Elizabeth Bishop: Sandpiper

When I went to Hamilton College all the students were men.  I was an English major.  All the English professors were men.  In four years, I don’t think I read a single woman author other than Virginia Woolf. 

  I went on to do graduate study in English at conservative, southern Duke University.  We read Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Eliot.  It was unavoidable: along with Dickens and maybe Hardy, they were the greatest British novelists of the nineteenth century.  I did not read women poets other than Emily Dickinson.  Also unavoidable, since she along with Walt Whitman was the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century.  (Samuel Johnson had said to his companion Bosworth, “Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.”  Johnson was quoted with a wink and a nod, as if he were outrageous but, well, right.  That was long ago, though not so long ago that those of my generation don’t remember Johnson’s statement.)

When I began teaching, I taught in large part what I had been taught when I was a student.  I did include contemporary novelists who had never been part of the curriculum I had encountered, and ventured into women poets who had never been taught to me: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin.

  It took me twenty years to come to the realization that “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova was the greatest poem of the twentieth century.  I had been taught that the honor should go to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  Eliot was many things, one of which was that he was a misogynist…

  It took me thirty years of teaching to wander into some poems by Elizabeth Bishop.  Of her earlier poems, well, the word ‘meh’ would represent my reaction.  The poems of the middle of her career and her later years were to me, to put it mildly, a revelation.  No poet writing in English in the twentieth century, save the two great Irish poets Yeats and Heaney, had the mastery her poems exhibited.  Both Irishmen seemed at ease in their poems.  (Yeats’ great early poem,” Adam’s Curse,” makes clear that he worked hard achieving that ease.)  That was never the case, for me, with Bishop.  She worked, worked, to attain the mastery over words I encountered in her poems.  More power to her. 

  I now think Bishop is the finest poet to write in English in the middle years of the past century, finer than Auden, more moving than Roethke, deeper than Ginsberg or Plath.  When I pondered on what to send out after writing about Neruda, it seemed obvious that I should turn to Bishop.  And, because she has more breadth than any poet since, well, Whitman, I thought I would send out two poems, first a shorter lyric, here, then a longer poem that moved from the intensely personal to the universal: “In the Waiting Room.” 

  What follows is an appreciation of her poem describing a shore bird, “The Sandpiper.”

Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

and that every so often the world is bound to shake.

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,

in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

 

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet

of interrupting water comes and goes

and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.

He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

 

--Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them

where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains

rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,

he stares at the dragging grains.

 

The world is a mist. And then the world is

minute and vast and clear. The tide

is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

 

looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray

mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

I had originally thought at Thanksgiving to send out a poem about a family dinner.  But it did not quite synch with my mood.  Wallace Stevens ended one of his poems hilariously:  “Happens to like is one of the ways things happen to fall.” I love how irreverentially he notes that our emotional lives and our desires are often governed by accident. 

  In this instance, as I was thinking about a poem to write about, I was on a beach.  I saw a sandpiper, only one as it turned out, and my thoughts turned to a wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop.  One beach, one bird, the accident of my being there: and here we are, considering Bishop’s poem.

  The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an extraordinary group of poets emerge in Britain and America: Yeats was hitting his peak years; T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens[1] were constructing a body of poetic work marked by such high achievement that it rivaled any era in the six hundred years in which poetry has been written in English.  Perhaps only the later years of the Elizabethan period and the following decades, and the upwelling of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, equal the profusion of modernist poetry for preeminence in English verse.

  What to make of the period which followed the modernist flowering[2]?  In hindsight, I would hazard that there were three preeminent poets of the immediate post-modern period, W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop, and of those three, Bishop seems to me the largest and most important figure.  Born in New England, she lost her father at a very early age and her mother as well (to mental illness).  She was raised by relatives, first in Nova Scotia, then in New England. 

  Bishop was often beset by personal tragedy.  She was often uncomfortable fitting into the contours of her own life.  An inveterate traveler, she for two decades lived in Brazil.  She won prizes, taught later in life at Harvard, and compiled a body of work that stands as the great poetic monument between the moderns and the emergence of her close friend and near contemporary Robert Lowell and other so-called confessional poets[3].

  We’ll look at two poems by Bishop, “Sandpiper” and, in a future mailing, “In the Waiting Room.”  They are very different poems. 

  “Sandpiper” echoes a theme we have seen in previous poems, particularly in William Carlos Williams’ “To a Poor Old Woman,”  a poem where an old woman eats plums on the street and “they taste good to her,” and in Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Tomatoes.”  In that poem Neruda celebrates the objects which surround us, amidst which we live our lives, and insists that the small things we take for granted are important, even if we too often we ignore them. 

  Celebrating what I have been calling the immanent world is in many ways a Romantic theme, even if the conventional view is that the Romantics[4] were in search of transcendence.   Nowhere is that celebration  better expressed than in the late Romantic Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Tortuously, since every line he wrote was tortuous, he made clear what I am speaking of in a quartet of lines in his sonnet, “God’s Grandeur”:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod,
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Reading Hopkins always seems hard, but in some ways that is deceiving: a translation of these lines into ordinary prose would be, ‘there have been a lot of folks through a good many generations who have been too caught up with buying and selling in the marketplace, and working long hours and working in factories.  Everything in this bright and wonderful world God created for us has been dirtied by what men and women have done, and the world has the stink of commerce hovering over it.  Nothing grows in our industrial landscape, nor can foot feel, being shod.  We quite literally cannot feel the ground beneath us – neither its subtle topography nor even its solidity – because we wear shoes all the time.  It would be better if we were barefoot.[5]’

I have been self-indulgent here, for Hopkins’ “Nor can foot feel, being shod” is one of my favorite lines of poetry.  Wordsworth had uttered a clarion call along a similar path fifty years earlier.  One of his greatest sonnets[6] begins with the stirring lines,

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away...

He concludes that he would be better off if he (and we) had been born in an earlier time, a time before civilization had ‘advanced’ to industrialism and merchandizing and factory labor:

Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn

because if he were a pagan, the world would be alive again with excitement and divinity:

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea [grassy field]
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem shares with Wordsworth and Hopkins this lineage of wanting to be in touch with natural objects but with a very modern difference.  As we shall see.

  In the poem before us, Bishop is looking at a sandpiper, a small bird with thin legs and a long narrow beak[7].  Sandpipers quickly dart in as a wavelet recedes, looking for tiny shrimp and crabs, eggs and larvae.  When the next wave pushes toward shore, the sandpiper moves rapidly to avoid the deepening water, only to return as the wave recedes.

  “Sandpiper” opens with close observation, so close that the poet who speaks, as the poem develops, almost merges with the object of her observation.  When I read the poem I often think of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther,” one of the most well-known poems in his book of poems about things, New Poems.  Rilke is yet another romantic poet who seeks salvation through closely observing the world into which he is cast.   Rilke too – and this is rare, this degree of empathic identification he shares with Bishop – observes an animal so closely that by the end of the poem he has almost entirely merged with the animal he is observing.  Both poems move from observation to empathy to identification, a merging of self and other.

  Half the poem, it seems to me, is foretold in its remarkable first line:

The roaring alongside he takes for granted

So much happens here that we ourselves may take the breadth of Bishop’s observation for granted and ignore its momentous import.  This small shorebird, accustomed to his environment, takes the crashing of the waves, the sound of the surf, “for granted,” even though the world itself seems (is?) shaken as the waves crash upon the beach[8]. 

  Small bird, large waves, the waves backed up by a huge ocean.  The  bird has the ability to ignore, or more properly has the incapacity to recognize, the immensity around him.  Taking the roaring and the shaking “for granted,” the sandpiper “runs”: the word is repeated, to emphasize the constant activity of the bird. 

  Then we encounter a stunning series of defining qualifiers: two adjectives, a prepositional phrase, a phrase in apposition.  All are important: in fact, the entirety of what is to come in this poem is foreshadowed in these four qualifiers.

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

First, “finical.”  The further the poem proceeds, the more the bird’s finicky-ness is made evident.  It is worth consulting a dictionary, here.  Finicky:  1. extremely or excessively particular, exacting or meticulous in taste or standards; 2. requiring much care, precision or attentive effort. The finical attitude of the bird is crucial to the poem.   The sandpiper’s meticulous, attentive, excessively precise posture towards to world – the beach, and in particular the extremely small patch of wet beach directly beneath his gaze – attracts and repels the poet who watches him run back and forth among the wavelets.

  “Awkward.”  There is a grace to soaring gulls, to unfurling waves, to undulating swells, to the glistening strand of beach.  Amidst such flowing, the bird’s movements, in being finical, in jerking back and forth with every small ebb and flow of the water, makes him seem – I am quoting from a phrase of self-description which Emily Dickinson included in a letter where she introduced herself to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson– “the only kangaroo among the beauty.” Ungainly, out of place, not at ease with the natural order.

  “In a state of controlled panic,” Bishop continues.  So often does the bird change course, so intent and preoccupied with its immediate surroundings, that he “runs…in a state of controlled panic.”   Later, I will suggest the bird is a counterpart of the poet; we’ll want to remember that the two adjectives – finical and awkward – are quite likely not merely adjunct to, but consequent from, this panic.  The attention the bird pays to its immediate surroundings is awkward, not easeful, because it results from its attempt to find some kind of anchor in its panicky world.

  “Like a student of Blake.”  As I was writing earlier, recognizing I had quoted Stevens and Hopkins and Wordsworth and Arnold and Frost and just now Dickinson, I wondered if I should perhaps add as a preface to this discussion something along the lines of ‘we all live surrounded by a fabric of rhythmic words, words we recall again and again because they have become part of the texture of our lives.  That’s why entire radio stations are devoted to golden oldies, or classic rock….’  But Bishop makes the case for me without my having to resort to such a preface.  She herself is a student of Blake, remembering the opening of his poem “Auguries of Innocence” as she looks at a bird on a beach:

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour. . . . .

The ‘grain’ of sand Blake refers to will be cited explicitly – in the plural – at the end of stanza three, and twice in the final stanza.  What the visionary Blake saw and intuited  in his phrase will take Bishop five stanzas to understand: that the world can be beheld in the infinitesimal, not just in the large and majestic.  By the end of the poem Bishop will recognize that the bird, in looking narrowly down at the sand and not paying attention to the huge “roaring” of the waves, may nonetheless be in touch with something profound.

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

A wonderfully close yet imaginative observation, couched as a simile, comes next.  It pulls us into understanding the bird’s point of view, small and close and strange, the strangeness here offset by the homeliness of the comparison: “The beach hisses like fat.”  (Think bacon in a hot pan.)  This sound, familiar to humans, is used here used to capture how the bird apprehends from four inches away the sound of the small waves sliding across the sand.  The water comes and goes, “interrupting” a flat “sheet” of approaching water to the bird’s left.  Bishop masterfully but without poetic pyrotechnics manages to denote the irregular motion of the water sliding up the beach, higher here (on the left) than there (where the bird is, and on his right).  The flat sheet of water shines in the light, so that it “glazes” the bird’s feet, “dark and brittle” amidst the flow, the ‘brittle’ reminding us once more that the bird IS awkward, and not quite at one with his world.

  Again – as I often tell my students in class, one of the easiest things you can do with a poem is notice which words are repeated – the bird “runs,”  now for the third and fourth time in eight lines.  (He’ll run once again, in the next stanza.)  No ‘deep meaning’ here: to observe a sandpiper is to behold a bird in constant motion, not flying but running back and forth along the shallow receding waters.  The finical bird can ignore the roaring of the waters and by now (unsurprisingly to us) we accept his narrow field of vision.  More emphasis: no larger view, quite the contrary: his typical posture is “watching his toes.”

--Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

  I’m always in admiration when poets correct themselves in mid-process.  It doesn’t happen very often: there is too much striving after being ‘right’ in poems, and the effort at “scrupulous exactness” (another phrase of Emily Dickinson’s) does not usually extend so far as to insist on self-correction[9].  Here, Bishop’s self-correction at the start of the third stanza reveals, since she is paying very close attention, the bird’s “finical” posture, that he looking at “the spaces of sand” between his toes.    So she corrects herself, modifying the statement that ends stanza two: the bird is not really watching his toes, though he appears to be doing so.  He is actually watching that sand, for which the earlier allusion to Blake might have prepared her and us.  Finical?  There is a merging here, since for the poet, as for the bird, there is “no detail too small.”

           But having made the correction, and observing the strand of beach as the bird observes it, seeing it though the bird’s eyes, Bishop is aware of the water draining “rapidly backwards and downwards.” 

  Stop!

  If I can be so presumptuous, look very closely at what Bishop is doing.  Concentrate on this moment in the poem.  Elizabeth Bishop is describing the sand through an immense feat of imaginative identification: we see the sand as the bird sees it.  We have a merging of the poet’s seeing ‘self’ with the line of sight, the scope, the focus of the sandpiper.  The water

drains
Rapidly backwards and downwards.
As he runs, he stares at the dragging grains.

  Wow.  Bishop sees, as the sandpiper sees, each grain dragging.  She is focused on each one, impelled by the receding water, slowed by friction with neighboring grains, semi-anchored by the small recess which is its place among the thousand other grains which surround it.  We are not seeing the beach as a beachgoer would, we are (at least as far as we are one with the poet) a sandpiper looking at the sand between his toes.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

Bishop’s imaginative identification  is not done yet.  As a new wave breaks, “The world is a mist.”  And moment later it isn’t: “And then the world is/minute and vast and clear.”  So consumed is the bird by the draining waters, the dragging grains, the misting and clearing as each wave produces droplets of water which quickly fall, that the sandpiper has no idea of the larger world.  “The tide/ is higher or lower.  He couldn’t tell you which.”  That’s because he is preoccupied. (Meanwhile, Bishop has smuggled in the paradox at the heart of the poem: the world is minute and vast.  A grain of sand can reveal the world.)  We see the world as the sandpiper sees it.

  Before we move onward, I hope you have noticed I skipped the penultimate word of the second line of stanza three.  What is draining is not just the wavelet.  It is “the Atlantic.”  Every time I read this poem I am surprised by the ending,  but I should not be.  The sandpiper is in actuality “a student of Blake,” more than I am ever willing to acknowledge.   He may look at a tiny flow of water dragging minuscule grains of sand, but it is “the Atlantic” which he is seeing.  The large is visible in the microcosmos, or as Emerson said in his seminal essay “The American Scholar,” “The near explains the far.”  So, yes, when the mist clears the world is both “minute and vast.”

  Finical, running, awkward, watching, the sandpiper is “preoccupied,” and his preoccupation is with focus.  “His beak is focused.”   “Preoccupied.”  With that word – on a comma, not a period like the close of three stanzas which preceded it, we move into the final stanza, the culmination of the poem. 

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

The sandpiper’s preoccupation is with focusing on what is in front of him, is in “looking for something, something, something.”  In actuality, we know what the bird is doing: he is looking carefully, with great focus, for what will sustain him.  In this case, those minuscule shrimp and crabs and plankton that keep him alive. 

  But Bishop’s noticing of the bird is characterized by great ambivalence.  The sandpiper is focussed (a good thing) but preoccupied (not so good).  He is “looking for something” as great human searchers like Socrates and Buddha and Newton did (good) but that something is poorly defined , for “something, something, something” (not so good).  The search is an obsession (not so good).  She even steps back from the bird to patronize him – “Poor bird!” she exclaims – before imaginatively re-entering his vision for a final time, returning to the identification which earlier enabled her to see the “dragging grains of sand” in the receding waters. 

  Seeing through the bird’s eyes the speaker of the poem notices “millions of grains” of sand.  We are back to Blake, seeing the world in a grain of sand.  Only here, with his finical stance, motivated by panic in a constantly shifting world where waters come and go and mists appear and disappear, obsessed with focusing on what is just in front of him, the sandpiper has a vision that is, it seems to me, redeeming even though it does not get beyond narrowness of focus and obsession. 

  The vision is not transcendent, above this world: it is immanent, very much in and of this world.  The bird sees grains of sand: in his intense focus on the near and small he sees a vision of what always seems (to me) a hint of paradise:

The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
Mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst. 

Not only is the sand visible in infinite gradations of what I am tempted to call sandiness, those gradations from white through tan and gray to black, but mixed in are the colors of beauty (rose) and royalty (purple), or, in their more translucent form, crystals of quartz shining, to those who look at the tan/gray world closely, in sparkles of rose and amethyst.

  When I was writing about the first stanza of “Sandpiper,” I went back to Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” and reread it to make sure I was accurate in identifying where ‘to see the world in a grain of sand” came from.  Blake’s poem is a song of innocence, in that it sees the divine everywhere.  It ends,

God appears, and God is Light,
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in realms of Day.

I think Blake’s conclusion points us towards what the poem says about the poet. 

  Bishop is a close observer, true.  This is a poem of intense focus.  And as someone with intense focus, she recognizes that the bird is an analogue to herself.  He is focused: so is she, as the poem demonstrates.  He watches, carefully, the small things in his world: so does she.   He is finical: so is she.  He is continually looking, for “something, something, something:” so is she.

  And, by extension, she too is awkward, a fellow ‘only kangaroo among the beauty.’   The poem implies that she too is panicked in a constantly shifting world where Bishop herself can never see the ‘big picture,’ never see whether “the tide is higher or lower.”  We note Bishop attempting to control her own panic at being in the world by focusing in on the near and small, and bringing what is near precisely in focus.  In this poem, it is a bird on a beach.

  It is this acceptance of her own insufficiencies which for me makes the poem modern, and different than similar poems by her forebears Wordsworth and Hopkins.  For Wordsworth believed that his alienation from the world could be cured, that through exercise of his poetic imagination he might once again be at home in the world of nature.  Hopkins believed that through faith he could be cured of his alienation, and might possibly be reunited with a God whose closeness would mean redemption.

  But Bishop, in identifying with the sandpiper, sees herself as permanently awkward, finical, obsessed, preoccupied.  Someone who when face with larger things and attempting to decide their significance, “couldn’t tell you which.”  Someone always “looking for something, something, something.”  In our post-Freudian world, Bishop accepts a limitation on human capacity that would not be acceptable to Wordsworth or Hopkins.  “I does de bes I kin,” says Dilsey near the close of Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury.  So does the sandpiper.  So does Bishop.  And in that doing the best one can, maybe, sometimes, one can see something out of the ordinary, something which serves as a symbol of hope, “quartz grains, rose and amethyst,” gleaming in the bewildering multiplicity which is our world.

  To accept our narrowness of vision is to be aware that we will not outstrip our human limitations and insufficiencies.  But our limitation is in its own uncanny fashion enabling: it allows us to see beauty, if only in grains, only in moments.  God may perhaps, appear, as Blake claimed in “Human Form” – or the form of the sandpiper, obsessively focused on the here and now, encountering those quartz grains.  For Bishop, the appearances of divinity are rare, miniscule, and probably fleeting.  But those “quartz grains, rose and amethyst,” are there to be seen if only we look closely enough. 

 Footnotes

[1] I hope it is not off-putting to be mentioning other poets, and later in the paragraph to compare modernism to other eras.  It is not bragging, ‘hey, look at me, I know a lot of poets,’ any more than it is bragging to link Michael Jordan’s extraordinary basketball career to his having played with Scottie Pippen, or LeBron James to having played with the others of Miami’s big three, DeWayne Wade and Chris Bosh.  Poets are similar to basketball players: they perform in context, and comparing Jordan and his peers to James and his is no in any way unusual.  Just as you don’t have to know how to diagram a pick and roll play to enjoy a basketball game, you don’t have to be a poetry scholar to enjoy poems.  Nor, in the one case, to admire the players who score nor in the other, the poets who write fine poems.

[2] The attentive reader will recall Frost’s final couplet from “The Oven Bird”: “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing.”

[3] Including Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass – and Roethke as well.  Because he wrote over a long period, I am grouping Lowell with those younger than he, and not with Bishop and Auden.

[4] Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron are the greatest names among British poets in this category.

[5] Need I point out that I have just demonstrated what poems do?  They make sense by speaking to us.  What they tell us can be paraphrased, but the paraphrase leaves out so much that it does not suffice.  Poems however long are economical: they tell us what they have to say in fewer words, fewer words, than we would use if we tried to say the same thing in a non-poetic way, 

[6] This poem will be examined closely in a later letter.

[7] If you go to Google, click on ‘Images’ at the top, and type in the search term ‘sandpiper’ you will find plenty of photographs of the bird.  It always helps to see what the poet is looking at!

[8] Two other poets, in famous poems, did NOT take this roaring for granted.  In “Dover Beach” Matthew Arnold hears in the crashing waves “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” [A later letter considers this poem.]   In “Once by the Pacific” Robert Frost concludes “There would be more than ocean-water broken/Before God’s last Put Out the Light was spoken.”  And then there is Walt Whitman, who in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” hears in the sound of the waves “the low and luscious word death/and again death, death, death, death.” 

[9] My favorite instance is when Robert Frost does it twice in his famous poem “Birches.” First he breaks into his fantasy to acknowledge science.  Then having given science its due he continues, “But I was going to say before Truth broke in/ With all her matter-of-fact about the ice storm.”