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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
"The Sea" can be read as embracing wholeheartedly the "total immersion" that Bishop finally advocates only figuratively in "At the Fishhouses," as Oliver remembers and yearns for the embrace of "that mother lap ... that dreamhouse," the sea. In fact the whole poem can be read as a response to Bishop's poem. From the beginning the fact that this speaker is swimming ("Stroke by / stroke my / body remembers that life") belies and even rebukes Bishop's warnings about the danger of physical contact with the sea. Oliver does Bishop and her fishscale-encrusted old man one better when she swears she knows just what the blue-gray scales / shingling / the rest of me would / feel like! / paradise!" Instead of warily watching Bishop's "heavy surface of the sea, /swelling slowly as if considering spilling over," Oliver delights in the "spillage of nostalgia" that "pleads" from her "very bones"; she longs to become "again a flaming body ... in the luminous roughage of the sea's body."
The desire that pulses through Oliver's poem is not simply for physical pleasure, but also for knowledge. Oliver imagines turning away from "the long trek / inland, the brittle / beauty of understanding" - the kind of knowledge afforded by separating the self from nature. Moore and Bishop glance toward this kind of knowledge when they turn momentarily inland and note the "procession" of firs, "reserved ... saying nothing," and the "million Christmas trees ... waiting for Christmas", but in neither case, as each would agree, does the turn inland offer a way of knowing the sea. Bishop finally sees the sea as "like what we imagine knowledge to be," but she appears to have no closer access to the sea itself at the end than at the beginning of her poem. Indeed, the shock of touching and tasting the sea - even conjecturally - may, paradoxically, have distanced her further than she was when she first contemplated the beautifully scale-encrusted and eroded scene. Oliver seems to take up the pleasure implicit in Bishop's initial emotional responsiveness and, trusting to "that mother lap," dive in. If she did so, she would be "vanished / like victory inside that / insucking genesis, that ... perfect / beginning and / conclusion of our own." The unexplained conflations and juxtapositions of these final lines indicate that what she yearns for is visionary knowledge, attained through a dissolution of boundaries between self and other, self and nature, that enables a larger, more dynamic, more empowering knowledge of self and other, in relationship.(6) Thus, unlike Bishop, in "At the Fishhouses," she doesn't pull back. Yet it is important to recognize that in going beyond Bishop's provisional alternative to Moore's inexorable assertions, Oliver takes a risk for which Bishop's poem may have prepared the way. For as Bishop humorously undercut her own pretensions to spiritual transcendence of nature, she indirectly opened the possibility of deeper knowledge in and of nature. And in yet another way Oliver replays, even while going beyond, Bishop's (and Moore's) poems: Oliver emphasizes her longing for the imagined experience of immersion so consistently and sensuously that she draws us into her desire and tempts (or enables) us to forget that in the poem itself she swims and wishes, but does not finally give herself up to that vanishing that would be at once vision and death. Her risk, too, is a risk of language and desire, of conjecture, just as was the case at the end of Bishop's poem. Thus Oliver imagines diving more deeply, empowered, I suggest, by the example of precursors whose desires and whose knowledge of limits she implicitly affirms.
