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Comment 1 of 1, added on December 5th, 2004 at 1:08 PM.
Harold Bloom (professor and critic at Yale) has this to say: “Its five stanzas essentially are variations upon its epigraph, from Bunyan: ‘He sleeps on the top of a mast.’ Bunyan's trope concerns the condition of unbelief; Bishop's does not. Think of her three personae as exemplifying three rhetorical stances, and so as being three kinds of poet, or even three poets: cloud, gull, unbeliever. The cloud is Wordsworth or Stevens. The gull is Shelley or Hart Crane. The unbeliever is Dickinson or Bishop. None of them has the advantage; the spangled sea wants to destroy them all. The cloud, powerful in introspection, regards not the sea but his own subjectivity. The gull, more visionary still, beholds neither sea nor air but his own aspiration. The unbeliever observes nothing, but the sea is truly observed in his dream:
which was, ‘I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.’
I think that is the reality of Bishop's famous eye. Like Dickinson's, its truest precursor, it confronts the truth: what is most worth seeing is impossible to see, at least with open eyes. “
Ed from United States
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Copyright © 2003-2008 Gunnar Bengtsson, Poetry Connection. All Rights Reserved.
Harold Bloom (professor and critic at Yale) has this to say: “Its five stanzas essentially are variations upon its epigraph, from Bunyan: ‘He sleeps on the top of a mast.’ Bunyan's trope concerns the condition of unbelief; Bishop's does not. Think of her three personae as exemplifying three rhetorical stances, and so as being three kinds of poet, or even three poets: cloud, gull, unbeliever. The cloud is Wordsworth or Stevens. The gull is Shelley or Hart Crane. The unbeliever is Dickinson or Bishop. None of them has the advantage; the spangled sea wants to destroy them all. The cloud, powerful in introspection, regards not the sea but his own subjectivity. The gull, more visionary still, beholds neither sea nor air but his own aspiration. The unbeliever observes nothing, but the sea is truly observed in his dream:
which was, ‘I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.’
I think that is the reality of Bishop's famous eye. Like Dickinson's, its truest precursor, it confronts the truth: what is most worth seeing is impossible to see, at least with open eyes. “
Ed from United States