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

Moore's "A Grave" (Complete Poents 49; first published in Observations, 1924) addresses a man who has blocked the speaker's view of the sea; the poem punishes his presumptuousness with the certainty that, far from being subject to his appropriation, the sea will eventually overwhelm him, in death. We are never shown the view the man has blocked and the speaker has lost. Instead the sea is characterized as deceptive, perhaps malevolently so, inexorably advancing, unmoved by the lives that sink within it. The speaker is aggrieved, perhaps vindictive; she attempts to wrest "ownership" of the sea from him by insisting upon her superior knowledge. But the facts that she understands will doom him will ultimately overwhelm her too, so, ironically, she must implicitly admit the limits of her own will and knowledge ("volition" and "consciousness"), her own inclusion in the universal certainties she proclaims.

The poem's emphasis on our inevitable immersion in death is reinforced by its impersonal quality and the nature of its actions. Though a speaking presence is evident in the poem's insistent denials, it admits no personal identity: the man's presumption affronts not "me" but "those who have as much right"; never does a first-person pronoun even appear. Further, the offending man's presence is grammatically effaced, as "you" disappears after the tenth line and the sea takes over, semantically as, well as thematically. Correspondingly, human actions - looking, taking, and fleeing - are undermined by denials of all kinds (for example, "you cannot stand," "whose expression is no longer a protest," "unconscious"), and all evidence of human presence, let alone volition or consciousness, is submerged as the sea collects, progresses and fades, rustles, and "advances as usual." This sea absolutely negates human energy, integrity, and creativity; its occasional charm - the "phalanx" of wrinkles, "beautiful under networks of foam" - intensifies its horror. Yet Moore may subtly invite re-vision, by intimating that alternative meanings are possible. Such an invitation is implied by Bonnie Costello's reading of "A Grave": "Moore uses an image to explore ... a subject.... The experience of the poem is constant revision and ambiguity, suggesting that human observation is never definitive" (56-57). More persuasively, Taffy Martin observes that "Moore has placed her readers in the uncomfortable position of facing not just the insufficiency and the error of their perceptions, but their inability - because of the scene's very attraction - to abandon hope in it" (90). Both readings propose a latent ambiguity that careful reading of other poems by Moore could conceivably draw to the surface of "A Grave." Thus the delight in chaos, danger, and multiplicity that abounds in other poems Moore published in close proximity to "A Grave," while heightening this poem's stark effect, might also call it into question. I am thinking of poems like "The Steeple-Jack" and "An Octopus," the latter of which Martin accurately characterizes as arguing that "the fear itself can become a positive adventure," that "survival and even genuine enjoyment result from complete and unquestioning immersion in the chaos" (21, 26). Especially given its distinctiveness, a perception of such hints and possibilities in "A Grave" or in other nearby poems could well have contributed to Bishop's (or Oliver's) inclination to think back through it, or enter into conversation with it.