Moore, Bishop, and Oliver: thinking back, re-seeking the sea - poets Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Robin Riley Fast

But Bishop, nonetheless, does not seem entirely to have joined Moore. The crucial fact is that her speaker is attracted to the sea, as Oliver's will be and as Moore's is not. Like Moore's man, she wants some kind of proximity and relationship, but, unlike Moore's intruder, she isn't "rapacious," and her approach is more complex: she combines a self-conscious desire for familiarity with an understanding very like that of Moore's speaker. As the poem nears its end she warns us, but in a tone that suggests she shares, despite her sobering knowledge, the desire to put her hand into the sea's burning cold. As a consequence of these differences, Bishop's speaker is not chastised, not condemned, by her poem, as, in Moore's poem, the man and ultimately the speaker are.

While Bishop clearly knows the sea's power to overwhelm her, unlike Moore she never uses the words "grave" or "death" here. Her sea is not the ultimate fact: "utterly free," it is yet "drawn" by some other force, "derived from the rocky breasts" of the world, and like our knowledge, it is flowing, and flown." Thus, though it remains both dangerous and elusive, its powerful finality is diminished. Both burning and cold, its paradoxical nature enables and invites us to approach it, for it is not all unequivocally one reality that we must name "a grave" or "death." It is unquestionably at once ominous and a source of beauty. That is why "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be," and if our knowledge, too, is temporary and incomplete, recognizing that need not imply annihilation. If it doesn't invite simple celebration, it does allow a considered ambivalence, and that makes more room for the personal and individual than does Moore's poem. The personal element is apparent in the figure of the old man, the speaker's familiarity with him, and their conversation. It is evident, too, in the speaker's humorous self-depiction as a singer of hymns and a curiosity to a seal. Finally, even as she evokes the sea's power most sternly, sbe brings the reader directly into the poem: "If you should dip your hand in ...," making the moment individual and immediate.

Bishop concedes Moore's point and modifies it, by reclaiming the personal, the particular, the immediate, and the at least temporarily knowable. For Moore, in "A Grave," meditation on the sea becomes meditation on the limits of human power and human language, and immersion, literal or figurative, threatens dissolution. "At the Fishhouses" hardly denies the realities of erosion, burning, or drowning, or the limits of our knowledge. Bishop's speaker, however, maintains her equanimity not on the strength of the superior knowledge claimed by Moore's (knowledge that must finally undo that speaker's claims, as she seems to know), but by holding tenaciously to volition ("If you should dip your hand in," "If you tasted it" - emphasis added) and consciousness, by recognizing and recreating the engaging particulars of her surroundings. As a result, Bishop can find the sea, as she says in the wonderful last line of another poem from A Cold Spring, "The Bight," "awful but cheerful." She will have it both ways.