18 pages • 36 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopSandpiper
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Finding Meaning in the Mundane
“Sandpiper” focuses on the quotidian, which means everyday occurrence. A bird running along the beach looking for food is something that happens every day, rather than being a monumental event. The poet seeks meaning in mundane moments such as this. The sandpiper’s search is a mechanism for exploring her search for meaning. The modern idea of mindfulness can be compared to Bishop’s approach in this poem. She seeks to gain a sense of the world by looking at the small details within it: “(no detail too small)” (Line 10), she says. Bishop placing this phrase in parentheses emphasizes how it is about something that is often ignored, like an aside or divergence. The sandpiper is a small bird, and the grains of sand between its toes are even smaller. Bishop explores these parenthetical things.
Specificity of location is another way to enhance the quotidian. Bishop chooses to narrow the location of the poem’s scene to the Atlantic coast: “the Atlantic drains / rapidly backwards and downwards” (Lines 10-11). By removing the ambiguity of the beach, the poem transforms from a general meditation on beaches and sandpipers to describing a specific set of observations. The Atlantic is a large ocean, touching the whole East coast of the United States, including where Bishop grew up and lived for periods of her life. It is an ocean many people see on a regular basis, rather than a distant and unknown locale. Anchoring the poem to a familiar location emphasizes the poet’s ability to find meaning in observation.
Another way to phrase finding meaning in the quotidian is the idiom "stopping to smell the roses." This idiom recalls the first two lines in “Auguries of Innocence” by Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” Blake heavily influenced Bishop thematically. Stopping to smell a “Wild Flower” is reflected in Bishop’s observations of the everyday. Appreciating the regular occurrences in the natural world enriches the experience of life.
Nature’s Sublime Power
“Sandpiper” is focused entirely on the natural world, which is characterized as both beautiful and powerful. In poetry, the sublime means experiencing infinity, such as in Blake’s lines, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.” Bishop builds upon this concept using the scene of the sandpiper running along the shore. The phrase “millions of grains” (Line 19) of sand at the end of “Sandpiper” hints at one idiom about infinity: The first day of infinity is a bird moving an entire beach to another place, one grain of sand at a time. In other words, infinity is powerful due to its scope. The sublime is merely a glimpse into its massive power.
In addition to the temporal (time-based) power of infinity, the power of the tides and waves appears in “Sandpiper.” The bird takes the fact that the “world is bound to shake” (Line 2) “for granted” (Line 1). Because he can fly away, the sandpiper does not fear the waves, which he feels in his feet. Rather, his kinetic (touch-based) experience of the waves is normal; the power is beneficent. In fact, he focuses on searching for food and ignores the tides altogether: “The tide / is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which” (Lines 14-15). People who live on the coast are far more aware of tides than the sandpiper. The bird is constantly in motion, while people build houses that they can lose in cases of extreme tidal changes (like tidal surges). Taking the ocean for granted can be read as a critique of the pure sublime that the Romantic poetics, like Blake, wrote about in their verse.
The bird’s hyperfocus on the grains of sand makes him less aware of the world around him than the observational speaker. Bishop notes, “The world is a mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear” (Lines 13-14). This is the atmosphere around the sandpiper, which he does not take in while staring down at the sand. As a bird that can fly, he will, at some point, look at the sky around him. However, in this moment that Bishop describes, the sublime is the ability to see the sandpiper totally immersed in nature. This builds upon Blake’s concept by showing the grains of sand in the context of the beach and with an animal who lives along the shore.
The Spaces Between Things: Liminality and Interstitiality
Bishop’s choice of the shoreline for her observation gives the poem a sense of liminality and interstitiality. Liminality refers to a thing that is between other things, and interstitiality refers to the spaces between things. Liminality refers to the space of the shoreline as both a space of water and earth. Bishop describes these two natural elements: “The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet / of interrupting water comes and goes” (Lines 5-6). The hiss of the earth—the sandy beach—is interrupted by the waves moving in and out with the current and tides. Liminality is the ability for the same space of beach to at one moment be underwater and the next moment be dry. This is the space that the sandpiper occupies, and Bishop focuses on it in the poem.
Interstitiality means occupying a space that is between other things. The sandpiper looks at the space between his toes: “watching his toes. / -- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them” (Lines 8-9). The speaker corrects herself. At first, it appears that the bird is focused on his toes, but then the speaker realizes he is looking at the grains of sand in the interstitial space between his toes. To take it a step further, the ecological action that the speaker describes is the sandpiper looking between the grains of sand for food. The multiplying of interstitial spaces like this is a type of infinity, to connect this theme with the previous theme about the sublime.
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