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.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
While “Sandpiper” is technically free verse, its rhythm and rhyme demonstrate Bishop’s love of formal verse. While the meter is not consistent—the line lengths vary from six syllables to 13 syllables—stresses give the poem a musical quality. For instance, the iambic (pair of syllables that is unstressed-stressed) pattern of “He runs, | he runs” is repeated in Lines 3 and 8. The back-and-forth rhythm of unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables mimics the motion of running.
Every stanza includes the rhyme scheme XAXA. This means that the end words in the second and fourth lines of every stanza rhyme. None of the rhymes are repeated; each stanza has a new rhyme sound. In addition to this consistent rhyme scheme, the second stanza includes a second rhyme, so its rhyme scheme becomes ABAB. This means the end words of the first and third lines rhyme as well as the end words of the second and fourth lines. Notably, the speaker corrects herself in the third stanza, saying that the additional rhyme word is not an accurate portrayal of what the sandpiper is looking at. He is not looking at his “toes” (Line 8), which rhymes with “goes” (Line 6), creating the second rhyme sound of this stanza. Instead, he is actually looking at the grains of sand between his toes. The poet’s self-correction comes with a return to the consistent rhyme scheme of XAXA, as if that is also the correct rhyme scheme that should not be deviated from to make the poem rhyme. This can be read as a critique of poems that lose some power of diction (word choice) to adhere to a rhyme scheme.
Pathetic Fallacy
The pathetic fallacy is the attribution of animate characteristics to an inanimate object or concept. In Bishop’s poem, the Atlantic Ocean is much more active than the sandpiper, with “interrupting water” (Line 6) that “drains / rapidly backwards and downwards” (Lines 10-11). The “roaring” (Line 1) is introduced before the sandpiper and the ocean are named, implying a large animal, rather than a sea. This application of life to an unliving body of water contrasts the inactivity and thoughtfulness of the sandpiper, whose only actions are running and observing. This heightens the sandpiper’s obsession with his sustained gaze on the sand.
Personification
Personification is the application of human thoughts, feelings, and actions to nonhuman subjects. Sandpipers cannot read, yet the subject of the poem is “a student of Blake” (Line 4). Later, the sandpiper’s singular focus on the sand makes him ignorant of his surroundings, which is explained as, “He couldn’t tell you which” (Line 15). The sandpiper cannot talk, so even if he knew the conditions of the beach, he couldn’t discuss them. However, the sentence implies that the sandpiper possesses the human power of speech, making his monomania (overpowering obsession with a single subject) more relatable to a human thought.
Paradox
There are several moments of paradox, which is a pairing of contrasts (like an oxymoron), in “Sandpiper.” The bird is described as being “in a state of controlled panic” (Line 4). This gives an idea of what his obsession looks like. He runs along the beach in a manner that looks panicked. However, his running is confined to the space of the shoreline—where the water meets the sand—and he is obsessed with looking at the sand. This paradox of controlled panic also appears right before the direct reference to Blake. Blake’s poetry and art could be described as controlled panic. One avian (bird-related) image in his poem “Auguries of Innocence” is the “Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage" (Lines 5-6). The cage both causes and controls the robin’s panic.
Another example of paradox in “Sandpiper” is in the lines “then the world is / minute and vast and clear” (Lines 13-14). Minute, which means something very small, is the opposite of vast, which means something very large. Again, this relates to Blake where he describes how the world—something vast—can be seen in a grain of sand—something minute. Bishop uses this paradox to highlight the contrast between the bird’s obsessive gaze and the speaker’s larger view of the scene in which the bird appears. Her sandpiper is only caged by his focused attention; he is free to explore the vast world in which he lives.
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By Elizabeth Bishop
