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

Bishop's tone takes on a note of argument, as well as humorous concession, when paired in this way with "A Grave." At the same time, Bishop's re-visions of elements from "A Grave" cast into relief, by a kind of back- or under-lighting, the possibilities that Moore suppresses. Bishop, I think, might here be inviting (almost teasing?) Moore to reconsider the kind of skeptical, provisional stance that is typical of Bishop's poetry and that could be thought of as a middle ground between Moore's most characteristic stance and that which she takes in "A Grave."

Mary Oliver seems to carry on a conversation about the sea with Moore and Bishop both, in "Sunday Morning, High Tide" (Twelve 54), "The Sea" (American 69), "The Swimmer" (Dream 63), and "The Waves" (Dream 66). Taken together these poems demonstrate an understanding and acceptance of immersion based on a sense of relationship to nature and the sea that is analogous to what, in human relationships, Evelyn Fox Keller calls "dynamic autonomy." Keller emphasizes that "dynamic autonomy is a product at least as much of relatedness as it is of delineation"; as such, it "enables the very real indeterminacy in the distinction between subject and object to function as a resource rather than as a source of confusion and threat."(5) Dynamic autonomy "presupposes that the fears of merging, the loss of boundaries, on the one hand, and the fears of loneliness and disconnection, on the other, can be balanced. It also presupposes the compatibility of one's contrasting desires for intimacy and independence" (99, 100). From this perspective, immersion can be seen as desirable.

"Sunday Morning, High Tide" partially shares the visions of Bishop and Moore, but finally claims different connotations for similar imagery. The sea is dark, powerful, "a cold slate," "booming under the wharf," "smashing" with "gray fists / among the pilings." It shakes the foundations of human life, interrupting "the Sunday gossip" and "the flameless, vague / philosophies mournful / as our own hearts." The juxtaposition of "cold" sea and "flameless" philosophies (in contrast to the presumably not flameless sea) recalls the sea's burning cold in "At the Fishhouses," while the violence is more reminiscent of "A Grave." But Oliver imaginatively welcomes the tide's assault. Unlike Bishop, but perhaps in accord with Moore's speaker, she sees the human behavior she depicts as trivial, solipsistic, even despicable. She differs from Moore, though, in seeing the sea's action as cleansing, and she goes beyond the figurative practice of both "A Grave" and "At the Fishhouses" when she animates the sea, giving it "desire" and "appetite," making it responsive to our "mournful," "wasteful" lives, and imagining the aftermath of the wishful tide's sweep through

the fallen gardens, the empty house: room after room peaceful, its beautiful boards washed clean.

On the one hand, Oliver's evocation of the sea's "desire" might suggest a sense of relatedness, of affinity with nature, that promises an openness to engagement with the other; on the other, the pathetic fallacy belies the acknowledgment of otherness, of alien if wondrous power, that initially gives the poem its impact. The sea's harshness is acknowledged only while it is under the wharf; when Oliver imagines it washing away the inhabitants but leaving the house intact and "peaceful", she makes it oddly benign. The poem thus illustrates the conceptual danger of too easily opting for immersion. She negotiates the attractions and risks of literal and figurative immersion more successfully in "The Sea," "The Swimmer," and "The Waves."