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

Yet progress is not an adequate name for what happens when we look at these poems together. Bishop's "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / Element bearable to no mortal" makes the inhuman coldness of Moore's sea palpable. Moore's descriptions are almost entirely visual - Bishop makes us feel the nullifying horror, even as she complicates it with the inquisitive seal, the "emerald moss," the "creamy iridescent coats of mail" and the Lucky Strike. Similarly, Olivir's "Sunday Morning, High Tide" recalls and recasts the indignation of Moore's speaker at the man who, presuming to take the view, assumes his own central importance. Oliver's evocation of the cleansing force of the sea opens the question whether Moore's speaker (and Moore, too) might feel a secret (unconscious?) satisfaction in her certain knowledge of the sea's ultimate power. At the same time, the harshness of Moore's and Bishop's sea is not contradicted, but thrown into relief, intensified both by Oliver's evasion (in "Sunday Morning") of the desired flood's human meaning, and by her yearnings for return to primordial immersion in "The Sea" and "The Swimmer." Together, the nullifying sea of "A Grave" and the seductive, "luminous, paradisal "dream house" of "The Sea" and "The Swimmer" intensify the ambivalences of "At the Fishhouses," pulling tighter the thread on which Bishop's speaker (and reader) must balance, narrowing that ambiguous edge between land and sea where we may stand and consider all that surrounds - or would surround - us.

"The Waves," perhaps, makes clearest the conversational quality of the relationship among these three poets. Moore's and Bishop's poems have clearly offered Oliver an opportunity for speech, for exchange, which Oliver accepts, as she adopts her predecessors' images and insights and remakes them, not agonistically, yet with her own insights (and her own sea-evoking form: what Bishop accomplishes with long lines and repetitions, Oliver does through short, symmetrically cresting stanzas). Oliver's fishermen are courageous though she doesn't say as much: they will not "stand in the middle," as Moore knew they couldn't; rather they spin "out / from the rickety pier," no safer, though less presumptuous, in their action than was Moore's man in his stolidity. Oliver's gulls, screaming while they float in the sun, and her "glittering / laden nets" ("glittering" both more brightly and more harshly than Bishop's silver sea and benches) capture the ways she has found to honor, answer, and think through her predecessors' works to in these poems, Moore's and Bishop's separate nature is fundamentally other than human, Oliver's sea, the "mother lap" from which we have come, is not absolutely and always separate.

Yet progress is not an adequate name for what happens when we look at these poems together. Bishop's "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / Element bearable to no mortal" makes the inhuman coldness of Moore's sea palpable. Moore's descriptions are almost entirely visual - Bishop makes us feel the nullifying horror, even as she complicates it with the inquisitive seal, the "emerald moss," the "creamy iridescent coats of mail" and the Lucky Strike. Similarly, Oliver's "Sunday Morning, High Tide" recalls and recasts the indignation of Moore's speaker at the man who, presuming to take the view, assumes his own central importance. Oliver's evocation of the cleansing force of the sea opens the question whether Moore's speaker (and Moore, too) might feel a secret (unconscious?) satisfaction in her certain knowledge of the sea's ultimate power. At the same time, the harshness of Moore's and Bishop's sea is not contradicted, but thrown into relief, intensified both by Oliver's evasion (in "Sunday Morning") of the desired flood's human meaning, and by her yearnings for return to primordial immersion in "The Sea" and "The Swimmer." Together, the nullifying sea of "A Grave" and the seductive, luminous," paradisal "dreamhouse" of "The Sea" and "The Swimmer" intensify the ambivalences of "At the Fishhouses," pulling tighter the thread on which Bishop's speaker (and reader) must balance, narrowing that ambiguous edge between land and sea where we may stand and consider all that surrounds - or would surround - us.