Reflection on Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Sandpiper”
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Sandpiper” is a short narrative poem about a sandpiper bird. A sandpiper is a short brown and white seabird that feeds by picking bugs and small creatures out of the sand with its beak, hence its name. Bishop’s poem is about the sandpiper’s behavior. She uses imagery to set the scene and describe how the sandpiper acts. One of the most evocative lines in the poem is “The beach hisses like fat”. This simile is highly effective because it contains some level of truth. When waves recede from the beach, the foam produces a hissing sound. However, by comparing it to fat, Bishop lets us know that the beach is hot, perhaps boiling or sizzling like oil in a pan. This simile works in multiple ways and is compelling. Bishop also uses some rhyming in “The Sandpiper”, though it does not follow any rhyme scheme. This adds a little bit of rhythm to the poem and makes it more audibly appealing.
Bishop conveys the determination of the sandpiper in several ways towards the end of the poem. She uses repetition in the line “Looking for something, something, something” as though we, as a viewer of this beach scene, are watching the sandpiper dart back and forth hunting for food in the sand. Bishop also uses language like “obsessed”, “preoccupied”, and “stares”, which also tell us that this bird’s only goal in life is to pick through the sand to find food.
Bishop’s fourth stanza is interesting because she plays with the idea of opposites. She says “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”. This stanza is interesting because though it follows the image of the beach that she already set, it adds an element of confusion to the poem, which is in character for a creature such as a sandpiper. By leading us back and forth with the image, Bishop allows us to focus more on the sandpiper and its behavior and less on the bigger picture. This is a unique and effective way to get her point across clearly but still elegantly.
