more than it is bragging to link Michael Jordan’s extraordinary basketball career to his having played with Scottie Pippen, or LeBron James to having played with the others of Miami’s big three, DeWayne Wade and Chris Bosh. Poets are similar to basketball players: they perform in context, and comparing Jordan and his peers to James and his is no in any way unusual. Just as you don’t have to know how to diagram a pick and roll play to enjoy a basketball game, you don’t have to be a poetry scholar to enjoy poems. Nor, in the one case, to admire the players who score nor in the other, the poets who write fine poems. 2 The attentive reader will recall Frost’s final couplet from “The Oven Bird”: “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing.” 3 Including Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass – and Roethke as well. Because he wrote over a long period, I am grouping Lowell with those younger than he, and not with Bishop and Auden. “Sandpiper” echoes a theme we have seen in previous poems, particularly in William Carlos Williams’ “To a Poor Old Woman,” a poem where an old woman eats plums on the street and “they taste good to her,” and in Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Tomatoes.” In that poem Neruda celebrates the objects which surround us, amidst which we live our lives, and insists that the small things we take for granted are important, even if we too often we ignore them. Celebrating what I have been calling the immanent world is in many ways a Romantic theme, even if the conventional view is that the Romantics4 were in search of transcendence. Nowhere is that celebration better expressed than in the late Romantic Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tortuously, since every line he wrote was tortuous, he made clear what I am speaking of in a quartet of lines in his sonnet, “God’s Grandeur”: Generations have trod, have trod, have trod, And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. Reading Hopkins always seems hard, but in some ways that is deceiving: a translation of these lines into ordinary prose would be, ‘there have been a lot of folks through a good many generations who have been too caught up with buying and selling in the marketplace, and working long hours and working in factories. Everything in this bright and wonderful world God created for us has been dirtied by what men and women have done, and the world has the stink of commerce hovering over it. Nothing grows in our industrial landscape, nor can foot feel, being shod.

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