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rev. March 2010 __ "A Self-Forgetful, Perfectly Useless COi1centration": Elizabeth Bishop's Art of the Shore

by

Megan I-Johnes

Cassandra Cleghorn, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillii1ent of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with 1-/(il1ors in English

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

April 18,2011 ADI(NOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my adviser, Professor Cassandra Cleghorn, fo r all of her patient encouragement and indispensable contributions and feedback. I could not have finished this thesis without her, and feel blessed that I had this opportunity to work and collaborate with her.

I would also like to thank Professor Richard King for his wonderful guidance during the first stages of this thesis.

Thank you Gabby, Leah, and Sasha fo r helping me de-stress and putting up with me during that last emotional, sleepless week.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and Nick for their steadfast support and love throughout this whole experience.

2 CONTENTS

Introduction: "This Place of Meeting": A Taxonomy of the Shore fo r NatUralist and Poets

Chapter One: Indrawn and Dubious: Bishop's Idiosyncratic Sublime 22

Chapter Two: "Being In" and "Pulling Down": Bishop's Tenus of Art 48

Conclusion: Erosion 70

Bibliography 79

"This Place of Meeting": A Taxonomy of the Shore for Naturalist and Poets

Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea (1955) is a scientist's attempt to understand and taxonomize the shore. I identify Carson as a scientist, but that title immediately demands adjustment. While working as a biologist for the Bureau of Fisheries, Carson was assigned to research and write radio scripts. One day, her boss Elmer Higgens asked her to write a brochure fo r the bureau. He returnedthe piece she wrote to her, telling her:

"It won't do fo r us; try again." He then told her to send it t6 the Atlantic Monthly instead.

Carson did just that, and the piece originally intended as a scientificbrochure was published as the essay "Undersea" in the September 1937 edition. It was this piece that attracted the publisher Simon & Schuster, who soon after contacted Carson about writing a book. Carson's firstbook was Under the Sea-Wind (1941). Later books included The

Sea Around Us (1951), and Silent Spring (1962). Within these books, Carson still retained her scientific style, but one with a decidedly literary bend. Carson however, does not attribute the poetry of her writing to anything other than the innate nature of the sea: "If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it isn't because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."l

Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House, and a writer whom Carson admired, reviewed Carson saying: "It is Miss Carson's particular gift: to be able to blend scientific knowledge with the spirit of poetic awareness, thus restoring to us a true sense of the ,, world. 2

1. Arlene R. Qllaratiello. Rachel Carson: A Biography. (Westport, CT., Greenwood Press, 2004), pp. 62. 2. Arlene R. Qllaratiello. Rachel Carson: A Biography. (Westport, CT., Greenwood Press, 2004), pp. 60. The Edge of the Sea approaches the life and characters of three different kinds of shores along the Atlantic Coast�JJ'om the expanses of sand upon which endlessly beat the rhythmic waves to the rushing silence of a frozen sea. For Carson the shore is more than an aesthetically pleasing place; there remains that elusive and indefinable nature that

Carson identifies as "strange": "The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of the earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the lanq, where the tides have pressed fo rward over the continents, , receded, and then returned. ,3 Perhaps this fe eling of "strangeness" comes from the otherworldliness of the shore, It is a place in-between two disparate environments, the land and the sea. This meeting place is "an area of unrest," and it draws one to try and identify the strange and beautiful: "]t is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is

,,4 hidden. Perhaps it is this probing for the hidden key of understanding that draws people to the sea, creating a place for contemplation and inspiration.

Rachel Carson was born in J 907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Always ambitious, she alone of her two other siblings finished high school, attending the Pennsylvania

College fo r Women in 1925. Here she believed she would major in English, and wrote frequently for the college newspaper and literary supplement. In order to fulfilla science requirement in her sophomore year, she signed up fo r Biology�a course that would change her life. She fe ll in love with science, and struggled with the decision to change her major to Biology. IronicallY enough, it was a poem that helped her make her decision to pursue science as a career. While trying to decide her major, she read the poem

3. Rachel Carson. Th e Edge of the Sea. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998, 1955) pp. 1. 4. Carson, pp. 7.

2 "Locksley Hall" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the line "For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go" struck a chord within her. She later wrote to her friend

Dorothy Freeman, "1 can still remember my intense emotional response as that line spoke to something within me seeming to tell me that my own path led to the sea-which then I had never seen-and that my own destiny was somehow linked with the sea."s She changed her major to biology. After college she went to woi'k for the Bureau of Fisheries as one of the firsttwo women to be employed there in a non-clerical position. There

Carson worked closely with the sea and the shore, traveling and gathering the material that would eventually manifest in her books.

The shore holds a unique place in life and literature. It is a zone that is neither land nor sea, yet both at the same time. Here is the archetypal landscape of dichotomy.

Not only embodying "movement and change and beauty," it also encompasses their antitheses as well. Even though the shore is constantly moving and changing, it is also an ancient and persevering place. "The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there have been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meetiilg of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of , life., 6 These merged dichotomies lend to the fluidity in delineating the shore and the urge to attempt to definitivelyset it in ink. Writers seeking t() findthe "inner meaning and significance" of this elusive place often find themselves drawn to it again and again, observing the drama of its riddles. Rachel Carson is a usefLil tool to understanding the significance of the shore in literature. Although many have written about the shore, their viewpoints are limited by their lack of mobility. Carson is ullique in her comprehensive

5. Arlene R. Quaratiello. Rachel Carson: A Biography. (Westport, ct., Greenwood Press, 2004), pp. 10. 6. Carson, pp. 2.

3 contemplation of myriad shores. She divides the shores into three types: rocky, sandy, and coral reefs. In her books ?he also address the physical forces at work-surf: currents, tides, waves. While the language of her prose is oftenpoetic, her approach is scientific.

To understand the shore as a comprehensive whole, to begin parsing the riddle, Carson shows that you must firstund�rstand the diversity of their expression. To do this Carson catalogs the shores, using formidable powers of observation to bring readers up against their subj ects, so that the strange become beautiful, and the beautiful unearthly:

Whenever I go down into this magical zone of the low water of the spring tides, I look fo r the most delicately beautiful of all the shore's inhabitants-flowers that are not plant but animal, blooming on the threshold of the deeper sea. In that fairy cave I was not disappointed. Hanging fr om its roof were the pendent flowers of the hydroid Tubularia, pale pink, fr inged and delicate as the wind flower. Here were creatures so exquisitely fa shioned that they seemed unreal, their beauty too fragile to exist in a world of crushing force. Yet every detail was fu nctionally usefLlI, every stalk and hydranth and petal-like tentacle fashioned fo r dealing with the realities of existence. I knew that they were merely waiting, in that moment oftl1e tide's ebbing, fo r the return ofthe sea. Then in the rush of water, in the surge of surf and the pressure of the incoming tide, the delicate flower heads would stir with life. They would sway on their slender stalks, and their long tentacles would sweep the returning water, finding in it all they needed for life.7

Delicacy and durability are COl11bin ed in one creature whose appearance itself is an

illusion, both plant and animal. Here you can see how close Carson's eye brings the minutia of life-"every detail...functionally" serving to depict these marginal lives as

deftly as with a painter's brush. Rachel Carson fully records the diversity of life at the

shore, from the single grain of sand and barnacles to the immensity of the ocean. But as

beautiful as this passage is in its detail, it does more than just catalog. In Carson the minute is magnified in order tp register the vast:

To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalog its life. Understanding comes only when, standjng Oil a beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its land fo rms and produced the rock and sand of which it is

7. Carson, pp. 4.

4 composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life 8 beating always at its shores-blindly, inexorably pressing for a foothold.

Both aspects, the minute and vast, are necessary to begin to understand the marginal world of the shore. It is sensing both the "long rhythms of earth and sea" as well as seeing the life prolific in its margins.

Carson is fascinated by the life of the shore in all its detail. In this mutable world, ,, "only the most hardy and adaptable can survive. 9 She Cali findwit hin the smallest crab the "delicate, destructible, yet incredibly vital force that soinehow holds its place amid the harsh realities of the inorganic world."lo In all the nooks and crannies of the rocky coast she finds life in moments, suspended in time for secoildsof beauty beforethey are wiped away by the "harsh realities of the inorganic world":

In the moment when I looked into the cave a little elfinstarfish hung down, suspended by the merest thread, perhaps by only a single tube foot. It reached down to touch its own reflection, so perfectly delineated that there might have been, not one starfish, but two. The beauty of the reflected images and of the limpid pool itself was the poignant beauty ofthiilgs that are ephemeral, existing I I only until the sea should return to fi ll the little cave.

In many ways the beauty of the shore lies in the ephemeral, in these almost snap-shot still moments before the world is again moving and changing. Ci'eatures and the evidence of their existence last only until it is washed away: "1 found the tracks of a shore bird, probably a sanderling, and fo llowed them a little; then they tLlrned toward the water and ,,12 were lost, for the tide had erased them and them as though they had never been.

At the same time, the shore is poignant for its permanence-"as long as there

8. Carson, pp. vii. 9. Carson, pp. 1. 10. Carson, pp. 5. 1 I. Carson, pp. 3. 12. Carson, pp. 5.

5 ,, have been an emih and sea there has been this place of the meeting ofland and water. 13

Even in the ephemeral the eteq1al is present: "[At the shore] there was also an awareness of the past and of the continuing ±low of time, obliterating much that had gone before, as ,, the sea that had that morning washed away the tracks of the bird. 14 Part of this is due to the substrate upon which the life of the shore attempts to write its story-the sand.

Always shifting, the sand will wash away the evidence of life with every breaking wave just as the sanderling's tracks 'vvere erased. With the constant edits of the waves, nothing of permanence can be written in the sand. However, the sand itself, in every grain, is an expression of consistency. The integral piece of earth at the shore is sand. It is itself

"steeped in antiquity. Sand is a substance that is beautiful, mysterious, and infinitely variable; each grain on a beach is the result of processes that go back into the shadowy beginnings of life, or of the eilrth itself."]5 Sand belongs intimately to the processes of the shore, swept at the waves' will whichever way. Carson thinks of sand as the shore's

"ultimate product": "We think of rock as a sym bol of durability, yet even the hardest rock shatters and wears away when attacked by rain, frost or surf. But a grain of sand is almost indestructible. It is the ultimat� product of the work of the waves--the minute hard core of ,, mineral that remains after years of grinding and polishing. 16 Within the most minute aspects of the shore, there is a vast array of significance.

The three manifestatiolls of shoreline that Carson examines in her taxonomy encompass the various represeptations of time. Along the rocky shore, "up and down the coast the line of the forest is drawn sharp and clean on the edge of seascape of surf and

13. Carson., pp. 2. 14. Carson, pp. 6. 15. Carson, pp. 125. 16. Carson, pp. 130.

6 sky and rocks. The softness of sea fog blurs the contours 6fthe rocks; gray water and gray mists merge offshore in a dim and vaporous world that 111ight be a world of creation, ,, stirring with new life. ]7 The rocky shore is young, a "woHd of creation," where life stirs in the crevices, "and one might easily imagine that the sea came in only yesterday to ,, create this particular line ofcoast. 18 The violence and power of the waves as they crash on the rocks mimics the quick impatience of youth. The sandy shore, on the other hand, is a place of unhurried calm: "On the sands of the sea's edge, especially where they are broad and bordered by unbroken lines of wind-built dunes, there is a sense of antiquity that is missing from the young rock coast of New England. It is in part a sense of the unhurried deliberation of earth processes that move with infinite leisure, with all eternity at their disposaI."]9 At the sandy shore, the equilibrium between land and sea is more established, from the sand grains "steeped in antiquity," to the unhurried motions of the tides over the sandy flats.

The coral coast comprises past, present and future:

The atmosphere of the Keys is strongly and peciliiarly their own. It may be that here, more than in most places, remembrance of the past and intimations of the future are linked with present reality. In bare aile! jaggedly corroded rock, sculptured with the patterns of the coral, there is the desolation of a dead past. In the multicolored sea gardens seen from a boat as one drifts above them, there is a tropical lushness and mystery, a throbbing sense orthe pressure of life; in coral reef and mangrove swamp there are the dimly seen foreshadowings of the 20 future.

This is a shore that is continuously building, the coral building upon coral. The dead coral is the foundation tor new growth, the tangled mangrove roots creating new islands in the muddy shoals. Within the coral and mangrove habitats life finds an easy niche, the

17. Carson, pp. 42. 18. Carson, pp. 45. 19. Carson, pp. 125. 20. Carson, pp. 191.

7 "tropical lushness" and "throbbing sense of the pressure of life" evident in the flourishing diversity of the coral reef ,, What connects allthese shores is the "unifying touch of the sea. 2! The different shores are not fixedin time; they are constantly changing:

Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and fo und a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have grOll11d these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind's eye these coastal fo rms merge and blend in a shifttng kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixedreal ity-earth become as fluid as the sea itsele2

] f the expression of the shores (lre so disparate and yet always blending in this "shifting kaleidoscopic pattern," then perhaps the place to look for meaning is in the boundary. If these shores can be made one by the sea, then their commonality lies in the margin. But even this idea is difficultto resolve. With the constant motion of the sea, through waves, tides and currents, this margin is constantly shifting. "Always the edge of the sea ,, remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. 23

Carson fo und a ubiquitc)Us element of the boundary in the wrack line. Here the

"Jlotsam and jetsam of the tide lines" collect, and "though what we see here may be but the husks and fragments of life, through it we are made aware of life and death, of movement and change, of the transport of living things by ocean currents, by tides, by ,, wind-driven waves. 24 It is a "net of flotsam," in which the "weavers use the materials at , hand, and the design of the net changes from north to south., 25 In one tapestry you may find "caught in the strands of dried beach grass and seaweeds there are crab claws and

21. Carson, pp. 249. 22. Carson, pp. 249. 23. Carson, pp. 1. 24. Carson, pp. 188. 25. Carson, pp. 164.

8 bits of sponge, scarred and broken mollusk shells, old spars crusted with sea growths, the ,, bones of fishes, the feathers ofbirds. 26 In another you may see the "j ackstraw gaffs and , hooks," "bobbles of sponges," and "a fence of chicken wire. ,27 It is also fo und in what ,, Carson calls the "black zone of the shore 28: "Wherever rocks meet the sea, the microplants have written their dark inscription, a message only partially legible although it seems in some way to be concernedwith the universality (jftides and oceans. Though other elements of the intertidal world come and go, this darkening stain is ,, omnipresent. 29 She sees this "black zone" on the Maine coast, in the "blackened ...coral rim of Key Largo, and streaked the smooth platform of coquina at St. Augustine, and left their tracings on the concrete jetties at Beaufort. It is the saIhe all over the world-from

South Africa to Norway and from the Aleutains to Australia. This is the sign of the ,, meeting of land and sea. 30

Carson's "dark inscription," this apparent illegibility of the shore, brings us explicitly from the scientificto the literary. The sea writes metaphorically, but writers write literally, not on sand but on paper, words that are me2uit to be read by others-their legibility is more or less prescribed. Their role is to decipher the coded mysteries of the shore, ours to illuminate the riddle of their words. The shore continually confounds these efforts. Be it mysterious black zones, or the constant editing of the waves, the shore's narrative is a multi-layered hieroglyphic. Various poets have foundthe seashore provoking as an ideal artistic ecosystem, fo cusing on specificaspects of this place in

26. Carson, pp. 164. 27. Elizabeth Bishop. "The Bight:' Th e Complete Poems. (New York: r�alTar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), pp. 60. 28. Carson, pp. 47. 29 . Carson, pp. 47. 30. Carson, pp. 47.

9 order to inscribe their own meaning onto it. We will turn to Elizabeth Bishop as our main poet of the shore. Before takil1g on Bishop's peculiar fascination with this zone, I will firstuse poetry by three of Bishop's American predecessors: Carl Sandberg's

"Sandpiper," Walt Whitman's "As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life," and T.S Eliot's "The

Dry Salvages." What fo llows is a poetic taxonomy orthe shore, a way of applying the scientist's powers offascinatjon, close observation and synthesis to the literary seashore.

Carl Sandburg wrote of another creature that attempts to write at the shore, and whose efforts to do so are continuously confounded. In "Sandpiper," these birds find their home in what seems like an otherwise inhabitable place, futilely writing words that will never remain:

Ten miles oftla,t land along the sea. Sandland where the salt water kills the sweet potatoes. Home for sandpipers-the script of their feet is on the sea shingles-They write in the morning, it is gone at noon-they write at noon, it is gone at night. Pity the land, the sea, the ten mile flats, pity anythingbut the sandpipers' wire 1 egs ancI J',eeL- , I

These literary birds live wher\"; the nat sandland "kills the sweet potatoes." With their feet they write in the sand, but whatever messages they might be leaving are lost to the sea's constant revisions of the shore_ Constantly writing, and rewriting, the sandpipers' lot seems to embody every synonym of futility: hopeless, pointless, useless, impotent, unsuccessful. Their job is an analog for the poet's, yet Sandburgexp licitly says not to pity them. Every other aspect of this scene is susceptible to pity, but not the "sandpipers' wire legs and feet." Even the i�npJements with which the sandpiper and poet write

31. Carl Sandburg. "Sandpiper." Smoke and Steel - V Mist Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1922).

]0 resemble each other-the birds' wire legs and the poet's rigid pen. The sandpiper's constantly erased script and ceaseless efforts to write morning, noon and night despite the relentless setbacks is as dedicated as the poet of the margin who tries to decipher what that script means.

In confrontingthe same illegible script, Walt Whitm:andoes not attempt to decipher its meaning. Instead, in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," when faced with the ocean his very self is reduced to the meanest elements bf the wrack-line. In Whitman, and other Romantic poets, this encounter with the ocean elicits an underlying anxiety between the conceptualization of the self and landscape: "The context fo r this phenomenon is a fundamental tension, the tension that arises between the Romantic imagination, conceived of as a power that transforms and hliinanizes nature, and the natural world itself, so far as it resists imaginative effort iri favor of its own otherness. ,,32

In grappling with the sublime, something supremely vast and mysterious, the mind has no choice but to empty itself in order to contend with it. However, in order to gain from this ,, encounter with the sublime, the mind is pressed "to the bririkof nonexistence. 33 This is the "oceanic dilemma," a term derived by Lawrence Kramer from a state of mind described by Sigmund Freud. In Freud's Civilization and It's Discontents, he addresses an "oceanic fe eling" described by a friend: "Itis a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, liilbounded-as it were, ,,, 'oceani c. 34

From the firstline of "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," it feels as though the

32. Lawrence Kramer. "Ocean and Vision: Imaginative Dilemma in Wordsworth, Whitman, and Stevens:' The Journal of English and German Philology, vol. 79, no. 2., (University of Illinois Press, April 1980), pp. 210. 33. Ibid., pp. 211. 34. Sigmund Freud. Civilization and its discontents. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005, 1961) pp. 26.

11 speaker is already diminished py both life and the ocean in these repetitious eight words.

The word "ebb'd" not only invokes the movement of the tides, but the waning of life.

These shores are familiar, the pace leisurely. Here the unintelligible is the "hoarse and sibilant" voice of the sea, the rustle of the waters as the wash up on the sand. In the state of mind with which he "utter[s] poems," the speaker is particularly vulnerable to the sublime, and is "seiz'd by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,! the rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land/ of the globe." Here at the wrack- line, the separating line of sediment that represents both land and sea, the speaker does not findenli ghtenment-he only finds debris, the t10tsam and jetsam of both provinces:

"Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea gluten,! Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce." This "windrow" is not a place fo r man, just his trash, and the trash ofthe sea. Yet, it "stcll1ds for all the water and all land of the globe." Kramer argues that the "rim is nowhere, a zone of non-entity, fo r the self confinedby it; but it is everywhere, too, because the self dwindles to nothing only by fading into the totality of ,, the world. 35 Perhaps by fo cu;sing on these slender lines of residue Whitman finds a place of refuge fo r the self in fqcing the "ocean of life."

In the second stanza tl1e shores have become unfamiliar, the voices that of the

"men and women wreck'd." In this fo reign landscape, the mysterious ocean rolls ominously "closer and closer," and instead of gazing musingly at the "slender windrows," the speaker becomes part of the driftand sand:

As I wend to th� shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean SQ mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify (1tthe utmost a little wash'd-up drift,

35. Kramer, pp. 219.

12 A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

The speaker is signified by the sea-drift-all the meaning ofhis existence is now contained by "a few sands and dead leaves." Insignificant, he gathers himself and

"merges" with the wrack-line, and instead of becoming nothing, is now a part of that which he earlier cited as representing everything. Still, this merging only elicits confusion and despair: "0 bamed, balk'd, bent to the very earth,! Oppressed with myself that I have dared to open my mouth." This and prior poetic efforts are dismissed as

"blab," Whitman's true self "untouch'd, untold, altogether iinreach'd." That his paltry songs are silently and instantaneously deconstructed by the personified sea through simple comparison indicates to the speaker that words cannot come close to embodying it-and if you cannot elucidate the object, how can you coi1te close to "singing" the self?

This very act of personifying the ocean, however, is how the mind begins to challenge the hegemony of the sea. In the third stanza the sea-drift is again expanded,

"these little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all." The speaker also ceases to be passive and instead "throws" himself on, "clings" to, and "hold(s)" firm to the shore, and despite the acknowledgement of his diminutive status,36 still seeks to learn the

"secret of the murmuring I envy." The speaker wants to, oi1ce and for all, clari(y the murmuring into intelligible language-not so unlike the attempt to read the illegible script at the shore. These are the same yearnings manifested differently.

The final stanza implores the "ocean of life" to cOIitihuc its clamor, to "cease not your moaning you fierce old mother," but appeals that his qiJeries and explorations be

36. Whitman writes "r too am but a trail of drift and debris." Although this line is very similar irs previous stanza's counterpart "1 too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift," it is situated among many more repetitions of"1 too," inciting a tone ofsolict,ii-!ty. rather than oblivion in the fa ce of the immense.

l3 more welcome. Instead of the sting, he asks fo r inclusion. Life is no longer ebbing, but

returning as well. In spite ofthis flowing return, the debris is now more morbid:

Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses, Froth, snowy wl1ite, and bubbles, (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last, See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,) Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,

Despite the repulsiveness of "ooze" exuding from the speaker's "dead lips," this scum, this ooze

is made beautiful. The "snowy white" froth contrasts with the "prismatic colors" of these

bubbles. Iridescent and gIisten iqg, the awful evidence of death is made playful-cheerful-

"glistening and rolling" with the other fragments of the wrack-line, the rim. From what originally was just a shoreline littered with wreckage and the shreds of life, is now a "burgeoning

,,37 imaginative center, complete with the "blare of cloud-trumpets" at the margin where your

" musings can be influenced by 0 dab ofliquid or soil." The collision of time both ancient and

continuously perpetuating constitlltes this idea of immensity. In T.S Eliot's "The Dry Salvages,"

the sea and time are inseparable considerations.

"The sea is all about US.,,38 Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" stmis with the river, but it

is the sea that is everywhere, and touches everything. It is "the land's edge also, the

granite/ Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses / Its hints of earlier and other

creation." With each wave that breaks upon the land, the creeping fingers of water try

and reach ever higher. The poem's real concern is hinted at in this segment-the shore is

a place fo r both "earlier" and "other creation." It is at the shore where man is reminded that there are things in this wClrld before him, and things that are completely other from

him. This other can be seen in the "starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whales backbone."

In the tide-pools, the "delicate algae and the sea anemone" are "offer[ ed] to our

37. Kramer, pp. 224. 38. T.S Eliot. "The Dry Salvages." four Salvages. (1941).

14 curiosity." The lives of these creatures that are both exquisitely delicate and yet inetTably durable is something unimaginable to man-and yet another aspect of the shore that defines it as a margin between the knowable and unknowable, a place of in-between.

The shore is also a place of life and death. After marveling at its creatures, "it tosses up our losses, the tornseine, / The shattered lobsterpol, the broken oar / And the gear of foreign dead men." All that is left of the men that tty and cross this border are mutilated objects; these things must embody the men they belonged to, because another ,,39 frightening thing about the ocean is that "only bones abide / There, in the nowhere. [t is both nowhere, and everywhere; all encompassing, but incapable of being mapped. The only evidence of those lost to the sea is the belongings that wash up on the shore.

One thing is clear: is that at the shore one confronts the boundary of time. Here is

"when time stops and time is never ending" and the "tolling bell," beyond the shore and out at sea, "measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried / Ground swell." How is it that the place in which the fu ture is told, the losses are tallied, is at once measured in a meter unmeasurable to man? The time measured is "older / Than time counted by anxious worried women / Lying awake." For longer than then have gone out to sea, and women have waited anxiously on their return, the ground swell "Clangs / The bell."

Not only is the seashore ancient and prehistoric (history being only within the purview of man to tell), it exists in-between the "past and the future, / between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, / The future futureless." Time lies suspended, motionless yet always present, always progressing.

As we enter the second movement of the poem, we leave the physical place orthe

39. Robert Lowell, "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." Lord Wecll]!'s Castle. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and company, 1946).

15 shore, and enter a limbo where only the rhythms and repetitions of the poem's form keep us anchored in space: "The se�ond movement, with a sense of profound oppression, meditates this revolving sphere of time, and times within time ...The rhythm of the sestina, more eloquently than words could do, implies eternal recurrence. It is a chant of sorrow, monotonous and inescapable. ,,40 Whereas in the first movement, repetition was referenced in the "distant rote in the granite teeth;" in this movement the motions of the ocean, and time, and words are found within the poem's structure. The poem vacillates between knowledge and despairing ignorance, asking "where is there an end of it," "of them," and answering "there is no end, but addition," "there is no end of it":

There is no end qf it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of the withered flowers, To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, To the driftof the sea and the drifting wreckage, The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable Prayer of the one Annunciation.

]n asking repetitiously for an i;nd, man acknowledges that at the shore he faces the infinite. The above stanza answers this question, but not necessarily in a way that we would wish fo r. It seems oppressively depressing, that the there is no end. Because the presence of infinity at the shore makes us more aware of our inability to participate in this infinite. Bachelard wrote in P()eticsof Sp ace: "In the presence of such obvious ,, immensity ...a poet can point the way to intimate depth. 41 Bachelard definethe immense as "a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that transports the

40. Anon. On the Four Quartets ojTS Eliot. (London, Vincent Stuart Publishers Ltd., 1953), p. 40. 41. Bachelard, Th e Poetics of Sp ace. trans. Maria JoJas. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 189.

16 ,, dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity. 42 It is the poet's peculiar talent to enter this daydream and contemplate grandeur, confront the infiniteand provide a mirror.43 Our lives are finite, and it is by being exposed to the endless "drift of the sea," that we are made fo rcibly aware of our mortality. The bone's prayer is to Death-the last remnants of life that remain as testimonies to death. Our prayer, in the face of death, is fo r the Annunciation. It is in this hope of salvation, of our own infinity beyond Death, that we "hardly, barely" pray for.

In the end, although most attempt to "apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time ..." this is a job only for the saints. "For most of us, there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time" that allows us to approach the infinite.

F or most of us, this is the aim Never here to be realised; Who are only undefeated Because we have gone on trying; We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew-tree) The life of significant soil.

The attempts of the poet are here recognized as a triumph, ifon ly a meager one.

Undefeated through unending effort, this end is finally broUght about in death, the end of man's contemplation of the infinite. In a "temporal reversi()ii" we are both brought back from the "unattended moment" as well as return to the "sigliificant soil."

In Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Crusoe in England," the protagonist's life is comprised of meager triumphs, the shipwrecked sailor living perpetually "in and out of time." "Crusoe in England" is perhaps the most emblematiC of Elizabeth Bishop's

42. Ibid., pp. 183. 43. Ibid., pp. 196.

17 maritime poems. In it, Bishop appropriates Daniel Defoe's character Robinson Crusoe and imagines him living back in England, remembering his past that "none of the ,, books 44 ever got right, his island "un-rediscovered, un-renamable." Crusoe's island is fu ll of volcanoes, but smaller qnd more ordinary than "I thought volcanoes should be."

Size and perception are muddled and transmuted as Crusoe imagines himself a giant, but

"can't bear to think what size! the goats and tUliles were," and as the waves are "closing, closing in, but never quite." (--Ie owns the waterspouts produced by unseen whales, "their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches / of scuffed-upwhite," and observes snail shells that look like "beds of irises" "at a distance."

Although alone in what could be called an ultimate, unmitigated coast-lined wilderness, Crusoe turns away from an experience that the Romantics would have sought out. Instead he turns to books for knowledge, rhetorically asking, "Why didn't I know enough of something?" He reads poetry books "full of blanks," and reads Wordsworth to his iris-beds: "'They flash upoq that inward eye, / which is the bliss ... ' The bliss of what?" A mocking allusion to "Daffodils," it alludes to the "bliss of solitude" that

Wordsworth fe lt "in vacant or in pensive mood," as he remembers wandering alone along a bay and through a field of dallodils. In comparison the shipwrecked, lonely and miserable Crusoe, this phrase becomes the naIve indulgence of an auspicious Romantic solipsism. Instead, Crusoe consciously turns his experience domestic, impossibly attempting to recreate the socia). I-Ie creates "island industries," experimenting with home-brew ("the awful, tizzy, stinging stuff') and playing a home-made ±lute ("(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)"). Drunkenly he celebrates the domestic: "and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats. / Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?"

44. Elizabeth Bishop. The Complete Poems. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), pp. 162.

18 A self.... prescribed naturalist, Crusoe seems to take sOlne joy in recalling the beach's "marbled colors," the hissing turtles, introspective goats and iris-like "bright violet-blue" snails. Yet although Crusoe records the sights, sounds and smells of his island, he also has nightmares of an endless life of observation:

I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away fi·om mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

This nightmare of a life of endless cataloging almost drives Crusoe insane. It is the appearance 0 f Friday, of another human, that saves him frolTi the con sum ing need fo r an all-encompassing knowledge. With Friday this island exile no longer seems to resemble a pennutation of hell, with the omnipresent hissing and shrieking, the self-christened volcano "Mount Despair" and gruesome dreams of "slittiIig a baby's throat, mistaking it / for a baby goat." Instead, Crusoe repeats "Friday was nice," and seems content to watch him playing with goats instead. Therefore when the next stanza arrives, consisting of one alienated line, "And then one day they came and took us otl" it fe els abrupt, and no longer the salvation that rescue would have been before Friday.

This line also illuminates the hinges upon which the rest of the poem has swung unnoticed: "them" and "us," "off" and "on." The island in retrospect has become an imaginative interior while life on the other "island" is "real" and "uninteresting." His knife, an object that previously lived through the intensity ()f Crusoe's concentration,

"now ...won 't look at me at all. / The living soul has dribbled away." All that remains of his island is himself and the catalog of similarly meaningless items bound fo r a museum,

19 as we heartbreakingly learn: "-And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles / seventeen years ago come March." At the end of this lengthy poem, the last thought is not of imagination, islands or "things." It is of Crusoe's real savior, Friday.

The purpose of this taxonomy is to draw fr om these exemplary works common tropes writers employ when contemplating the shore, a topos that is at once particular and universal. For aJ] of their keen attention to the details of the shore, Sandburg, Whitman and Eliot are finally writers. Carson, for all her literary faculties, is finally a scientist. But all are bound by an understanding of the powerful effect of this zone. Certain themes permeate their writing about the shore: the mooring of the ephemeral and permanent in one place meaning in the fr agments fo und in the wrackline, the hieroglyphic traces of life upon the paper-like sand. The shore offers a platform for identifying with a vast mysterious force, one that Carson acknowledges but hesitates to name, but that the others identify readily as the sublime. The integral difference between this scientist and those poets it that while the poet anp scientist both perceive the omnipresence of erosion and mortality at the shore, the poets miss the pattern, thecycles of geological time running parallel to and exceeding hUnl(l:ntime.

This is where Bishop stands as the keystone between the mirroring arches of the poetical and empirical. While she shares with the other fo ur writers a fascination with the shore, she is also a maverick. Bishop was not a prolific poet-during her lifetime she published only 101 poems. Of these, 34 were about or included the sea and the shore; many of her prose pieces concern the shore as well. It is this significant proportion of her

20 poems that matters most to me; in them Bishop makes an invaluable contribution to the body of maritime poetry, but also, and more importantly, transfonns the readers' sense of what a poem about the seashore can make of that topos, and how such illuminations might be made.

Bishop's extraordinary powers of indirection are perfectly stimulated by the shore. This zone figuresas more than Bishop's artistic inspiration. It was also where

Bishop made her home throughout her life. In an acceptance speech for an award,

Bishop admitted: "I have always felt I couldn't possibly live very far inland, away from the ocean; and I have always lived near it, frequently in sight ofiL .. [I have] spent most ,, of my life timorously pecking for subsistence along coastlines of the world. 45 Her maritime poems serve as records of a life spent "timorously pecking forsubsis tence" along the shore, and as evidence that it was this place that inspired some of her most salient and profound reflections.46

45. Millier, pp. 517-5 18. 46. I am aware that there is a body of criticism that addresses Bishop's queer and fe minist identity. While I acknowledge the veracity of this approach, it is a well-traveled path and one that I am not interested in following. Here are some interesting essays that corisider this theme: Lee Edelman: "The Geography of Gender: Elizabeth Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room,'" ContemporCIIJ' Literature, 26 (Summer 1985), 179-96. In Lombardi (1993), 9[-107. Barbara Comins, '''That Queer Sea'; Elizabeth Bishop and the Sea.'" Divisions a/ the Heart; Elizabeth Bishop and the Art a/ Memory and Place. (Wolfville, N .S. ; Gaspereau Press, 2001), 187-197. Gary Fountain. "'Closets, Closets, and More Closets!' Elizabeth Bishop's Lesbianism. " Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures. Ed. Martin (ed and introd ). Duberman. (New York, NY: New York UP, x, 1997.) 247-257. Jarraway, David R. ""0 Canada!": The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop." P/'vILA 1 13.2 (1998): pp. 243-257.

Other critics have also written eloquently about the relationship betweeh Bishop and the sea. While I have gained insight from them, this thesis diverges from them in significant 'vays. Here are some notable works within this consideration: Roger Gilbert. "Framing Water: Historical Knowledge in Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich." Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 144- I 61. Hugh Egan, "Element Bearable to No Mortal": The Sea in Selected Elizabeth Bishop Poems." Richard Sanger. "High Seas: Elizabeth Bishop Returns Home." Ccii1adian Literature. Vol 166 (2000) 113-123. Brain Bartlett. "'The Land Tugging at the Sea'; Elizabeth Bishop's Coasts and Shores." Divisions a/ the

21 In what fo llows I will examine Bishop's art oftbe shore and the ways in which it aligns with the other writers in the Taxonomy. In Chapter One I will look at Bishop's unorthodox sublime in comparison to the sublime as conceived by its progenitors in 19th century American thought. Using "The End of March" and "In the Waiting Room," I will examine how they are in conversation with and instantiate permutations ofthe sublime as expressed by an ex:cerptfr om Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of

Virginia, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, and Walt Whitman's "Sea-Shore Fancies." In

Chapter Two, using the proto-theory written by Bishop in her letters and journals, I will perform a similar investigation of Bishop's divergences with surrealist thought. This chapter will also examine the role of observation and concentration, particularly as a way to pressure Bishop's relationship with Surrealism using her poems "Sandpiper" and "The

Map," and her prose pieces "The Sea & Its Shore" and "In Prison." To conclude I will use succinct readings of "Floriqa" and "At the Fishhouses" to draw together Bishop's maritime themes and to expand into time Bishop's concentration on place.

Heart; Elizabeth Bishop a.ndthe Art of Memory and Place. (Wolfville, N.S.: Gaspereau Press, 2001), 91-102

22 Chapter One: Indrawn and Dubious: Bishop's Idiosyncratic Sublime

In "The End of March," one of the later poems of Geography III, Bishop winds her way down an empty, wintery beach:

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach. Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist.

Everything about this scene feels at once exposed and in hiding. The whole world seems to be closing in on itself, trying to huddle away from the cold wind. "Withdrawn" and

"indrawn" connote reticence and introspection respectively, both thwarting further interpretation. Even the water element of this shore has retreated, "the tide far out, the ocean shrunken." The only life (besides the walkers) are the "seabirds in ones or twos" and the "lone flight of Canada geese." Despite the diminution of the scenes' elements, there is still a sense of the immense sweeping shore-line. Lonely and cheerless, this beach offers only depression and discomfort as "the rackety, icy, offshore wind, / numbed our faces on one side."

The bleak atmosphere continues in the next stanza as the speaker and companions continue walking along the "long beach." The last stanza eiids as the wind blows "back the low inaudible rollers / in upright, steely mist." With the truel nuances of "steely" the poem's fo cus is drawn upward from the sea: "The sky was darker than the water / -it

23 was the color of mutton-fat jacle." Rather than clarifying the subject, the italicized "it" only serves to confuse. The use of "mutton-fat jade" to describe this "it" also invokes a morbid paleness that is echoed in the fo llowing lines:

Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we fo llowed a track of big clog-prints (so big they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on lengths and lengt!ls, endless, of wet white string, looping over the tide-line, down to the water, over and over. finally, they did end: a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, rising on every wave, a sodden ghost, fa lling back, sodden, giving up the ghost. .. A kite string?-l3ut no kite.

The speaker and the dog (or li()n?) both leave tracks in the "wet sand" as evidence of their passing, while the eerily (igent-less string leads to a corpse of string "but no kite."

The string itself is "wet white," like the mutton-fat jade of the water, looping endlessly and leading the speaker to the water. This "man-size" snarl is like a drowned body washed ashore, "rising on every wave." Bishop repeats "sodden" and "ghost," both words that epitomize this miSGrable scene.

This previously pointl\3ss outing has a destination, however-Bishop's "proto- dream-house, I my crypto-dream-house." Bishop would love to "retire there and do nothing, I or nothing much, for�ver." This long and prosy stanza presents Bishop's ideal life, one where she would do nothing but "look through binoculars, read boring books I

... I talk to myself. .." All she requests is "A light to read by-perfect!" Just like a dream though, this wish turns out to be more fanciful than true: "But-impossible I And that day the wind was much too cold I �wen to get that far, I and of course the house was boarded up." The walkers do not even make it to their destination, and Bishop's dream-house retreats, "boarded up."

24 The last stanza offers some hope in a dreary world:

On the way back our faces fr oze on the other side. The sun came out for just a minute. F or just a minute, set in the bezels of sand, the drab, damp, scattered stones were multi-colored, and all those high enough threw out long shadows, individual shadows, then pulled them in again. They could have been teasing the lion sun, except that now he was behind them -a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide, making those big, majestic paw-prints, who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

"FOI' just a minute," the dismal tone of the rest of the poem is lifted with the emergence of the sun. The sun changes the bleached world into a rainbow, as the "drab, damp, scattered stones" become "multi-colored," the alliteration also serving to enliven the verse. Instead of the passivity of the string snarl that's moved only by the pushing waves, the stones throw their shadows and "pulled them in again." Everything has turned lighthearted; the sun is transformed into the lion who made the prints they had earlier fo llowed, and who created the kite to pair with the endlessly looping string.

Some would classify Bishop's "The End of March'; automatically among the 47 Shore-Odes -the American response to the Wordsworthian-style Romantic Crisis-Ode, or confrontation with the sublime: "The sublime is that which in nature or in art impresses the subject with a consciousness of elevation (hypsos). This occurs in a transport contrarily marked with terror at the loss of ordinary selfl100d and ·wonder at the ,, promise of expanded being. 48 In confronting the immense and awe-inspiring in Nature

(capital N), the poet cannot help but be overwhelmed by this spectacle that is beyond words, beyond understanding. In the attempt to understand it, the poet nearly loses

47. Here I am fo llowing Bloom's capitalization, as 1 will with " ROlmihtic" and "Surreal." 48. Rob Wilson, American sublime: the genealogy of a poetic genre. (Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 172.

25 her/himselfto the "abyss" ofthis self-threatening beauty. In The Critique of Judgm ent,

Kant describes the different steps from x to y in his experience of the sublime:

it began with an ()verwhelming natural phenomenon that checked and voided human powers of understanding and imagination, and ended with reason, which was "part or particle of God," producing a transcendent concept to explain it. Subliminity resided not in nature per se but in the calm, reflective mind that contemplated it, reduced it to concepts and words, and proved reason's superiority over it.

The importance of such enCOUl1ters rests not in the poet's/self's confrontation of the

sublime, but rather in the landscape or phenomenon that effect that confrontation. The

climax of the Romantic sublime poem is when the "I" not only recovers and survives the

overwhelming abyss that alm()sten gulfed it, but emerges from this experience

enlightened about the self.

The genesis of the Anlerican sublime can be traced to Thomas Jefferson. In his

Notes on the State of Virginiq, Jeffe rson answers questions directed to him from Fran<;ois

Barbe-Marbois, the Secretary of the French delegation in Philadelphia. Each section is

the answer to a query.49 The first queries concern the geography of the state; in those

chapters Jefferson wrote eloqUently on the natural world, and invoked a term that has

engrossed writers on both sides of the Atlantic: the sublime. In the section answering the

query on Virginia's cascades and caverns, Jefferson describes the Natural Bridge: "the

most sublime of Nature's worlzs, though not comprehended under the present head, must ,, not be pretermitted. 50 As Harold Bloom would later concur, fo r JefTerson the sublime is

49. Bishop mirrors this fr aming in her opening to Geography III, using an excerpt fr om "First Lessons in Geography," in James Monteit\l's Geographical Series. These lessons inquire and answer with a childlike simplicity: "What is Geography ? I A description of the earth's surface. / What is the Earth? I The planet or body on which we live. / What is the shape of the Earth? I Round, like a ball. / Of what is the Earth 's swface composed? / Land and water. 50. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Ed. William Peden, (University of North Carolina Press 1954, 1787), 24-25.

26 5i something that can be recognized, but not fully understood. Despite its ineffability, the sublime is a phenomenon that cannot be omitted from any true understanding of nature.

In a conscious backtracking from the poetic assertions of the passage's first line,

Jefferson continues empirically, carefully describing the patameters and components of this sublime work. Still, Jeffe rson is unable to remain scientific for long: "Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixedrocks, yet fe w men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss." The word "abyss" immediately evokes the sublime. Kant wrote that one feels the sublime when "findingal l the might of imagination still unequal to its ideas .... [that] the mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime in nature ... the point of excess fo r the imagination (towards which is it driven in the apprehensioh of the intuition) is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself"S2 Sure enough, "few men" becomes "you" as both the reader and Jefferson are transported to this precipice, about to brave an encounter with the abyss: "You involuntarily fall on your hands and fect, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach

[sic]." The anticipation of the abyss, the sublime, fo rces you "involuntarily" down. Both

"creep" and "peep" indicate apprehension and trepidation, as well as an element of danger that is unique to the American encounter with the sUblime. Able to endure the self-obliterating abyss for only a minute, Jefferson withdraws with "violent head ache."

The rest of the passage concerning the natural bridge is in parentheses, as though the description of this sublime experience is outside the reahl1 ofJefferson's queries as

51. Harold Bloom, The Sublime, (Chelsea House Publishers, Feb. 20 I 0), xv. Bloom writes in his introduction to this collection: "After nearly six decades of writing Longinian criticism, I have learned thatthe literary sublime can be exemplified but liot defined." 52. Immanuel Kant, The Critique af Judgement, (Forgotten Books, 1973), 79-81.

27 something separate, but also (is something that he cannot "pretermit." The headache from the encounter is "relieved by (l short, but pleasing view of the Blue Ridge... descend ing

into the valley below, the sens(ition becomesde lightful in the extreme." In his minute-

long observation, the magnificGnce of the scene overtakes him like a slowly cresting

wave, the "pleasing view" moving fr om "delightful in the extreme" to: "It is impossible

for the emotions, arising fr om the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so

beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven, the rapture

of the spectator is really indescribable!" At this moment of experience Jefferson alludes

again to one of the European progenitors of sublime thought-Edmund Burke: "[the

sublime] is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling."s3

Language is inadequate to express the epitome of emotional experience. In his attempt to

describe the scene, Jefferson's eloquence disintegrates; his sentence becomes choppy

with commas. He searches for words, even in retrospect, to fully describe the "rapture of

the spectator" before declaring it a futile effort and simply "indescribable." Finishing his

aside, Jefferson seems to findq return fr om rapture through grounding in the act of

observation, "less remarkable... than those before described."

Fifty years later, Emerson, steeped in the same philosophies that had shaped

Jefferson's ideas, approached the sublime. Emerson's Nature, contains the locus

classicus of the 19th century American sublime. Emerson does not peep over the edge of

an actual overhang; he dwells on a more abstract sense of sight as the organ of perception

and understanding. Too many �ook at the world through the eyes of the past, without

opening their own eyes: "Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very

53. Edmund Burke. A philosophiccrlenqu iry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, (London, 1767), 58-59.

28 superficialseeing." Even under the stars, what Emerson cedIs the "perpetual presence of the sublime," the mind must be "open to their influence." That person is the poet: "There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet." Emerson distinguishes between the eye of the poet and that of the average person. The seemingly simple act of seeing is practiced by those with transcendental gifts; poets may detect the presence of the sLtblime.

Emerson also probes the indescribable. Emerson wailts to be with Jefferson on the parapet: "Let us intelTogate the great apparition, that shiiies so peacefully around us. , Let us inquire, to what end is nature?, 54 Emerson expcrie11ces "Nature," that which he describes as "NOT ME," in the most mundane of circumstailccs. He does not need to approach the abyss to feel Jefferson's rapture: "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having iil iny thoughts any occurrence of special good fo rtune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaratidi1. I am glad to the brink of tear." Instead of invoking light, elevation, beauty and heaveil, Emerson's sublime is on the "bare common." If Emerson's sublime can be fo und on an open piece of land for public use, can the "perfectexh ilaration" and "rapture" of the sublime scene be not so much a matter of having to crawl and peep over the edge as being able to see the infinite in all?

Sight is essential to this sublime. As Emerson stands on the bare common, he is

"uplifted into infinite space-all mean egotism vanishes. J become a transparent eye­ ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." In experiencing the sublime, Ernerson merges with the same

"NOT ME" of Nature and becomes nothing and everything. He is disembodied.

54. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, (first pLib. 1836).

29 Essential to that transformation is sight-the first step after uplift is becoming nothing but sight. Becoming a "transparent eyeball," the world is reduced to that one sense and through sight he can become "part or patiicle of God,"-simultaneously vast and minute.

Walt Whitman is the embodiment of the American sublime-the flesh to

Emerson's transparent circuits. In Whitman's ShOli prose-piece "Sea-Shore Fancies," he addresses the impetus behind bis choice of top os fo r what Harold Bloom calls "the

American transformation of Wordsworth's English Romantic Crisis-Ode."s5 Whitman proffers his preoccupation with the shore as a "fancy, a wish," rather than a dilemma or quandary. I would like to put some pressure on Whitman's will to innocence, recognizing instead in Whit111,an's "sea-shore fancy" a profound state of uncertainty that he repeatedly encounters at tb� shore.

Whitman statis his piece:

Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece, perhaps a poem, about the sea-shore-that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid-that curious, lurking something, (as doubtless every objective fo rm fil1ally becomes to the subjective spirit,) which means far more than its mere first sight, grand as that is-blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other.

Instead of Wordsworth's topos-the vast infiniteof Nature, Whitman's subject is explicitly limited to the sea-shore, "that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid." What draws Whitman's fancy, "even as a boy," is the mystery of the shore. This zone uniquely divides as well as unites; it is ripe with dichotomies and almost implicit poeticism. The shore is "suggesting," it is expressing "something" indirectly, offering "something" for consideration. Whitman's language here is

55. Harold Bloom. "Introduction." Leaves a/ Grass. (New York: Penguin books, 2005, 1855). It is this crisis ofthe self, the reckoning with the sublime at the sea-shore that I earlier referenced as Lawrence Kramer's "Oceanic Dilemma."

30 uncertain, unable to describe the object of his dreams. His language reiterates a common intuition of the shore's meaning. Rachel Carson too found "a deeper fascination bornof inner meaning and significance" in the "elusive and indefinablebo undary" of the

"meeting of land and water." At once a "dividing line"-redundant in that lines by definitiondivi de-and "contact," here the land and sea meet and merge while remaining distinct. Yet there is also a reserved element, that of "lurking" meaning. Whitman qualifiesthis presentiment as ubiquitous to the act of contemplation, "as doubtless every objective form finally becomes to the subjective spirit." And this is doubly true, as I will demonstrate later. Dissecting this parenthetical aside, we have two subjects-the

"objective fo rm" and the "subjective spirit." The objective refers to that which "exists as an object ofthought or consciousness as opposed to having real existence."s6 Therefore the "objective form" is the embodiment ofthis abstract. Or rather any "form" will become "objective" through prolonged contemplation, and seem to posses a "curious something" of significance. This is all perceived by the "subjective spirit"-in other words the perceiving, thinking self, the poet, Whitman.

Whitman continues to tease with abstractions. The "lurking" feeling "means far more than its mere first sight, grand as that is." This is another instance of deviation from the English Romantic sublime. It is through this prolonged contemplation that meaning begins to emerge, rather than in an instantaneous moment of wonder. Just as the sea and land meet and coalesce at the shore, the "real and ideal" blend as one goes beyond the first "grand" sight, until each is "made portion of the other" and the "objective form" of the sea can no longer be objectively considered.

Retreating from definitionand interpretation, Whitman resurrects memories of his

56. "Objective." www.oed.com.

31 youth at the shore. He did not merely spend time at the shore; ghost-like he "haunted the shores of Rockaway or Coney islands, or away east to the Hamptons or Montauk," appearing as a semblance of self in the presence of the line that so fascinated him. At the latter shore, he remembers a moment in which he saw "nothing but sea-tossings in sight in every direction as far as the eye could reach," perhaps the same "slender windrows, I

Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, I Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide," from "As I Ebb'd." Alone except fo r the

"spirit that trails in the lines underfoot," he feels compelled to write about this "liquid, mystic theme." Although used as an adjective here, interestingly a "mystic" is: "any person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain union with or absorption into God, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths which are beyond the intellect."s7 At the shore Whitman is both entranced by its "mystic theme" and so turns into a mystic through contemplation of the shore, as he seeks full absorption and understanding of it.

Despite the definitive implication of "I felt I must one day" (emphasis mine), the young writer Whitman draws back in fear of attempting this "liquid, mystic theme":

"instead ...the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a gauge and tally fo r me in my composition." Whitman in parentheses acknowledges this decision as the excuse it is:

(Let me give a hint here to young writers. I am not sure but I have unwittingly follow'd out the same rule with other powers besides sea and shores-avoiding them, in the way of any dead set at poetizing them, as too big for formal handling-quite satisfied if I could indirectly show that we have met and fused, even if only once, but enough-that we have really absorb' d each other and understand each other.)

Speaking from a position of wary experience, Whitman lets other "young writers" know

57. "Mystic," www.oed.com

32 that this apprehension of "lyrical or epical or literary attempt" at the "sea and shores" and other sublime powers "too big for formal handling" is far from atypical-in fact it is a

"rule." He wryly acknowledges that his belief that he could "indirectly show" the

"invisible influence" of the sea-shore is linked with the naivety of youth. The power is also active in this process, as both "absorb" and "understand each other."

This thread continues as the "dream ...pic ture" of the sea-shore "has come noiselessly up before me." Like the surreptitious "lurking something," there is an element of mystery and furtiveness in this power that has "shaped and color'd"

Whitman's writings almost as if without his conscious intent. This dream is ofa empty beach, stretching out endlessly outwards:

It is nothing more or less than a stretch of interminable white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums. This scene, this picture, I say, has risen up before me at times for years. Sometimes I wake at night and can hear and see it plainly.

This "picture," as Whitman self-corrects twice, is characteristic in multiple ways. Like other Romantic poets and thinkers before him, this encounter with Nature is an individual experience-where Man meets Nature, the Other, Emerson's "NOT ME." This scene is infinite-"intenninable" sands, the ocean "perpetually ...ro Iling in upon it." However, in contrast to the vertical models advanced by Emerson and Jefferson, this sublime is horizontal. While Emerson dissolves into the stars, and Jefferson is rapt at the edge of a precipice, an endless fl atness "rises up before" Whitman. Despite the differences in terrain or setting, all three writers make the essential reflection that pervades the

American sublime: a meeting with something in Nature "too big" causes a fusing or merging of the self with this infinitethat leaves one transcended or changed. In "Sea-

Shore Fancies," Whitman slightly changes this fonnula. A further distinction between Emerson and Jefferson on the one hand and Whitman on other is that in this seminal passage Whitman is experiencing nature in his head only. Lying in bed, safe in the domestic interior, he conjures the sight and sound of the sand and sea. He dreams the power of a sublime emptiness awaiting his arrival.

Elizabeth Bishop's po�m "In the Waiting Room" also takes place in the domestic world and largely in her head. The setting is Worcester, Massachusetts, in a dentist's waiting room. The other ("gr()wn-up")people wear "arctics and overcoats," surrounded by "lamps and magazines." 111 a typical Bishop fashion these details are duly observed and marked-but this mundane and domestic setting will paradoxically prove to be

Bishop's closest appropriation of the poetic sublime experience.

I make this assertion not without consideration. In comparison to the works of

Jefferson, Emerson, and Whitman-those demiurges of American sublime thought­

Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" seems an unlikely compatriot. First, and most obviously controversial, is the poem's setting. Neither at the edge of a precipice, in awe of Nature, nor in the presence of the sea, this poem is ostensibly situated in a purely domestic sphere. The dentist's waiting room is also an intriguing liminal setting, between the outside world and the interior dentist's office. The speaker, a girl (also significantly not adultor male), is transported from this mundane to a world outside herself not through travel or existential contemplation, but through the popular middlebrow magazine, Nati0l1al Geographic. The photos perform what Jefferson's crawling accomplished-they bring the speaker to the edge ofthe abyss. Instead of bringing oneself to look at the Natural Bridge, the pictures bring the speaker inside a volcano "black, and full of ashes." The danger inherent in Jefferson's feat is uncannily

34 echoed by the sudden eruption of Bishop's volcano: "then it was spilling over/ in rivulets of fire."

This encounter with representations of dangerous riature does not evoke the sublime. Instead the poem retreats, the page of the magazine turned to a pair of

American adventurers. The moments, still flashes captured by the camera, start coming faster, almost as though the girl is flipping through the pages, carrying us closer to her epiphany. "Wound round and round" is repeated twice as the poem begins to spiral closer to the climax:

Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks oflight bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. [ read it straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain --Aunt Consuelo's voice-­ not very loud or long. [ wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a fo olish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all [ was my fo olish aunt, l-we--were falling, fa lling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic February, 1918.

With the repetitive "wound round and round" the rhythm of the poem possesses a lilting beat that is broken almost immediately by the simile of "like the necks oflight bulbs," through which the speaker attempts to remove the uncanny foreignness with a fam iliar

35 domestic image. Instead it provides a contrast fo r the unadorned next statement: "Their breasts were horrifying." For the girl, these women and their breasts are more terrifying and potentially transformative than the more traditionally sublime image of the erupting volcano and its dark interior. She closes the magazine and takes refuge in the cover.

No longer immersed within the magazine's pages, "suddenly, from inside, / came an oh! of pain." Here is the pqin of Jefferson's headache. But in a twist we learn that it is Aunt Consuelo's voice, a character who has been absent physically from this poem thus far. The pain, "not very loud or long," is proof fo r the speaker of Aunt Consuelo's

"foolish and timid" character. Distinctions between formations of inside and outside are completely contorted with the realization that the "oh! of pain" is also simultaneously from the girl as well, and both girl and aunt are "falling, fa lling."

The speaker tries to arrest her fall by rem embering who she is-a girl just shy of seven years old. This attempt fails, and instead leads to the climax of the poem:

I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. 1 was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turniqg world into cold, blue-bl(lck space. But 1 felt: you are an i, you are an Eli:::abeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was 1 was.

She still struggles with the threat of self-obliteration, of falling into the abyss. The language repeats the "round" (lnd "black" that were so unsettling earlier, now pmi of the

"cold, blue-black space," within which she has no control. The sense that this abyss threatens is that of the individ4al self, leading into the sublime idea of collectivity.

36 Instead of being overwhelmed by the magnitude of some inhuman, infiniteNature,

Bishop's sublime is wholly human. Still, the experience is no less overwhelming. What could have been a moment of unity and security becomes aile ofterri(ying immensity and loss. The speaker is "an I," "an Elizabeth" (emphasis mine). The terrifying revelation is that she is not the only "I," the only "Elizabeth." She is "cii1eof them," a part of an incomprehensible humanity and femininity. "What" it is that she is is a woman, and therefore connected both with her fo olish aunt and those "horrityingbreas ts." In the mien of past poetic sublimes, the speaker begins to work her way back to equilibrium, attempting to define her connections:

Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities- Boots, hands, the fa mily voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts­ held us all together or made us all just one? How-I didn't know any word fo r it-how "unlikely" ... How had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't?

While Elizabeth's desire to not become her foolish aunt is iJi1derstandable, her desire to not be "me, or anyone" essentially equates to a disowning of self and identity rather than to a reconstitution of a transcendent self. Elizabeth is still lost in the liminal, betwixt and between her self (her "I") and the world. She recognizes the similarities connecting her to humanity ("boots, hands"), fam ily ("the family voice"), and femininity ("those awful hanging breasts"), but is confused by the idea of "us all." How can she be an "I" or an

"Elizabeth" when "us all together" are "j ust one"?

37 Elizabeth the child is still a poet, searching for the correct word to encompass this experience. She settles on "un,likely," and the rhythm of the next lines reflectsher discomfort with this adjective: "How had J come to be here," she questions, the line breaking to indicate another qqestion, essentially-how did I come to be "like them."

She's back in a "here," surroullded by "them," but it is all quite ambiguous, tenuous- sliding: "The waiting room was bright / and too hot. It was sliding / beneath a big black wave, / another, and another." The use of oceanic language alludes to and contains

Whitman's oceanic sublime within the confinesof the waiting room, which appears as though it will be drowned beneath this seemingly overwhelming fo rce.

But suddenly we are tra,.nsported back to the beginning of the poem:

Then 1 was back in it. The War was 011 . Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, ] 91 �.

Contrary to the prior stanza's equivocal language, this final stanza is firmly placed. She is back in herself, in the waiting room. Outside the waiting room, it is winter in

Worcester, Massachusetts (a Place not too far from Emerson's winter commons), and we finally get the specific date. Tl1C onlyindication that something extraordinary, the strangest thing that "had ever happened," occurred is contained within the word "still."

The momentous, self-changing sublime experience is revealed to have happened nearly instantaneously, as the speaker is "still" in the waiting room, and it is "still the fifth / of , February 1918. ,58

We have been taught by the Romantic sublime that the self leaves an encounter

38 with the sublime enlightened, elevated-yet here there is no such epiphany. Nothing seems to have noticeably changed. The speaker gives no indication of diffe rence, but the reader knows there must have been some change-for who could emerge from the other side of sllch an experience unaffected? Victor Turner's theories on the phases of liminality seem applicable here, insomuch as they mirror the three-phase progress of the sublime. Turner's phases are separation, margin, and reagreggation--ormor e explicitly:

The first phase, separation, comprises symbolic behavior signityingthe detachment ofthe individual or the group from either an earlier fixed point in the social structure or fr om an established set of cultuhll conditions (a 'state'). During the intervening liminal period, the state of the rittial subj ect (the 'passenger,' or 'liminar,') become ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state. In the third phase the passenger is consummated and the ritual subject, the neophyte or initiand reenters the social structure, often, but not always at a higher status level.s'!

The three phases of this fr amework are easily discernible in "[n the Waiting Room." The child Elizabeth is clearly distinguished fr om the others in the waiting room by age-they are "grown-up." The liminal period consists of the speaker's submersion beneath the overwhelming sublime loss of identity. At the end of the poem the speaker has consciously reentered the waiting room, but we are only len to assume that there has been some lasting transcendent change as "often, but not always [the neophyte or initiand reenters the social structure] at a higher status level" (emphasis mine). The waiting room itself is a liminal place-its purpose is to function as a place of delayed action, wherein you are not yet a patient and time lingers slowly as your apljointment approaches, the

"symbolic domain that has fe w or none of the attributes of his past or coming state" that

Turner says the "liminar" must pass through.

Although several critics read "In the Waiting Room" using language associated

59. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Sy mbolic Action in H1Iman Society. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 232.

39 with the sublime, they do not explicitly acknowledge the poem as a permutation of

60 sublime realization. In two independent analyses of "In the Waiting Room," Bonnie

Costello writes: '''In the Waiting Room' describes the eruption of an abysmal vision into

,61 the controlling norms of consciousness,, and:

A shocking experience of identification, as we have seen, creates a simultaneous loss of original ideptity, and this loss is never overcome. The inscrutable volcano, the inside of the cl1ild's mouth, the dentist's chamber, are all figures fo r the abyss the child has discovered, and as she peers into it she is fu ll of questions, another and another-why? What? How?-until she is thrown back into the exclamatory 62 "how unlikely" an�l it is clear they will never be answered.

Although using language fr om the Romantic tradition ("eruption of an abysmal vision",

"loss of original identity'" "the abyss"), this critic suggests that the poem's domestic setting precludes it from reprt;senting a new American sublime. Bishop's poem of the sublime does not involve the loss of a self overwhelmed by the magnitude of Nature, but instead examines the self, and through that examination confronts the abstract and overwhelming connective ideas of humanity and fe mininity.

With this example of Bishop's unorthodox sublime in a social setting, I would like to return to the poem with which I began, one that does take place on Whitman's shore-"The End of March." Like Whitman's "stretch of interminable white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it,"

Bishop's poem takes place on a long beach whose boundaries seem to only expand.

Bishop's beach is not enticing or inviting, however, but cold and withdrawn. The speaker is also in the company of others, the "John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read" to whom the poem is dedicated, instead of engaged, like Jefferson or Emerson, in an

6 J. Bonnie Costello, Questions of M.aste/y. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 119. 62. Bonnie Costello, "The Impersol1al and the Interrogative in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop," Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. (University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 1 13.

40 intensely individual struggle of the self Yet although physically in presence of others, this social context is muted, abstract. She is with others, but still alone. Bishop's beach also has other evidence of mankind integrated into the scene. While Whitman's windrows are made up of chaff, straw and sea-gluten, Bishop's debris is the "wet white" kite string that ends in a "man-size" snarl. The walkers' destination is not theoretical or

conceptual, but actual-the vacation house on the beach.

The introduction of the "proto-dream-house, / my crypto-dream house" is also

marked by the introduction ofthe first-person voice. Befo re the speaker referred to

"our," and "we," but here it is just "1" and "my":

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of-are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.)

This "I" belongs to Bishop, her firstsecret dream house sorhething ramshackle and

quirky, an "artichoke of a house." The language here shifts from the metaphorical lyrics

of the previous stanzas to one more colloquial and confiding: The descriptions are made

more hesitantly, musingly. The green of the house is like ali artichoke, "but greener." In

parentheses Bishop reveals a bit of cooking knowledge, that adding baking soda to

boiling green vegetables makes their color brighter. She asks the reader to corroborate

her observations-"are they railroad ties?" as if the reader Was there alongside her. The

curved parentheses of the second aside can be seen like a cupped hand on one side of her

mouth as she whispers conspiratorially to the reader. She tells the reader that "many

things about this place are dubious." The reader is reminded that this proto-dream-house,

41 "that crooked box," is not only deliberately ambiguous, but also unceliain. The stanza conveys tentativeness in defining this place, unable to settle between proto/crypto, "sort of, " "are they."

What this conversatiomlltone hides is the importance of this stanza. Positionally it lies at the heart of the poem, and literally it tells us Bishop's ideal life. But this significance is hidden, its beauty tucked away in the longest stanza of the poem, so easily skimmed and skipped fo r the b.righter more poetical verse that brackets it:

l'd like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, fo rever, in two bare rooms: look through bil1Qculars, read boring books, old, long, long l) Qoks, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, fo ggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light. At night, a grog a 1 'americaine. I'd blade it with a kitchen match And lovely diaphanous blue flame would waver, doubled in the window.

The word "nothing" is penneq so ecstatically. Bishop's ideal retirement means having to do nothing, or as Bishop chara�teristically self-corrects, "nothing much." Like Bishop's discomfort with settling on imperfect words (her poems are fu ll of self-correction and modulation), her idiosyncrati� sublime also seems unable to settle, refuses to settle.

There is tension between Bishop's fa scination and attraction to the exterior beach-even enclosed in her "dream-house" she is drawn to "look through binoculars" and watch the fo g-and the interiority ofth� house and its withdrawal fr om that exterior. Bishop's

lovely details of the dream inv()lve watching the droplets of moisture "slipping" down the window, oxymoronically "heCtYY with light." It is as if the light caught and reflected in the droplets is what weighs them down. This is Bishop's interior, set apart fr om what is outside. The delicate "diaph,mous flame" that "waver[s], doubled in the window"

42 contributes to the sense of confinement, like Virginia Woolf's candles in To the

Lighthouse:

Now all the candles were lit up ...fo r the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, 63 outside, a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterily.

The flames illuminate the inside but eliminate the outside-the reflection in glass turns

the outside into a watery world, one that belongs to the "droplets" and fo g, and within

which you could remain fo rever, looking through binoculars, reading books and talking

to herself.

The poem retreats from this climax by dispelling the dream: "A light to read

by-perfect! But-impossible. / And that day the wind was imlch too cold / even to get

that fa r, / and of course the house was boarded up." Just as Bishop has articulated her

idea of perfection, she must declare it impossible. Then it turns out that on that day she was unable to even reach the house-it remains a dream, and one that is "boarded up,"

inaccessible.

64 The last stanza is so diffe rent-so much like "rainbow rainbow rainbow,,, that it

is as if Bishop is trying to draw attention away fr om what she's self-consciously revealed

in the fo nner stanza. In comparison this stanza stages an epiphany-the sun comes out

"for just a minute," transforming the world into jewels and fantasy as the stones tease the

lion sun. The last stanza ties together the first, turning the dog-prints that were like lion-

prints into actual lion prints, and the taking away the morbidity of the kite-less string by

tuming it into a toy fo r the "lion sun" to bat "out of the sky t() play with."

Tn Costello's reading of the poem, she calls Bishop's "proto-dream-house" an

63. Virginia Woolf:To the Lighthouse. (Wordsworth Editions Limited, (994), pp. 70. 64. Elizabeth Bishop, Th e Complete Poems, "The Fish." pp. 42.

43 escape fr om that reality from which she wakes in the final stanza. Costello examines the various subj ects fo r the poem's imaginative fo cus that are lacking until the stone of the final stanza, patiicularly the dream house and the flying geese and missing kite. These become inferior subjects fo r the imagination, respectively of "autonomous, solipsistic

65 imagination" and "transcendent aspiration.,, The stones are a more effective image as they "stand with life, not above or beyond it." Ultimately Costello interprets the poem as one that "suggests [that if] we are subject to the whims of fate, depicted as sublime power, that power is also seen to have its benevolent side. We are reminded that March comes in like a lion but goes o�t like a lamb. Bishop's quiet, am used style marks her

,,66 integration of the sublime with the ordinary ...the natural with the fiction. Perhaps what Costello means by "the whims of fate" contains both the threat of death she finds in the "proto-dream-house," as well as the withdrawal fr om this death when the sun comes out "for just a minute," as though by chance. Yet this argument does not fe el complete.

The insertion of "sublime" seems forced, an assertion backed only by the presence of powers that have been interpreted as sublime in the past-the sea, the sun. Costello's analogy of the parallel dichotomies of sublime/ordinary and natural/fiction(or the imaginary) is also fa lse. BishOp'S perception of nature includes both the sublime and the ordinary, and is not a dichotomy to be reconciled through art-the shore is both ordinary

and sublime.

Costello explicitly identifies "the lion-sun as a figure fo r both Fate and

Imagination," turning the whQle poem into an allegory fo r the progression towards death in which Bishop (and her con1panions) are fo llowing "those big, majestic paw-prints"

65. Costello, Questions of Master)!, pp. 17l. 66. Costello, Questions of Mastery, pp. 172.

44 that eventually (although not today) lead to the "proto-dreatn-house," which Costello designates "a greave, a crypt." Costello argues that by tuniii1g away from death that the

dream house represents, the poem "turns from this austere sLtblimity to a renewed, affirmative power of imagination and engagement with fat e tather than mere surrender

,, 7 (as in 'giving up the ghost') of imagination to fate. 6

Instead, I would like to argue that Bishop significantly sets up a tension between

interior and exterior that disturbs the neat categories upon which our common

understanding of the sublime generally rests. Although she insists on a desire fo r

interiority ("I'd like to retire there and do nothing / or nothirig much, forever"), she is too

present in the exterior, in the details of daily life and the imaginative possibilities it offers

,,68 to ever fully get there. Bishop's self is in no way pressured by any "austere sublime of

fa te in "The End of March." Rather, the poem celebrates both the imagination (what

Costello names "fiction") and the indulgence of observatioil, and through these fa culties,

reaggregates the speaker like Turner's"ritual subject" into a distorted and lonely version

of the social. That is, though we would hardly identify "The End of March" as a

celebration of community, the presence of Bishop's companions is essential to the

staging of her encounter with the unbeautiful. The shrunkeh ocean and long beach invite

scrutiny, they encourage one to squint at the distance, as do the water droplets,

"diaphanous blue ilame," and the "drab, damp, scattered stones" "set in their bezels of

sand." The end of the poem returns to the observations froth the beginning of the poem

yet is does so with a fa lse brightness. These details are woven together in a fable of

imagination, an oddly persistent yet ephemeral moment as Bishop repeats, "for just a

67. Costello, Questions 0/ Mastery, pp. 254. 68. Costello, Questions o/ Mastery, pp. 254.

45 minute. / For just a minute."

Bishop's "minute" bears careful consideration. Indeed, Bishop's peculiar manipulations of time in this poem, as in her oeuvre more generally, may be what most clearly distinguishes Bishop's version of the sublime fr om that of her American Romantic predecessors. The versions of the sublime offered by Jefferson, Emerson and Whitman are marked by epiphanies in which moments amount to abstract, timeless encounters. When Jefferson reports that he looks into the abyss fo r "about a minute," we understand that he is speaking metaphorically. During that expansive minute his mind

"feels itself set in motion" so as to take him out of human time unti I he is released fr om the supernatural encounter, and returned to the "pleasing" delights of the vista. Similarly,

Emerson's "perpetual presence of the sublime" takes place in a metaphorical "twilight"; what matters is the infinity of the moment and the infinitude of the self. In contrast,

Bishop's poems of the sublime-unOlihodox in their interest in both the social and the unbeautiful-take place at specifiedtimes: on February 5, 1918, or at the end of

March. Bishop's minutes are fl eeting, measurable by calendar and clock. During this minute at the end of March, "individual shadows" are thrown out, then "pulled in again."

Bishop never explicitly rejected the label "Romantic." She wrote to Anne

Stevenson: "I also fe el that Cal [Lowell] and I in our very different ways are both

69 descendents fr om the Transcendentalists.,, Even as she acknowledged this connection,

she was also aware of her own digressions fr om Romanticism, as well as every other poetic school. David Kalstonc's assessment of Bishop as "hard to 'place'" is shared by

69. Costello, pp. 8.

46 7 most serious readers of Bishop. o Bishop wrote to Lowell: .i l believe now that complete agnosticism and straddling the fe nce on everything is my natural posture-although I

71 wish it weren't." Lowell corroborated in an unfinishedpoem, "The Two Weeks'

Vacation": "Dear Elizabeth, / Half New Englander, half fugitive / Nova Scotian, wholly

Atlantic sea-board- / Unable to settle anywhere, or live / Our usual roaring

72 sublime ...,, Much as Bishop herselflived, unsettled, on the shore, Bishop's art balances on the edge of myriad influences and associations. Ultimately the work presents a permutation of the Romantic, an idiosyncratic configuratioii of the sublime.

70. David Kalstone opens an essay on Bishop: "Elizabeth Bishop, to her credit, has always been hard to 'place.' In the surveys of American poetry she is not linked to ai1)! particular school." David Kalstone, Five Te mperaments (New York: Oxford University rj'ess, 1977), pp. 12. 71. Costello, pp. 8. 72. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, (New York: Random I-louse, 1982), pp. 135.

47 Chapter Two:

"Being In" al1d "Pulling Down": Bishop's Terms of Art

In 1966 Anne Stevenson wrote the first introductory study of Bishop's work, and the only critical book about her work to be published before Bishop's death. In the

73 process of writing the book, Stevenson exchanged letters often with Bishop. These letters began in 1963 and continued intensely fo r three years; in them Bishop discussed openly and fr ankly her childhood, influences on her poetry and thoughts about poetry in general. In a letter from Januqry 1964, Bishop responded to a question about the relation between the consciousness and sub-consciousness in art writes:

Yes, I agree with you. 1 think that's what 1 was trying to say in the speech above. There is no 'split' [between the role of consciousness and sub-consciousness in art] . Dreams, wor\<:s of art (some), glimpses ofthe always-more-successful surrealism of ever.yday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see fu ll-face but that seems enormously important. 1 can't believe we are wholly irrational-and I do admire Darwin! But reqc\ipg Darwin one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless, heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic-and then comes a sudqen relaxation, a fo rgetful phrase, and one fe els the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiel1cing it, is the same thing that is necessary fo r its creation, a self­ 4 fo rgetful, perfectly useJess concentration.7

Stevenson had suggested that Bishop's work bears comparison with that of Max Ernst, the surrealist visual aIiist who specialized in fr ottage, and Bishop's contemporary.

73. The book Stevenson did eventually write, Elizabeth Bishop, was purely analytical, as Stevenson states in her prelude: "This study of Elizabeth Bishop is analytical rather than descriptive or biographicaL Apati from the first chapter, it does not concern itself with Miss Bishop's personal life; and as far as possible I have tried to avoid simply paraphrasing her stories and poems." 74. Millier, pp. 346.

48 Bishop seems less than taken with the comparison, implicitly criticizing the movement known as surrealism when she alludes to the "always-more-successful surrealism of

everyday life." Like Bishop's pennutation of the Romantic sublime, here Bishop rej ects

75 the designation of surrealism as well.

Surrealism was first defined by Andre Breton in the Manifesto of Surrealism as a fo nn of "pure psychic automatism by which is proposed to express, either verbally, or in any other manner, the real fu nctioning of thought," and as "the dictation of thought in the

,,7 absence of any control exercised by reason, beyond aesthetic or moral preoccupations. 6

By this "psychic automatism," the Surrealists sought to slough off the restraints that

social conventions place on the human mind: "Abdication of reasoned control, surrender to the fr ee flow of uninhibited imagination-these represei1t 'a revolution of the mind in

its reasoning and imaginative fa culties, an uncompromising struggle fo r the 11'eedom of

,77 the individual. " Through techniques like automatic writing and drawing, cut-up technique, decalcomania, calligramme, Exquisite Corpse, coi lage, fr ottage, coulage, and grattage, the artist's imagination is freed from conscious cohtrol and she becomes a spectator to her own art, a passive receptacle for "forces the tational mind cannot even perceive. At such times, it is [the artist's] fu nction to recoi'd, to become a channel

,,78 through which inspiration can make its influence fe lt in the experience of his public.

Surrealism privileges dreams, chance and irrationality as ways through which the

Surrealist artist fr ees himself and his audience from the rational world and is granted

75. Richard Mullen specifically considers Bishop's relationship with Slirrealism illhis essay "Elizabeth Bishop's Surreal Inheritance." American Literature Vol. 54, No I (Duke University Press, Mar., 1982), pp. 63-80. 76. 1.1-1. Matthews, An Introduction to Surrealism. (University Park, Peimsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1965), pp. 81. 77. Matthews, pp. 84. 78. Matthews, pp. 86.

49 access to what Breton called surreality: "the future resolution of those apparently

,,79 contradictory states, dream anq reality, in a sort of absolute reality. J.H. Matthews wrote in his Introduction to Surrealism that Surrealism takes the viewer/reader through

"two stages of experience. First disturbing our sense of reality, as it discredits the world of everyday convention and hapitual relationships, it then reveals and sets about

,,80 exploring another world, that of the surreal which it has brought into reach.

In surrealist art, the vi�:wer is often: "confronted by a world that is completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully recognizable, realistical ly painted images are removed fr om their normal contexts and reassembled

81 within an am biguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework.,, In Bishop's work the surreal aspects come not so much from moments where one questions reality, but where reality is sharpened, and imagil1ation acutely experienced. Jeremiah Pickard argues that although the minute and dreamlike aspects of Bishop's poetry may seem to echo those of

Surrealism, Bishop rejects Surrealism as "a movement that mishandles materials in which

,,82 she herself is interested. That is, Bishop acknowledged the common ground of materials and preoccupations that she shares with surrealists, even as she distinguished their respective approaches to those ideas and their techniques. Where Bishop was a meticulous, clear and pedantic; poet known fo r her restraint, the Surrealists valued the relinquishment of control, the "supreme necessity fo r passivity upon the part of the

,,83 artist and "the liberation of the creative act from the limitations of premeditation and

79. Mattews, pp. 67. 80 . Matthews, pp. 171. 81. "Surrealism." Britannica Onlil1e Encyclopedia. 82. Zachariah Pickard, "The Attack on Surrealism in Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter." Studies in the Humanities 3.2 (2004). 83. Matthews, pp. 106.

50 ,,84 preconception. Indeed, the work of the Surrealists is largely uncongenial with that of

Bishop. Only in Bishop's idees fixes is she in tune with SUti"ealism.

Instead of pursuing this train of thought in the letter; however, Bishop instead abruptly changes the subject: "-and I do admire Darwin!" 'rhis intelTuption of Darwin

(interestingly, an intensely associative or irrational moment evocative of surrealist logic-as though her unconscious is showing itself) implies that that fo r her, Darwin and art are intimately linked. Pickard suggests that "Bishop ell1ploys Darwin as a sort of substitute fo r the surrealists, gently redirecting Stevenson's attention away from Ernst

, 85 and toward someone with whom she fe lt more in tune. , Darwin is the opposite of

Surrealism in Bishop's mind, the rational scientist she admires and invokes after exclaiming, and "1 can't believe we are wholly irrational." One can see why: "reading

Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic

86 observations." Bishop is clearly the "one" admiring, as Darwin builds up his "case" through "endless heroic observations." Bishop would like the case fo r art to be argued similarly-through observation.

Bishop's fo undation fo r her poetry lies in a style of almost scientific observation, like Darwin's-seemingly "almost unconscious or automatiC." This fidelity to observation is "both crucial to [Bishop's] argument in this letter, and anathema to the surrealist aesthetic." The Surrealists looked inwards to find the unusual and irrational, where Darwin and Bishop fo und profuse material in the external, empirical world.

Although Bishop refers to this observation as effortless, fo r her it would have constituted

84. Matthews, pp. 60. 85. Zachariah Pickard, "Natural History and Epiphany: Elizabeth BishCip's Darwin Letter." Tw entieth Century Literature, 50.3 (Autumn, 2004). . 86. Millier says that Bishop had said that Darwin was her fav orite English writer. Millier, pp. 356.

51 the exact opposite-in her poems she assumes a pretension of effOliless perfection while in reality nothing is unconscious. It is only through "a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase ...one fe els the strangeness of his undertaking." As a poet who spent years on a single poem, and fo r whom no word was unpremeditated or unplanned, any perceived moments of relaxation must exist with the definitive purpose of illustrating the

"strangeness." These "unexpected moments of empathy" reveal the "lonely young man," his eyes fixedon fa cts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily of into the unknown." For Bishop, with her insistence on authenticity, this moment of imagining

Darwin is incongruous-perhaps a proxy fo r Bishop the "lonely young woman. "

The "moments of relaxation" expose the emotionally empathetic human behind the empirical observant eye. Although Bishop admired science and was preoccupied with "minute details" herself, observation was to her just as much about living as about learning. In the "speech" she mentions at the beginning of the letter excerpt above, she writes that she is

thunderstruck by the helplessness, ignorance, ghastly taste, lack of worldly knowledge, and lqck of observation, of writers who are much more talented than I am ...Lack of observation seems to me one ofthe cardinal sins, responsible fo r so much cruelty, ugliness, dullness, bad manners-and general unhappiness too.' (ellipsis is hers), . 87

Integral to the act of writing, observation is comprised of more than compiling descriptions. As we recall fromCarson: "To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalog its life. Understanding �omes only when .... we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores-bl indly, inexorably pressing fo r a

,,88 fo othold. Bishop continues by asseliing that observation is "a living in reality that

87. Quoted in Pickard, "Attack on Surrealism." 88. Carson, pp. vii.

52 works both ways," a way to "catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see fu ll-fa ce but that seems enormously important." Instead of attempting to confront the irrational "full-face" as the Surrealists tried, Bishop's observation allowed her to see the same material, but peripherally, while still reveling in the wonderful familiarity and pleasure of her "self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration."

No poem of Bishop's better illustrates her style of concentration and fo cus on the

"minute details" than "Sandpiper." The poem begins by fo cllsing on the waves that characterize this zone, the constant movement, crashing arid retreating:

The roaring alongside he takes fo r granted, and that every so oftenthe world is bound to shake. He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

For the sandpiper, "roaring" and "shaking" is a part of its everyday existence. While the

equivalent fo rm of chaos would halt humans in terror, the scli1dpipertakes it "for

granted." Or at least he takes it in stride, as "he runs, he runs," the repetition

emphasizing this essential action.

Thoreau marveled at the sandpiper's ability to live in sLlch a state: "The little

beach-birds trotted past close to the water's edge, or paused but an instant to swallow

their fo od, keeping time with the elements. I wondered how they ever got used to the sea,

S9 that they ventured so near the waves." The sandpiper is a creature always on the edge,

always moving, and as such is an important denizen of the shore for many writers. In my

Taxonomy of the Shore, 1 looked at Carl Sandburg's rappol-t with the sandpiper. With

their wire legs that write as they run, constantly revising the sand, the sandpiper emerges

as a symbol of the writer. Significantly, Rachel Carson also wrote about these sea birds:

89. Henry David Thoreau. Cape Cod. (T. Y. Crowell & co., 1908), pp. 171.

53 "Animals of open beaches are typically small, always swift-moving. Theirs is a strange way of life. Each wave breaking on the beach is at once their fr iend and enemy; though it

,,90 brings fo od, it threatens to carry them out to sea in its swirling backwash. The sandpiper is an especially fe J1iie fo cus fo r Bishop's imagination as well because of the fe verishness with which it lives on a daily basis-"small" and "swift-moving" they live in dichotomy, where the waves are "fri end and enemy," bearing both fo od and danger.

Bishop's sandpiper is aware of this danger fo r despite the first line's nonchalance, the sandpiper lives in "a state of controlled panic." Mobilized, as it were, by the paralyzing emotion of panic, the sandpiper epitomizes the control that the writer wants in the face of the shaking world, always running and moving fo rward even as one is stricken by the moment-like Eliot addressed his sailors: "0 voyagers, 0 seamen! ... / Not fare well, /

,,9 But fare fo rward, voyagers. l

As the poem continues, Bishop invokes a favorite conceit, the correlation between water and fire. Just as the rain and turtles and lava hiss in "Crusoe in England," and in an unpublished poem "Current Dreams" ("and at the edge of the waves / where the stains burn ragged red / and the water hisses"), the world seems to be on fire, in flux at the shore. The sound a droplet m8,kes as it strikes a flame marks the separation point between water and fire, where both elements are melded in a single sound, that sibilant

"hiss":

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet of interrupting water comes and goes and glazes over llis dark and brittle fe et. He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

While the beach acts as BishQP!s stove, the "sheet / of interrupting water" interrupts the

90. Carson, pp. 153. 91. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages."

54 first line, starting a new line from the left; as the phrase "comes and goes" also mimics the waves' staccato motions. The water "glazes" over the sandpiper's fe et, reiterating that this is a transmutable landscape as the sandpiper's fe et are "tIred" at the kiln of the sea- edge. A kiln can be used to process anything from bricks to porcelain; and fr om the adjective "brittle," the poem indicates that this creature is iI·agile and closer to the easily destroyed porcelain. This transmutability of the shore is ohe of the reasons that this zone is fo r many writers a place where the dreamlike and seemitig\y irrational moments of daily life manifest. That is what lends the sandpiper such aUthority as "he runs, he runs straight through it." His only sign of precaution in this zorie is that he "watch [ es] his toes."

The next line, in typical Bishop fa shion, re-qualifies this observation. The sandpiper is not "watching his toes", instead, he is:

- 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 fo cussed. He is preoccupied.

The lines of both stanzas keep being interrupted, continuing into the next line-the waves crashing in the poem's structure as well as on the sandpiper's beach. The point of view has shifted to that of the sandpiper where "(no detail too SITIclll)" the world changes tr om moment to moment. As "the Atlantic drains / rapidly backwards and downwards," we fo llow it and "the dragging grains" until once again "the world is a mist." Just as quickly though, the wave retreats, "and then the world is / minute ahd vast and clear. The tide / is higher or lower." There is a push and pull in the rhythm, concealment then clarity as the

55 waves crash and the lines brea,<. and then "drain."

The sandpiper is truly the "student of Blake" mentioned in the first stanza as the bird "stares at the dragging grains." In his "Auguries of IImocence" Blake wrote:

To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, .. 9) Adn etermt y 111 all h our. -

The sandpiper's world is sand, both its habitat in nature, and the source of beauty and obsession in Bishop's poem. However, while Blake's grain of sand passively offe rs itself fo r interpretation, Bishop's sapqpiper must run after the "dragging grains." A grain of sand is the smallest piece of the shore, but also a key element of it, both philosophically and empirically. Carson fo und in the sand the merging of the ephemeral and eternal. It is both the "indestructible ...minq te hard core of mineral that remains after years of grinding

,,93 and polishing as well as a sl!rface of constant change and flux where nothing of permanence can be written before it is washed away by the ocean that persistently pushes and pulls it.

In the concluding stanza the reader learns what the sandpiper is so "focussed" and

"preoccupied" with. He is:

looking fo r something, something, something. Poor bird, he is ()bsessed! The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

His fo cus is truly obsessive, the poet observes, as he looks fo r "something, something,

92. William Blake. "Auguries oflnnocence." The Literature Network. < http://www.online- literature.com/blake/6 121>. 93. "We think of rack as a symbol Of durability, yet even the hardest rock shatters and wears away when attacked by rain, frost or surf. \3uta grain of sand is almost indestructible. It is the ultimate product of the work of the waves--the minute hard core of mineral that remains after years of grinding and polishing." Carson, pp. 130.

56 , 94 something. , But this obsession is also fo cused and not just "anything, anything, anything." His minute world is populated with the "millimis of grains" in a prism of colors. The sand works as a perfect fo cus fo r this obsession, as "the ultimate product of

95 the work of the waves,,, the grains of sand are the only truly "indestructible" element of a mutable world.

Bishop exclaims somewhat wryly, "Poor bird, he is obsessed," a conscious nod at her own obsession with minutia. She once acknowledged her affinity with the sandpiper:

"All my life 1 have lived and behaved very much like that sandpiper-j ust running along

,96 the edges of diffe rent countries and continents, 'looking fo t something. " Countless critics have written about Bishop's "famous eye" and what it was able to capture so uniquely. However, fe w have examined the physical place in which those details were

,,97 most profoundly expressed-the sea's edge, Thoreau's " neutral ground where land and sea interact and the world is at once "minute and vast."

The literary nature of the sandpiper figures prominehtly in Bishop's short story

"The Sea & Its Shore." The story's main character, Edwin Boomer, has the job of

98 keeping the sand of a public beach "free fr om papers" (171 ). Boomer does not clear trash or other waste-he collects only papers, at night when the beach is empty, and sets

fire to it all. He keeps all his work materials in a simple wooden house, "more like an

idea of a house than a real one" (171). This home seems to echo Bishop's "proto-dream-

94. c.r " Somebody ... Somebody ...Somebody ..." from " Filling Statiol1." Bishop, The Complete Poems, pp. 127. 95. Carson, pp. 130. 96. Millier, pp. 517-5 18. 97. 'The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point li'om which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves fo rever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the fo am, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime." Thoreml, pp. 1. 98. Elizabeth Bishop, "The Sea & Its Shore." Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).

57 house, crypto-dream-house" from "The End of March," tying Boomer and Bishop (both with initials E.B.) to each other- The speaker observes that Boomer's task should have naturally been taken care oJ� "a,ccordingto the laws of nature, a beach should be able to keep itself clean, as cats do. We have all observed: 'The l110ving waters at their priest­ like task / Of pure ablution round earth 's human shores'" (172). The quote is from John

Keats' poem "Bright Star," in which he appeals to the "bright star" fo r steadfastness,

"watching, with eternal lids apaIi" as the tides rise and fall daily with a religious ,, constancy, washing "earth's human shores" with ritual ceremony "of pure ablution. 99 In

"The Sea & Its Shore," this ritual is taken to be one of actual cleaning, rather than religious cleansing. However, "the tempo of modern life is too rapid. Our presses turn out too much paper covered with print, which somehow makes its way to our seas and their shores, for nature to take care of herself." It falls to Edwin Boomer to perform this

"priest-like" task.

Boomer's life revolves around paper and words, much as a poet's does, only even more intensely concentrated: " Edwin Boomer lived the most literary life possible. No poet, novelist, or critic, even one who bends over his desk fo r eight hours a day, could imagine the intensity of his concentration on the life of letters" (172). His concentration is so intense, that "the world, the whole world he saw, came before many years to seem printed too" (178). As he wat�hes "a sandpiper rushing distractedly this way and that,"

Boomer imagines the bird is literally becoming paIi of the text: "like a point of punctuation against the 'rounded, rolling waves.' It leftfine prints with its feet. Its feathers were speckled; and especially on the narrow hems of the wings appeared marks that looked as if they might be letters, if only he could get close enough to read them"

99. John Keats, "Bright Star." .

58 (178-1 79). Again, Boomer's concentration is intense. He tries futilely to get close

enough to read the letters on the sandpiper's wings, which constantly flee from him.

Even the sand becomes subsumed by Boomer's obsessive concentration: "The sand itself,

ifhe picked some of it up and held it close to one eye, looked a little like printed paper,

ground up or chewed" (179). Just like its poetic counterpaii, through obsession with

details and the meticulous fo cus the world is revealed.

"The Sea & Its Shore" coalesces many of Bishop's dominant themes-reading,

the arts of reading and writing, the transmutability of the shore, and the fragmented

physicality of living at the edge. And while the story is uset'ttl in its focus on the

conceptualization of concentration, it is also practical, as Boomer describes the other uses

of paper "besides reading and such possibilities of fitful illUmination" (173).100 It has

been pointed out before that the protagonist and Bishop are very similar-from obsession

with the former ideas to the simple sharing the same initials; "Boomer" was also the

maiden name of Bishop's mother. Most revealingly, BOOliieris an alcoholic: "Once or twice a week when drunk (Boomer usually came to work that way several times a week)"

(173). Sharing an af11iction that Bishop suffered from throbghout her adult life, Boomer

manifests the negative or problematic aspects of Bishop's life. This close identification

explains Bishop's ambivalence toward Boomer, and why, perhaps, there is no resolution

of his story. Bishop wants in art what Boomer cannot achieve in the "intensity of his

concentration on the life of letters."

Returningto the January letter, Bishop imagines the young Darwin lost in

observation, "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknowl1. What one seems to want in

art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary fo i· its creation, a self-forgetful,

100. Boomer llses it as insulation in winter by stuffinghis coat and Ihiirig his floor. (pp. 173)

59 perfectly useless concentration." Bishop uses the verbs "sinking" and "sliding," both of which could be used to describe the sensation of slipping into the sea and descending, sinking. The experience is giddy, disorienting and alarming, but at the same time exciting, promising something pew. The "unknown" may be the higher understanding that one can achieve through compiling "minute details." In the word "ofT' there is also a sense of the "unknown" being elsewhere, exterior to the familiar and known. Yet this same higher understanding brings Bishop and Darwin to different conclusions. For

Darwin this "self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration" produces his scientificdata and theories; fo r Bishop it generates poetry.lOl

Bishop has no difficulty connecting Darwin and his "heroic observations" to

"what one seems to want in art." Yet Bishop also has theories on the craft of the poet that go beyond Darwin's empirical : "the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal (is sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial as a glass eye. ,,102

Bishop's conception of the poetic function is to go beyond the real and outside the un- real-to combine the "natural with unnatural." The poet blends the sight of one who sees ,, reality with one eye with the glass eye that looks "heavenward, or offat an angle. 103 In this way Darwin resonates in(iclequately with Bishop. His "observations," while containing elements of the surreal in the "unconscious or automatic" as he slides "into the unknown" realms of knowledge, are still emphatically scientific. Perhaps a more

101. Recalling "In the Waiting Room," this describes the experience of Bishop's speaker as she is "failing, fa lling/ ... / into cold, blue-black space," "sliding / beneath a big black wave." 102. Elizabeth Bishop. Edgar Allan poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Ed. Alice Quinn. (New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), pp. 212. 103. David R. Jarraway . Going the distance: dissident sUbjectivity in modernistAme rican literature. (LSU Press, 2003), p. 152.

60 ingenious scientificasso ciate fo r Bishop is Carson. Recall Henry Beston on Carson: "It is Miss Carson's particular giftto be able to blend scientific knowledge with the spirit of ,, poetic awareness, thus restoring to us a true sense of the wotld. [04 Replacing Darwin with Carson in the letter gets us closer to an understanding of the impetus behind

Bishop's art. Bishop's poems follow from her "endless, heroic observations," and such work, as it does for Carson, makes her aware of both the minute empirical detail and the vast poetic whole.

In Bishop's poetry of the shore, the selfis forgotten, auxiliary to the importance of observation and mastery. The concentration required is liilique. The focus used by

Edwin Boomer and the sandpiper is too close, their concenU'ation too demanding. Just as the shore spans the threshold of land and sea, the key poetiC position fo r Bishop is in­ between. Bishop's maritime poems seek the ideal place of observation to master this zone of the shore.

Looking back at "The End of March" now, the push and pull between the immediate and the distant, interiority and exteriority, is more readily appreciated; prepositions are the preeminent part of speech. "Withdrawn," "indrawn," "out,"

"otfshore"-the poem's first stanza pushes everything away and characterizes this strange exterior. These first two stanzas are full of details, from the "lone flight of

Canada geese," to the "rubber boots" and "wet white string." It is the long middle stanza, although also fu ll of lovely detail, that now seems to stand cts Bishop's "sudden relaxation"-both in meter as well as content. Although this is where Bishop has imagined herself in retirement-no longer the maker but the reader, she still is a part of

104. Quaratiel\o, pp. 60.

61 this experience of art. She does not seem quite able to escape her role as poet though; she wants to take "useless" notes and observe "minute details" such as the droplets or flame.

In order to see these details fo r what they mean, the reader herself must do what Bishop has done: fall into "a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration." However, by "self- forgetful" she does not mean the same self-loss that the sublime necessitates to be ultimately elevated through nqture-rather she refers to a tranquility of mind that allows one to appreciate those details without forcing them into more grandiose meanings. In fa ct, this stanza avoids all nuances ofthe grandiose. Her ultimate dream is to "have a light" by which to "read boring books, / old, long, long books." Although she attempts to mask this "unexpected moment of empathy" through the almost overly resplendent concluding stanza, the intimate interiority of her "crypto-dream-house" is not lost.

Instead, she addresses it again, although conceptualized differently, in her prose piece "In

Prison."

"One must be in; that is the primary condition" (182).105 In Bishop's short story

"In Prison," she exclaims, "I �an scarcely wait fo r the day of my imprisonment" (181).

She muses on the literature of �mprisonment and what her cell should look like: "What I should like best of all, I might confess, would be a view of a courtyard paved in stone"

(187). What she desires is a view, a window to the world which, imprisoned, the only thing she can do is observe. Through this window the world is a stage:

by looking to t11� east. . .one obtains the most theatrical effects fr om a sunset, in my opinion. 1 refer to that fifteen minutes or half an hour of heavy gold in which any object can be macleto look magically significant. If the reader can tell me anything more beautiful than a stone courtyard lit obliquely in this way so that the shallowly rounded stones each cast a small shadow but the general surface is thickly sanded with gold, and a pole casts a long, long shadow and a limp wire an unearthly one�l beg him to tell me what it is. (187)

l05. Bishop, "In Prison." Th e Collected Prose, pp. 181-192.

62 The sunset turnsthe world dreamlike-surreal. In this time of "heavy gold" objects are made "magically significant," and a wire casts an "unearthly" shadow. Only in this fantastical imprisonment can Bishop yield control and assurrie the role of the passive spectator: "In dreams we become, to quote Pierre Mabille, 'amiable spectators, and no , longer intransigent masters with inquisitorial control." I06 Bishop even uncharacteristically states the choice for the location of her prison as one "best decided, as of course it must be, by chance alone" (187).

Other moments of surrealism creep into this piece of prose. The lozenge design she wishes for her courtyard invokes frottage, as well as the way she imagines approaching the one book she hopes to have. Evocative of "The End of March," she desires "one very dull book to read, the duller the better. A book, moreover, on a subject completely foreign to me; perhaps the second volume, if the first would familiarize me too well with the terms and purpose of the work" (187-1 88). Within her enforced home, safe cell, she can desire confusion and unfamiliarity over the familiar she normally engages with. "Then I shall be able to experience with a fi·ee conscience the pleasure, perverse, I suppose, of interpreting it not at all according to its intent" (188). Here is

Bishop's conflict-free space of creation, where she feels free to ignore her otherwise obsessive adroitness and with "a free conscious ...interpr et [a work] ...not at all according to its intent." She continues that

from my detached rock-like book I shall be able to draw vast generalizations, abstractions of the grandest, most illuminating sort, like allegories or poems, and by posing fragments of it against the surroundiI1gs and conversations of my prison, I shall be able to fo rm my own examples of surrealist art!-something I should never know how to do outside, where the sources are so bewildering. ( 1 88)

106. Matthews, pp. 65.

63 It is suggestive that Bishop's "vast generalizations" and "abstractions of the grandest, most illuminating sort" are "lt�e allegories or poems" (emphasis mine). Bishop needs to revoke her role as a poet in order to become a surrealist artist. Through juxtaposing fragments of what could very well be her own work against the walls of her cell, she is able to approximate "examples of surrealist art." This is a skill that she can only do inside and "something I should never know how to do outside." In response to this work,

Marianne Moore wrote to Bishop that "Never have I ...seen a more insidiously innocent, and atiless artifice of innuendo than in your prison meditations." Still she criticized: "But I07 1 do feel that tentativeness an,]in teriorizing are your danger as well as your strength."

However, Bishop's aim at interiority, while harboring a compulsive fascination with exteriority, renders her incapable of "surrealist art" outside, "where the sources are so bewildering."

In "The Map," though, Bishop does find a way to look at the world abstracted, yet fam iliar at the same time. In the poem Bishop zooms out, looking at the land and sea from afar. From a bird's eye perspective she describes the back and fo rth between land and sea. Both painting and PQ�m, the land is described as shadowed green, with

"shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges," where the land becomes sea. The language plays with how the contours of the land are fo rmed, with the land leaning down and

"drawing [the sea] unpeliurbe,] around itself," or "tugging at the sea from under" "along the fine tan sandy shelf." The reader becomes god-like or larger than life, capable of stroking "these lovely bays, / under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, / or as if to provide a clean cage fo r invisible fish." A map displays eatih from a distance, an

107. Millier, pp. 137.

64 object for study as though the glass were that of a microscope, and allow one to see both the details and the whole picture. For Bishop, however, distance does not mean impartiality. Instead of a scientificremoteness, the very text of the map is laden with human empathy:

The names of seashore towns run out to sea, the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains -the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.

The names are not only emotional, they are ecstatic, runnirig over boundaries and straight into the sea. With the next two lines Bishop further reduces the association between distance and impartiality-the peninsulas on the map are made domestic, taking "the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling fo r the smoothness of yard goods."

Even though a map should be the most impersonal way of jaoking at the shore, removed from the immediate vastness of the sea, the waves crashing on the sand, Bishop fills her poem and map with touch. The land "lifts the sea from under," tugs at it, we "stroke these lovely bays," feel the water "between thumb and finger." The map has become an instrument by which one may touch those fe atures otherwise too big to grasp.

But in the end the map remains a representation of reality-the topographic lines lending the land a misleading motion in comparison to the quiet blue of the ocean:

"Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is / lending the land their waves' own conformation." Distance and time are collapsed as "North's as near as West," and "more delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors." There are limitations to what this representation can accomplish, yet at the same time such maps allow fo r an understanding of the shore and earth more complete than that of one inside the map, physically present at one point on the map. In this way Bishop transcends even the

65 understanding of Carson, who at her most empirical is also most focused on the "minute details." It is only when Carson pulls back from the minutia that she "relaxes" and the moments of poetic inspiratioJ1 ?hine through. Both Bishop and Carson share an understanding of myriad shores that allows them to separate and merge the minute and vast, interior and exterior.

In a journal entry, Bishop mused on this dichotomy between what she called the

"spiritual" elements of poetry and their "material":

It's a question of using the poet's proper materials, with which he's equipped by nature, i.e., immediate, intense physical reactions, a sense of metaphor and decoration in everything-to express something not ofthem-something, I suppose, spiritual. But it proceeds fr om the material, the material eaten out with acid, pulled dmYl1 from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in . 108 Its pI ace.

Bishop posits here that it is the material-the physical world and all observations of it,

"immediate, intense physical reaction"-that is the paramount fo undation of poetry, not the spiritual abstract or idea tbat the poet may precipitate fromthat materiaL It is the way

Bishop considers this material that is interesting. The material is not just collected and then used. There is a process of examination and evaluation. It must first be scrutinized,

"eaten out with acid, pulled dQwn IJ·om underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in its place." This is what makes the poet's eye unique. Anyone can see; the poet manipulates the world, condqcts research on it, erodes away the superfluous to reveal the , "the minute hard core of mineral that remains after years of grinding and polishing., ]09

The ultimate goal is mastery, keeping the material "in its place" and from that expressing

"something not of them," revc(ilingsomething other.

This approach to art is both suggestive of and in conf1ict with Surrealism. In the

108. Millier, pp. 65. 109. Carson, pp. 130.

66 "material eaten out with acid" there is something reminiscelit of Ernst's frottage. Perhaps there was some validity to Stevenson's claims, for although Bishop circumvented her association with Ernst in letters, her journal entries reveal ah interest in the conceptualization behind the technique. Frottage, mentioned before in passing, was a technique developed by Ernst whereby using pencil or charcoal one produces a rubbing of a textured surface. Bishop herself experimented with this technique in her own visual art. She wrote to Marianne Moore: "I can turnthem [frottages] out by the dozen now and I shall send you one." IO This experimentation was not performed as an embrace of

Surrealist ideas, but as an exploration. Lorrie Goldensohn Observes that Bishop's experimentation with frottage may be another way in which Bishop sought to amplify her I I I creativity. (For example, while attending Vassar, Bishop conducted other experiments of inspiration. Brett Millier writes in her biography: "She had heard that strong cheese before bed would make one's dreams more vivid, so she kept for a time a pot of smelly ,, Roquefort on the bookshelf in her donn room and carefully recorded the results. 112)

Despite her interest in dreams and frottage, the Surrealists' abdication of creative control was anathema to Bishop.113 Breton once said, "by the least erasure the principle of total ,, inspiration is ruined. 114 For if the Surrealist artist is to act primarily as a spectator to his own art, by erasing any part he is intervening and asserting his own consciousness on what is meant to be a "spontaneous and delirious"lls expression of his unconscious. [f he

110. Lorrie Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography o/ a PoetlY; (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 122. III. Goldensohn, pp. 126. [12. Millier, pp. 43. 113. In the January 1964 letter to Stevenson, Bishop exclaims: "You i11cntion Ernst again. Oh dear-\ wish I'd never mentioned him at all, because I think he's a dreadiu[ painter." Quoted from Goldensohn, pp. 123. 114. Matthews, pp 87. 115. Matthews, pp. 84.

67 produces a work that is not perfect, it is still valuable in that it reminds "the Surrealist that

he is not primarily an miist, aiming every time to produce a masterpiece. He findshis

failures as stimulating as his svccesses, in their reminder that his role, ifhe is to be

e1Iective as a Surrealist, must remain that ofmedium."lJ6 Bishop's material on the other hand is "made to perform and always kept in order, in its place." Bishop's goal is mastery, not spontaneity. There is a strict control in her poetry that is expressly absent in

Surrealism by virtue of its most fu ndamental tenants.

Although Bishop's journal entry does not explicitly evoke the Surrealists, it later

suggests that the Romantic poets derived their poems in the opposite manner: "The other

way-of using the supposedly 'spiritual'-the beautiful, nostalgic, the ideal and poetic, to produce the material-is the way of the Romantic, ] think." From the "other," the

ideal, the Romantics produced the material that would corroborate the spiritual concern.

Bishop calls this approach "a great perversity." Similarly "In Prison" also speculates

about experiencing the "pleasure, perverse ...of interpreting [works] not at all according

to its intent." From this perverse interpretation Bishop plans to "fonTI [her] own

examples of surrealist mi."

Bishop fo und perversity in both Surrealism and Romanticism. She was fascinated

by the aspects of these art fo rms divergent from her own. We see a characteristic gesture

of ambivalent positioning here, with elements of both Surrealism and Romanticism that

Bishop is drawn to, but rejects as incomplete or antithetical to what she wants to do in

poetry.ll7 It fo llows that Bishop's poems do not readily yield their miistry, the spiritual

116. Matthews, pp. 116. 117. As far as Surrealism goes, in a letter to her editor at Houghton Mifflin,she explicitly writes: "[I] am not a surrealist." Quoted in Lorrie Goldensohn. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. (New York: Columbia University I�ress, 1992), p. 123.

68 that proceeds from the solid materiality of their subjects. Tiiomas Travisano remarked:

"The success with which [Bishop's] art conceals art has caLlsed many readers to enjoy her poems deeply without quite knowing why. The critic's first job is to uncover the sources ,, of their sometimes mysterious authority. 118 Bishop's poeii1s display their material with a deceptive simplicity, without explicitly explaining the spiritual. Bishop's poems present themselves to the discerningreader as surface UPOIl which to perform her own

frottage. With pencil in hand the reader must rub the surface of the poems to reveal the

spiritual, what lies "between" the descriptive words. The sea performs a sort of reverse

frottage upon the shore, dragging away, eroding some portions while depositing others in

the wrackline. What is left are only fragments, which are themselves only partially

legible, "the material eaten out with acid, pulled down frOITI lmderneath." Frottage is

perhaps an insufficient metaphor for Bishop's act of art, ins(yfar as it relies upon passive

discovery. For Bishop's reader, on the other hand, frottage (illows for the active process

of reading and interpretation that Bishop's poems require.

1 18. Thomas J. Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. (University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1988), pp. 9.

69 Conclusion

Erosion

Bishop navigates between multiple dichotomies in her poetry-fluctuating between interior and exterior, empirical and lyrical, reality and imagination, minute and vast. She experiments with permutations of major poetic schools while shifting between positions of observation and acuteness of concentration. Supporting this precarious balancing game is Bishop's rhythmic use of prepositions, the cadence of waves beating upon the shore spanning her \york like a buttress as the poems move in and out, up and down, above and amid their sllbjects. In the few pages that remain I look at two poems that harness this movement: "Florida" and "At the Fishhouses." Both limn the elusive boundaries of time, engaging vviththe natural processes of eroding saltand sand and water at the sea's edge.

"Florida" begins by b41ancing between Bishop's favorite dichotomy, the perspective in the first stanza moving between being in and above. The first line is deceptively congenial, "The state with the prettiest name." As in "The Map," the poem then looks down upon the state from above before entering its swamps:

The state with the prettiest name, the state that flo�ts in brackish water, held together by mangrove roots that bear while jiving oysters in clusters and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons, dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks like ancient canpon-balls sprouting grass.

The state "floats," as if tethered to the land like a boat off a dock, the "brackish water" still and stagnant. Holding it together are the "mangrove roots," that also "bear" the

70 "oysters in clusters." "While living" and "when dead" are s6 casually juxtaposed as to naturally reflect the cycle they describe. Here time is definitively outside of human purview, as the life and death of oysters creates new islands, "green hummocks." The

language attempts to include humans-the oyster "skeletons" conjure the empty white oyster shells and turns them into bone, the dead strewn "as if bombarded, with green hummocks / like ancient cannon-balls" evoke violence and war-but the language is inadequate. The cannon-balls work like Eliot's tolling bell ("The tolling bell / Measures

time not our time, rung by the unhurried / Ground swell, a time / Older than the time of chronometers, older / Than time counted by anxious worried women"); their tolling measures a time that is older than it, and cannot contain the ancient cycles it endeavors to.

Up until this point the poem has been articulated in what David Kalstone calls "a free-floating eternal present, a series of phrases which don't commit the observer to any , main verb at all. ,119 This poem's physical situation and its special convergence of moments in time recall Rachel Carson's meditations upon Florida, with which this thesis began. The passage is worth quoting again for its particular resonance with this poem:

The atmosphere of the Keys is strongly and peculiarly their own. It may be that here, more than in most places, remembrance of the past and intimations of the future are linked with present reality. In bare and jaggedly corroded rock, sculptured with the patterns of the coral, there is the desolation of a dead past. [n the multicolored sea gardens seen fr om a boat as one drifts above them, there is a tropical lushness and mystery, a throbbing sense of the pressure of life; in coral reef and mangrove swamp there are the dimly seen foreshadowings of the 120 fu ture.

Carson too felt the Ubiquitous presence of time at the mangrove swamp, the tropical coast. The reminders of a continuous cycle of death ancl life continues in "Florida" as:

Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down, over something they have spotted in the swamp,

119. Kalstone, pp. 16. 120. Carson, pp. 191.

71 in circles like stiq'ed-up flakes or sediment sinking through water. Smoke fr om wo()ds-fires filters fine blue solvents. On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.

Bishop scatters the lines with s's, giving us the "S-shaped birds," here the buzzards, as well as subtly suggesting the \vispy smoke. This mnemonic of death, like the charring on the dead trees and stumps is not malevolent, as is Moore's sea,12I but is, paradoxically part of the "throbbing sense of the pressure of life." The buzzards drift gently "down, down, down," suspended in air like sediment "sinking through water." The charring "is like black velvet," lovely and soft and unlike the "gray rag of rotted calico." Just as integral to the scene are the mOsquitoes and their "ferocious obbligatos" and the fireflies that "map the heavens."

This beautiful world is one ripe with poetic material, but the poet's words are not what will remain. As the moon rises, all the wonderful lushness of the landscape becomes pale and stark:

Cold white, not pright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed, and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest post-card of itself.

The implacable flintiness of the first three internal rhymes harshly separates this section from the previous lines. Up tmtil this point everything has meshed unobtrusively together, with alliteration: "drifting down, down, down," and woods:fzresfiltersfine blue solvents," and subtle rhyme: "mosquitoes/obbligatos" and "fireflies/moon rises." Now the world is "coarse-meshed," cmd the thoughtlessly decaying state is all "black specks," the repetitive hard ck's halting the rhythm awkwardly. "The poorest / post-card of itself,"

12 J. In Moore's "A Grave," she writes: " The sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave." Bishop's sea is more balanced, where both life and death have equal sway, and everything is part of the process oflife.

72 mockingly pretending as though this spectral scene cares about its image.

Kalstone looks at Bishop's "Florida" as a poem emblematic of various elements of her poetry that make other critics "nervous": "her apparent lack of insistence on meanings beyond the surface of the poem, the poem's seemihg randomness and disintegration. There is something personal, even quirky about her apparently , straightforward descriptive poems which, on early readings, it is hard to identify., 122 The critic he mentions, Steven Stepanchev, reads "Florida" as a poem providing a "scattering of images whose relevance to the total structure is open to question. It is as though Miss

Bishop stopped along the road home to examine every buttercup and asphodel she saw."

Stepanchev mistakes this scattering of images and fragments of her imagination as something like habitual observation. While observation is iiilportant, (a lack of observation classifying as a cardinal sin in Bishop's mind), it is from that "self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration" that art stems.

The beginning of "At the Fishhouses" starts with a speaker who is barely there, the only human presence that of the old man. The setting is vaguely inhospitable, cold and smelling of codfish. As dusk renders the net "almost invisible, / a dark purpJe- brown" that blends with the "gloaming." Everything humaii in the scene is slowly fading away beneath the similarly invisible yet insistent pressure of time. The old man's shuttle is "worn and polished," and his "black old knife" that he "has scraped the scales ...fr om , unnumbered fish"is "almost wornaway. ,123 Even the "benches / the lobster pots, and

122. Kalstone, pp. 14. 123. Crusoe in "Crusoe in England" owns a knife similarly worn with ,ige: "The knife there on the shelf--­ / it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. / It lived. How many years .did I / beg it, implore it, not to break? / [ knew each nick and scratch by heart, / the bluish blade, the broken tip, / the lines of wood­ grain on the handle . . ./ Now it won't look at me at all. / The livihg soul has dribbled away. / My eyes rest on it and pass on."

73 masts" are "of an apparent tr�I1slucence."

What is not fading is encrusted with the evidence of age, the "small old buildings with an emerald moss / growing on their shoreward walls" and the "ancient wooden capstan, / cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains." Fish scales coat everything like their own delicate yet grotesque ornamentation, plastering the wheelbarrows and the big fish buckets with their double "iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies." The iplluence of time is implicit, shown rather than told. It accomplishes subtly what T.S Eliot did explicitly in "The Dry Salvages": "Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, / The future futureless, before the morning watch / When time stops and time is never ending; / And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning." In "At the Fishhouses," the reader/eels as though time is both simultaneously frozen qnd inexorably moving forwards.

Although the poem begins by bringing the reader "down" to the fishhouses, the rest of the stanza has a distinctly upward fo cus, from the fishhouses' "steeply peaked roofs / and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up / to storerooms in the gables," to the capstan "up on the little slope behind the houses." The next stanza, however, finally brings us down again to the water's edge that was only briefly mentionedin the first stanza. Aftera short recoil Ctlley haul up the boats, up the long ramp"), the poem finally fo llows the plank "descending into the water. ... down and down." Like long breaths in and out, the poem seems to finqJly have arrived at its lyrical climax, down at the water's edge, a cresting we are denied twice as the esoteric thought wanes with the ellipses:

"Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal, / to fish and seals ..." But then the seal m(ikes an appearance in the poem, emerging in the middle of

74 the line as he does in the sea: "he would disappear, then suddenly emerge / almost in the

same spot." He is, like the speaker, "a believer in total immersion." Just as we think we too are going to be immersed in "the clear gray icy water," the ellipses appear again, retreating from the water, drawing our attention backwards to where "the dignified tall fi r

trees begin." Here "a million Christmas trees stand / waitihg fo r Christmas," waiting on

time to pass just as the old man waits for the herring boats.

Yet underlying this waiting is an undercurrent of dread. Like the slow erosion at the fishhouses, the passage of time also means a slow decay (X , as for the Christmas

trees, inevitable destruction. We are not given even the tinieto dwell on this presentiment though, as a caesura causes the line to pick up immediately where the

ellipses leftoff:

The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the saihc, slightly, indiffe rently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world.

Like a camera snapshot, the moment is frozen, suspended "above the stones," a phrase

that is repeated four times in these six lines. This is the return sibilant sea from the first

stanza, whose opaque silver "heavy surface" swelled "slowly as if considering spilling

over." Now with the same alliterative hiss the speaker obsei·ves the repetition ("over and

over") and cycling of time in "the same sea, the same," slowed down moment as the

waves crash onto the rocks.

At this point the poem becomes hypothetical, and the address shifts to the second

person. The speaker has withdrawn again, addressing the reader ("If you should dip your

hand in") as the new subject. This water is so cold that "yolir wrist would ache

75 ] immediately, I your bones wou.1dbegin to ache and your hand would burn" 24:

If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones WOllid begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then, �urely burn your tongue. It is like what ""e imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived fr om the rocky breasts fo rever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

This partial immersion in the sea is Bishop's epitomic encounter with nature-an absorbed, sensual (as in evocatjve of the senses") abstraction that is also concrete-"dark, salt, clear," recalling the repetitious "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear." For Bishop, knowledge and the sea are ins�parable, moving with a certain rhythm. Forever "t1owing and drawn ...f lowing, and nOWn," Bishop embodies a conception of time that does not revolve around a single human life. If time appears as though it will continue nowing long afterthe fishhouses have faded, that is because it will. Unlike Eliot we do not "have to think of them as forever bailing, I Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers I

Over shallow banks unchanging and erosion less." Bishop's ali subvelis this apocalyptic 125 language, asseliing the reality pfmore immutable cycles. "Derived from the rock

J 24. Robeli Gilbeli reads this secti()l1, as well the line "element bearable to no mortal,' as some sort of death wish on the pmi of the speaker, instead ofa description of water so cold it aches, as close to immersion one can accompliSI1 in this explicitly icy sea: "The hypnotic repetitions in these lines hint at the speaker's tormented relation to the sea, betraying a compulsive, almost masochistic drive to enter its deathly space. She Jmows too well what the results of such contact must be, though; 'your bones would begin to ache al1

76 breasts," knowledge includes both humanity's "historical" ahd Nature's geological sense of time.

At the shore Bishop marries the neutrality of the scientific with the lyricism and fundamental humanity of art. The scientificallo ws her to disassociate from the fear of

human mortality, and to recognize the patterns of the natural world that poetry is perfectly poised to express. Carson and Bishop's rocky shores are the same. Where

Bishop sees fishhousesand Christmas trees, Carson sees a shore where "gray water and gray mists merge offshore in a dim and vaporous world that inight be a world of creation, ,, stirring with new life. 126 But it is not simply that the poet sees the human and the scientist sees the terrestrial. Both perceive the perpetual pattern of erosion and renewal at the shore, where "coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixedrealit y-earth become as fl uid as the sea ,, itself. 127 This pattern of fluidity becomes visible to "the rii:ind's eye" only at the shore, where nature and time are fused, "flowing." It is Bishop's peculiar capacity to see at once this "shiftingkaleidoscopic pattern" of erosion and huinanity's tentative and tenacious insistence on continuity at this boundary.

Like Carson, Bishop is not satisfied to stand and regard a "pleasing" vista, or content to be metaphorically "bathed in the blithe air." For Bishop the shore expresses more than a "liquid, mystic theme"; her shore is the epitome af Nature, in which she phys ically immerses herself. That essentiality is what sets Bishop apart from her fe llow poets-and what sets "At the Fishhouses" above Bishop's other poems. At the end of this extraordinary moment in Bishop's oeuvre she leaves behind the visceral physicality

Mastel)!. 126. Carson, pp. 42. 127. Carson, pp. 249.

77 of the stones, sea and salt, bringing into relief the eroding power of her adroitly chosen words:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived fr om the rocky breasts fo rever, flowing ,md drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing,and flown.

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