Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards
The contrast between the enormous and the minuscule in the natural world is illustrated by this quote. Bishop's juxtaposes the spaces between grains of sand alongside the Atlantic Ocean which – despite its size - “drains” into every pore. This almost scientific observation of the natural world evokes the necessity of precision; to find his gems the Sandpiper must closely analyze the world around him. In fact, this value is self consciously addressed in an aside to the reader, contained in parenthesis “(no detail too small)”. Likewise Bishop's poem must be treated with similar precision and close analysis, and through highlighting the value of this endeavor she encourages the critic to approach her work with a similar rigor.
illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint
(...) Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire
In this poem, Bishop shifts perspective onto the natural world itself and emphasizes the chaos that can be brought about through human negligence. To man, "illegal fire balloons" are granted biblical status, seen to be "rising toward a saint" and yet to the animal kingdom these alien objects wreak hellfire comparable to nuclear warfare - "egg of fire". The perversion of the incident is encapsulated within the language itself as the symbol of new life - the "egg" - becomes the object of destruction, as the ecosystem of the area is rocked by a simple flying lantern.
I felt in my throat,
or even the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together or made us all just one?
In this section, Bishop explores the narrators alienation from the female body - the image of breasts being what provokes her existential crisis and ultimately what makes her consider the nature of our relationships to one another. The natural state of exposed breasts are denoted with the pejorative "awful", and yet the narrator cannot stop fixating upon them to the extent that they take on philosophical significance: "held us all together / or made us all just one?". Humanity becomes either a collective mass where individuals are "held" together, or one which individuals blur into a singular entity: like the breasts that the narrator is both in disgust and awe of, the nature of society is too left "hanging" in a constant oscillation between one state and another.
I dreamed that dead, and meditating,
I lay upon a grave, or bed
In this poem Bishops asks of the reader to consider something that is metaphysically impossible - a description of the sensation of being dead. And yet we are reminded that in the realm of the psychological, the dream state ("I dreamed"), such surreal enterprises become possible. The paradoxical nature of dreams feeds its way into the lexis of the poem, as the poet questions the nature of external objects from this liminal perspective: the "grave" is conceived of as a "bed" and vice versa.
(...) Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say: esso—so—so—so to high-strung automobiles.
In an act that resembles prosopopeia, Bishop gives the power of speech to the inanimate "rows of cans" in the mundane setting of a Filling Station. And yet, she finds magic not through instilling these cans with supernatural properties but through revealing the magic within the world, and the commonplace, itself. Through the onomatopoeia of "esso-so-so-so" itself Bishop achieves a synaesthesia of sorts whereby the written word takes on a mysterious auditory experience through virtue of the perspective and arrangement of the cans themselves. This simultaneously lucid and surreal image is characteristic of Bishop's poetry which is both precise, hyperreal and scientific while also possessing a strong sense of magic and the mysterious.
