Terminus

A terminus is, of course, a boundary; and of all the boundaries we know, the most common are the boundary between self and non-self, the boundary between day and night, and the boundary between land and sea. There are termini which are more subtle: boundaries between love and hate, masculinity and femininity, time and space.

But today I saw a poem which called to mind an old friend. There are so many boundaries hid within these crucifying lines; each line targets the bird within us, which as Chesterton once wrote, "...went singing southward / when all the world was young." But this is no raven, no albatross, no phoenix or other legendary avian. This poem is about a member of that family Scolopacidae, who somehow finds himself in the exalted company of birds who have something to say about humanity.

Here is Elizabeth Bishop's 1949 poem, Sandpiper. I am thinking of breaking with tradition and adding commentary.

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

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.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

=====

Random Notes:

This remarkable poem seems to be about the boundary between chaos and order, perception and the lack of it. The protagonist struggles (despite himself? unknowingly?) to find meaning, and adopts several coping strategies.

In the first stanza, he ignores the background noise, tries escapism (runs), tries seeking refuge (traditionally, southward), tries to control the panic ('panic' from Greek 'pan'='all' – a response to immensity, terror), and seeks meaning in every grain of sand (student of Blake).

In the second stanza, he ignores the signs of apocalypse ('unveiling') in the form of 'sheets of interrupting water' and the sizzling of the sand as it shifts in the tide; although he has feet of clay (dark, brittle) he continues running as long as he sees he still has the means to run (watches his toes).

In the third stanza, he is actually watching a 'Red Queen's Race' – it is the sand that is shifting while his desperate efforts keep him above the instability. We remember that the Atlantic generally symbolises strife and violent disruption (cf. 'Pacific', ref. Atlantis myth) of order. He is fascinated by the fact that he survives while the world is in continual flux.

This flux is the theme of the fourth stanza; the world is mist – out of focus, huge and diffuse – and then minute, vast, clear. The contrast between minute and vast recalls Blake's line, "To see a world in a grain of sand..." It also brings to mind the phenomenon of focus - to see everything with a lack of detail or to see very little with great detail. The protagonist, however, seems to be only following his nose.

The first line of the last stanza creates a significant break in the rhyme-scheme. What is lost, and rhymes with 'gray'? Obviously, the protagonist has lost his way, and doesn't know that he has. In his obsession with the individual grains, he does not see the whole picture, the picture in which he is a single organism in a continually changing immensity.

Perhaps the poem as a whole is about existential terror, the fear that one might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, be nothing, be overwhelmed by what is 'more real' and lose all identity and self. Hence, perhaps, there is the obsessive need to focus on small details and make worlds out of grains of sand. The sandpiper treads the terminus, the space between the void of the sea and the minutiae of the sandgrains which make up the volatile substrate of his existence.

Perhaps, also, the poem can be compared to Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, from the 'grating roar' as the ocean flings pebbles up the beach to the 'long, withdrawing roar' of the Sea of Faith. Sigh, so many random thoughts, each a grain of sand. Like Whitman, I contain multitudes.