"Controlled Panic": Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop's Epiphanies

(II. 1-4)

As the bird watches the sand grains between his toes, "the Atlantic drains / rapidly backwards and downwards," taking with it the "dragging grains" (II. 10-12). Although these familiar lateral and plunging motions usually drain away the seer's selfhood, the bird, having been through this endless times, knows that chaos or dissolution will alternate with microscopic clarity:

The world is a mist. And then the world is

minute and vast and clear. The tide

is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied.

A virtuoso of concentrated Blakean perception, the sandpiper, recalling the mast-top dreamer of "The Unbeliever," views a spangled surface "minute and vast and clear." But, preoccupied with a search for something, this bird is trying to maintain his shaky sense of one discrete individuality in the face of newly-appearing millions of particles suggesting an unstoppable chaotic fragmentation:

(II. 13-16)

looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,

mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Is it his identity he is looking for? Like the girl in the dentist's waiting room, he could "be" any of these separate selves or "family" members, these alike-and-different particles. Yet, finally, the bird--its perspective blended with that of the epiphanist--is aesthetically liberated into the perceptual abandon of endlessly shifting tableaux, where minutely distinguished beauties are observed even amid the ever-present threat that at any moment they may all be dragged down and sideways, identities dissolved into oblivion. Controlled panic, suspended terror, the threat of dissolution combined with perspicuous discernment of discrete individualities in a rich aesthetic manifold--these represent Bishop's perilous elemental sublime.

(II. 17-20)

In "The Weed" (20-21) a conceptual, quasi-allegorical framing tactic barely tames terror. Terse and detailed like "Sandpiper," "The Weed" varies that bird's epiphanic problem/solution--clear aesthetic perception of the threatened dissolution of identity--in the vegetative realm. The speaker dreams that, "dead and meditating," she lies on a "grave, or bed, / (at least, some cold and close-built bower)" (II. 1-3), from whose comfortless strictures she is mentally unmoored by an "explosion" (1. II). This threatening upward thrust subsides to a slower growth, but one just as ominous: a weed (definable as an unwanted plant), sprouting up from the dreamer's heart, pushes out leaves like a "twisting waving flag" or a "semaphore" (II. 21-22). Then the heart, splitting, produces "a flood of water," forming "Two rivers," cascading down her ribs (II. 30-31, 34). These "half-clear streams," "smooth as glass,/ went off through the fine black grains of earth" (II. 33, 35-36). Since lateral-descending surges can sweep away the self, when "The weed was almost swept away" as it "struggled with its leaves" (II. 37-8), it recalls the sandpiper's barely controlled panic over the retreating sand grains dragged down and swept away by the tide.