1Although neither dismissed nor underrated, “Wading at Wellfleet” is usually sidestepped by critics. It has received little notice once one gets beyond the repeatedly mentioned reference to George Herbert. Critic Jeredith Merrin for instance writes:

The single phrase that Bishop quotes from Herbert in a poem of her own is a poignant expression of that psychological strife in Herbert’s poetry which she found compelling. Addressing his Lord in Affliction (IV), the troubled speaker says, “My thoughts are all a case of knives.” Bishop translates Herbert’s metaphor in her “Wading at Wellfleet,” where “all a case of knives” becomes a descriptive epithet for the sea’s glittering waves. (Merrin, note 15, 154)

2 I wish to argue away from the thematic contents of this quotation towards the act of quoting itself. When quoting is seen reflexively as the process of inscribing a verbal heritage in the poem, then it guides critical attention to the other converging inscription of a visual quotation, that of the museum sculpture depicting a scene from an Assyrian war. Both the verbal and visual quotations instantiate an experience of art as detour. My hypothesis is that “Wading at Wellfleet” is not the transitive copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s life experience because her primary experience is mediated by images and texts, by a pictorial and literary heritage. This mediation or detour functions as a cultural construct shaped by her appropriation of a tradition of antecedent and contemporary artworks. This cultural construct constitutes her being-in-the-world. To be sure, linking the pictorial and the literary is a venerable practice. Etymology has long established the kinship and competition of painting and writing, the sister arts, since graphikos, the classical Greek word for painting also has the sense of writing. Besides, the two complementary principles of description which combine sensorial and cultural references have long been known, analysed and used: hypotyposis, the rhetorical device said to create the illusion of the presence of a sensorial object, and ekphrasis, the other rhetorical device which represents an artwork in a literary or poetic text. They both make use of the homonymous proximity of the verbal and visual image, of the image as trope and the image as icon. However, Elizabeth Bishop‘s use of ekphrasis in “Wading at Wellfleet” does not originate in a Romantic nostalgia for Homer’s Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, for Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” Her use of ekphrasis is decidedly part of the shift towards inclusion which constitutes the dividing line between Modernist and post Modernist art practices. Ekphrasis serves the specific function of opening up the literary and pictorial arts to each other, of blurring their boundaries while foregrounding the issue of representation as constructedness. Quoting seen as a “weaving, unweaving” of poetical “echoes” (Bishop 275) to the visual arts is a quilting of the literay to the pictorial. As such, quoting turns the reader toward metapoetry and self-reflectiveness.

3My line of argument is that “Wading at Wellfleet” submits to scrutiny the dialectic between the word and the image as well as the modernist dialectic between the image and reality. Those two dialectics are among Elizabeth Bishop’s lifelong concerns from 1946 North & South to her last found poem entitled Objects & Apparitions, translated from Octavio Paz and dedicated to Joseph Cornell, from which I will single out two quotations: “But you constructed/boxes where things hurry away from their names […] Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes/my words become visible for a moment.” (CP 275-6) In his boxes as well as in her own boxes and poems, the text becomes visible and legible. In “Wading at Wellfleet” the word-image dialectic and the image-reality dialectic are deceptively toned down. Most arrestingly, the clarity of individual images is not in step with the clarity of meaning for the reader. Elizabeth Bishop seems disinclined to make meaning plain. The poem is blindingly opaque, surface clarity being all the more destabilizing for the reader as it conjoins traditional meter with unreachable meaning. How does one account for this impression of disorientation? What does quoting as a pragmatic strategy, then as a phenomenological experience, tell us about poetry and history, about war and technology? These questions will guide my reading.

Quoting as a Pragmatic Strategy of Disorientation

4My first contention is that “Wading at Wellfleet” disorients the reader because it unexpectedly breaks away from the Modernist faith in the verbal-visual image as analogy and raises the question of the changing status of the image as “bearer of revelatory power, of presence” (Perloff 59). I would like to have a closer look at the baffling disconnection between title and poem and then at the obtrusive absence of a lyrical subject.

5The title evokes the image or the story of wading as a physical experience on Cape Cod or at Wellfleet Bay, yet it is at odds with the Assyrian war sculpture representing a warrior’s chariot in the first two stanzas:

In one of the Assyrian wars
a chariot first saw the light
that bore sharp blades around its wheels.
That chariot from Assyria
went rolling down mechanically
to take the warriors by the heels. (CP 7)

6No reference to wading is made in the further four stanzas. What’s in a title? one might ask. This title reveals a strategy of disorientation. Unlike such titles as “At the Fishhouses” (CP 64) or “Cape Breton” (CP 68) which frame the poems that will in turn fulfill the visual promises of their titles, “Wading at Wellfleet” as a title does not frame its poem. It is contiguous to the poem rather than its analogous recapitulation. This title functions as a mirror of the poem’s relation to reality: the poem is as contiguous to reality as the title is to the poem. Which addresses the question of realism in poetry since the poem does not stand in imitation of or isolation from referential reality but is contiguous to reality. Now, if titling as a non-framing device restrains or destabilizes our desire for correspondence and analogy, then it calls to attention the way we relate the verbal signifier (the title) to the object signified (wading). In turn, it raises the epistemological question of the relation of the verbal signifier (the description of the sculpture) to the visual signified (the museum Assyrian sculpture) in the poem. Should we expect them to coincide? Maybe not. A non-analogous title pulls the reader away from analogy or representation and closer to René Magritte’s famous 1929 surrealist painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe also undertitled La trahison des images (the betrayal of images). The point made by René Magritte, in Michel Foucault’s reading, is that what is painted is not a pipe but the depiction of a pipe. A firm line is drawn between the notion of resemblance which posits an assertion of reality, and that of similitude which marks off reality and establishes the artwork as simulacrum. Put back into Bishopian terms, the description of the sculpture is as contiguous to the sculpted object as the title is to the poem. This disjunction of the visual from the verbal comes after the earlier disjunction of the verbal from the real. Both are the performative consequences of choosing a non-framing title.

7The poem further disorients reading because it escapes another frame, that of the lyrical subject. In the opening lines, observe the absence of a central, assignable speaking subject or seeing subject as the locus of narrating authority. There is more to the line than just a pun on light in “a chariot first saw the light.” The erasure of the lyrical subject of perception becomes noticeable when one realises that the scene is perceived (or focalized) by a non-human chariot, the synecdoche of a human driver. The next two stanzas confirm that there are few markers pointing to the moment of enunciation and to the narrating agency:

A thousand warriors in the sea
could not consider such a war
as that the sea contrives

but hasn’t put in action yet.
This morning’s glitterings reveal
The sea is ‘all a case of knives’. (CP 7)

8Note the subtle shifts in focalization from “chariot” in stanza one to “warriors” and to “sea” in stanza three; then the tense changes from preterit as past (“went rolling”) to preterit as hypothesis (“could not consider”) then to present (“reveal”); then the deictics “yet” and “This morning.” The moment of enunciation is implicit until the unobtrusive narrating agency first surfaces in the metaphysical-sounding conceit (“such a war/as that the sea contrives/but hasn’t put in action yet”) and in the conspicuous quotation from George Herbert. Of course, this quotation works as a rhetorical ekphrasis, as a means of citing one work of art within another. But for my present purpose I will single out the role of the quotation as an implicit marker of the speaker’s presence. At this point in my reading, turning to George Herbert’s “Affliction (IV)” is an enlightening experience because his poem serves as a useful contrast to “Wading at Wellfleet”’s enunciative choices.

BROKEN in pieces all asunder,
Lord, hunt me not,
A thing forgot,
Once a poor creature, now a wonder,
A wonder tortured in the space
Betwixt this world and that of grace.

My thoughts are all a case of knives,
Wounding my heart
With scattered smart;
As wat’ring-pots give flowers their lives.
Nothing their fury can control,
While they do wound and prick my soul.

All my attendants are at strife
Quitting their place
Unto my face:
Nothing performs the task of life:
The elements are let loose to fight,
And while I live, try out their right.

Oh help, my God! let not their plot
Kill them and me,
And also Thee,
Who art my life: dissolve the knot,
As the sun scatters by his light
All the rebellions of the night.

Then shall those powers which work for grief,
Enter Thy pay,
And day by day
Labour Thy praise and my relief:
With care and courage building me,
Till I reach heav’n, and much more, Thee. (Herbert 178-9)

9George Herbert’s poem is a dialogue between God and the speaker who contradictorily begs God to relinquish (“hunt me not”) and save him (“Oh Help, my God”) from the war (“strife,”” plot,” “rebellion”) raging between his human wordly nature and his aspiration towards divine transcendance (“A wonder tortured in the space/Betwixt this world and that of grace”)—in other words from the war between his soul and his thoughts. The Eliotian “dissociation of intellect and feeling” refers to the reflexive power of introspection which is both self-destructive skepticism and life-saving belief (“the task of life”). See how cognitive powers are compared to “a case of knives” and to water (“As wat’ring-pots give flowers their lives”): calling this comparison a conceit is apt indeed since in its Latin origin conceptus means the cognitive ability to understand and invent. Should God as sun intervene and help “[scatter] by his light/All the rebellions of the night,” then understanding and belief will be reconciled and the discordia concors of the conceit will be achieved in a new construct, the one which yokes “me” to “thee” at the end: ” With care and courage building me, /Till I reach heav’n, and much more, thee.” George Herbert’s speaker deals with personal experience sub specie aeternitatis, that is, with the experience of conversion lived in the light of Scripture as well as in the light of poetic traditions. The poetic canon counterbalances the danger of inner disruptive forces by providing a steady grid of lines, a regular pattern of enclosed rhymes (abba) followed by couplet rhymes (cc) against an odd number of five stanzas. Disruption, conversion and poetry may become conatural if providential grace enacts the utopian fusion of form and experience. In a way, this isomorphism of form with content is Plato’s Cratylus dream come true.

10In striking contrast, Elizabeth Bishop writes what looks like a conventional poem with its six very regular tercets, its four-stress line pattern and its conceit of war as sea. But it has no panoptic, lyrical subject in view which makes her displacement of narratorial perspective all the more potent. Seen hastily, a traditional poetic form may seem at odds with this non-traditional absence of a lyrical subject. But Mutlu Konuk Blasing illuminatingly underlines that the Modernist attack against the Classical or Romantic authoritative norm to write poetry loses its rebellious edge when Modernism becomes mainstream in the 1930s and 40s. The political efficacy of deviant, non-normative styles becomes limited. Conversely, after modernism, styles that observe historical conventions are increasingly liable to question the rhetoric of their forms and may indeed have greater rhetorical flexibility than organicist experimental styles, which cannot afford to question their own rhetoric. For the only authority organicist experimentalism can claim is that it is ostensibly non-rhetorical—that it can access truths and processes beyond those available to conventional forms, which alone are seen as rhetorical. Organicist experimental writers end up with less room to question the values (ethical, political, or natural) that they invoke to authorize their forms, for without the identification of forms with certain moral, political, or metaphysical truths, the poet has no authority save that of individual talent, which in poetry is no authority at all. Thus ostensibly free forms which must invest in authorities “above” or “below” the historical, conventional, or rhetorical, may enjoy less rhetorical freedom than conservative forms (Blasing 72).

11Read in this perspective, the antithesis between tradition and innovation in “Wading at Wellfleet” becomes more subtle. The absence of a lyrical subject as the assignable center of a poem does not stand in contradiction to a traditional form. Both are postmodernist choices. Both eschew what Charles Bernstein calls with reference to Charles Olson, “the phallacy of the heroic stance,” “the idealization of voice as the locus of authority” (Perloff 47), possibly the idealization of voice as masculine authority. It is striking to realise that quoting performs the very same function: the role of verbal authority is transferred from the speaker to a relay voice in the quotation by George Herbert and the ventriloquist line stops authority from being reinscribed in the speaker of “Wading at Wellfleet.” Quoting as an enunciative strategy further questions the validity of an organicist poetry based on an aesthetics of recovery which posits first the poet’s unique sensory and transcendant experience, then its verbal rendering on the page through transparent and non-rhetorical images in the Poundian sense. Quoting displaces attention away from the poet’s personal experience towards literary memory as the echo of multiple and heterogeneous experiences. Here, it is impossible to say that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (Blasing 13). So, after first pointing out that “Wading at Wellfleet” as a non-framing title is simply not the Verbal Icon of a wading experience, one must now add that the source experience does not originate in a lyrical subject in search of the perfectly adjusted form capable of rendering an original experience.

12At this stage, one may logically deduce that quoting works as a third anti-framing device. What matters in quoting is not the question of sources, of “the anxiety of influence” or of the thematic congruence between the evoked text and the evoking poem. What matters is the way the poem inscribes quotations as metaelements which blur the neat separateness of mutually delimiting fields: the poem versus literature, literature versus sculpture, reading versus writing, the original versus the copy, the personal versus the non-personal domain, the public versus the intimate sphere. Let me sharpen the focus here on the function of three unobtrusive and veiled allusions which are imbedded in the texture of the poem. First comes Henry David Thoreau’s Wellfleet, an expected reference on Cape Cod:

Here in Wellfleet, this pure sand plateau, known to sailors as the Table-lands of Eastham, on account of its appearance, as seen from the ocean… stretched away northward from the southern boundary of the town, without a particle of vegetation, —as level almost as a table, —for two and a half or three miles, or as far as the eye could reach; slightly rising towards the ocean, then stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as sand could lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire. It was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous fortress, whose glacis was the beach, and whose champaign the ocean. From its surface we overlooked the greater part of the Cape. In short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible, —we never saw one from the beach, —and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery as their footsteps in the sand. (Thoreau 62-3)

13Between the evoked text and the evoking poem, the reader recognizes such markers as the stooping slopes, the military engineer, the fortress, and the defeat of the thousand men who could not go against the limitless seascape and landscape. Interestingly enough, Thoreau’s Promised Land marker interlinks with Elizabeth Bishop’s chariot of light when it branches out to other markers of war and faith in other evoked texts. One by William Blake for instance:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
(“Milton”)

14or another by Lord Byron in the The Destruction of Sennacherib (Spiegelman 159) which describes how the Angel of Death swept out the Assyrian enemy army:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

15Byron’s image of masculine conquest, of military heroism and savagery is pitted against the women’s suffering, and the might of the warriors rolling down on their prey melts in the heat of the Lord’s glance. If one keeps the thematic contents aside, one concludes that quoting invites consideration of a poem as being about itself vis-à-vis other literary texts. Whether overt or inconspicuous, the ekphrastic inscription of interlocking texts pulls the poem’s center of gravity out of itself and extends the local poem beyond its present frame. The poem becomes what Roland Barthes called in S/Z “an entrance into a network with a thousand entrances” (Barthes 12). Literature as limitless “writerly text,” or as cultural hypertext, makes of the poet-reader a producer of texts and this no longer fits the binary split between original and copy, model and repetition, private and public domains. Quoting makes the text boundaries slightly irrelevant, the poem wading in and out of its textual locus. This results in the quoted image (“a case of knives”) losing “its authority as the poetic signature par excellence” (Perloff 47). This further pulls the text away from the subject position of authority since quoting originates in what Bruce Andrews calls in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book “a semantic atmosphere, or milieu, rather than the possessive individualism of reference” [Andrews 36]. And this bears again on the value ascribed to the organicist image which can no longer be said to fit a unique, personal life experience.

16This view of quoting brings about a different assessment of the status ascribed to Elizabeth Bishop’s translations and found poems. Quoting is an enunciative practice which may pertain neither to an aesthetics of stealth nor to an aesthetics of indirection. Let me return here to Objects & Apparitions translated from Octavio Paz and included in the Bishop canon. Most critics are uneasy about them and wrongly assume they do not deserve the same treatment as her other truly original poems. But her consistent quoting strategy together with her keen interest in Joseph Cornell’s boxes point to the same opening/de-framing of the textual space, which Bonnie Costello rightfully calls with regards to Joseph Cornell’s boxes, “not spaces of mastery but of release and freedom.” (Costello 224). This should lead critics to conclude that there is no boundary and no hierarchy between original and found poetry, between writing and memory, between writing and recycling. There is therefore no need to disclaim her translations as non-original and critics need not set up a boundary which Elizabeth Bishop consciously erased (Costello 224).2

17In other words, and this will be a momentary conclusion, “Wading at Wellfleet” is not an organicist self-contained unit which functions as the iconic equivalent of a life experience–that of wading—but a poem which sidesteps the traditional framing and closure of poetic discourse. Beside the meaning it produces, beside its semiotic weight, quoting as a speech act is a pragmatic experience of reading-writing which pertains to an aesthetics of the graft, to a dynamic view of writing as rewriting, of literature as used and usable “cages for infinity.”

Monuments to every moment,
Refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity. (CP 275)

18If the latin etymology of citing, citare— “to set into motion”—is to be trusted (Compagnon 44), then citing is a dynamic which taps the potential force of a verbal or visual meta element and dynamically sets a poem into motion. In that perspective, citing is tantamount to creating for the first time: as Maurice Blanchot puts it in The Infinite Conversation, “what matters is not to say, but to say again, and in this repetition, to say each time again for a first time”3 (Compagnon 7).

Quoting as a Phenomenological Experience

19Considering quoting as a pragmatic experience is a first stage in my reading of art as detour in Wading at Wellfleet. I now wish to look at its complementary aspect, namely to look at quoting as a phenomenological experience, as an encounter. The contemporary French poet Michel Deguy cogently defined it in a recent conference entitled “Poesie à la BNF ou Les conversations de poétique de Paris 2002-2003.” He wondered:

What is the point of a poem? I would answer: the point is to quote, is quotation for the benefit of the meaning of existence. The point of a poem is to make us see a thing while making it heard in its native language, a language which by the same token can be better heard, examined, perceived as a native language whose phenomenological specificity is precisely to welcome. (Deguy 13)4

20If poetry is a native language, therefore the poem is a homecoming which turns quoting into an act of hospitality toward any writing. Past writers, visual artworks or historical experiences are welcome into the locus of the poem. This leads me to underline how quoting next involves interlocking temporalities and timing: “Wading at Wellfleet” weaves together my reading time, the reading and writing time of Elizabeth Bishop (the 1940s) but also the times of George Herbert, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, to say nothing of the Assyrian war period. I suggest we relate this network of interlocked temporalities lying at the heart of quoting to Roland Barthes’ concept of “idiorythmie” (idio, meaning personal, and rhythmie meaning rhythm). I am referring here to one of his recently published 1977 Collège de France conferences on literature entitled “Comment vivre ensemble?” (How to live together? 67-76). In this talk he gave on February 2, 1977 Roland Barthes starts with Emile Benveniste’s seminal chapter on rhythm as form, then goes on to analyse fiction through a reference to monastic religious life. He describes how the Greek monks from Mount Athos monastery simultaneously lived in isolation in their cells and in communion with their brethren. Barthes dubs this dual rhythmicity “idiorhythmics,” literally one’s own rhythm in a collective rhythm. This idea of a personal rhythmicity-as-togetherness is precisely what writing as quoting is all about: quoting is writing in isolation from and communion with others, writers, creators, human beings past and present. I find that this view of poetical timing5 nicely fits a “believer in total immersion” because this co-presence of poet and text is the rhythm of the “native language” effected by poetry as quoting. And this definitely gives the lie to the assumption that poetry as detour is sealed off or that self-reflectivity is synonymous with ahistoricity or autotelic art. Quoting “for the benefit of the meaning of existence” means living with art rather than looking at art. It means being able to see architectural beauties in the natural world, “the suggestively Gothic arches of the mangrove roots” (CP 40), or to see Raphael in a fish jump:

[…] a fish jumps, like a wild flower
in an ornamental spray of spray;
this cartoon by Raphael for a tapestry for a Pope:
it does look like heaven.
(“Seascape,” CP 40),

21to see men of war in birds (“Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar” [ “The Bight,” CP 60]) or Baudelairian correspondences in a Bight. This is why “Wading at Wellfleet” guides me toward reading history in the light of poetry rather than poetry in the light of history. Elizabeth Bishop “poetically, Dwells on this earth” (Hölderlin) and she makes us read history “in the shadow and play of poetry” (Cook 3). As the title of my essay suggests, reading history in the light of poetry is “what poets are for in times of distress” (Hölderlin).

22My point is that history in “Wading at Wellfleet” is situated roughly between 1942 (when the poem was completed) and 1946 (when North & South was published). The presence of the Second World War may not be explicit, but it can be perceived through the literary grid of Antiquity. It is also related to that disruptive force which threatens the rhythm of the stanzas. Watch how the regular four-stress pattern is established in stanza one so that our attention is drawn to the stressed words “first” and “light” in: “a chariot first saw the light.” The stress is thus on technological discovery, on armament as technological innovation, and the pun in “to see the light” helps the reader grasp that the technology (the blade-bearing wheels) which makes war efficient and devastating originates in understanding and knowledge as episteme. Once established, however, this regular stress-pattern is disrupted by two five-stress lines: “that bore sharp blades around its wheels,” followed by: “went rolling down mechanically.” Observe how the chariot as a metonymy of the warrior links up with the visual inversion of light-mirroring blades into light-giving blades (“the light/that bore sharp blades around its wheels”). They both point to a monstrous, autonomous technology which not only bears in the sense of carrying but also of giving birth. Bearing as a birth-giving, as a bringing-forth is what the poem and war hinge on, since the waves at the end of the poem are said to be unlike the Assyrian wheels in that “they will not bear the weight.” This makes us look back on the first-mentioned wheels which stand for technology. In the first two stanzas, technology is perceived as a bearing-forth of weight, so it connotes both passivity and control. Hence, the oft-noticed rhyming “wheels” and “heels” (“that bore sharp blades around its wheels.”/ “to take the warriors by the heels.”) do not just foreground a sound echo but foreground the incremental letter w that separates the human from the technological. Technology as w—heel encompasses the human, or if I may rephrase this in Martin Heidegger’s terms in The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger 1977, 3-35), technology is monstrous because it “enframes” humans rather than stands passively as a means to an end under their control. Control is an illusion. Technology sets upon nature and man: its destructive violence against man inheres in the mastery of enframing knowledge which rationally calculates speed, impact, death. Technology enacts the power of the rational exercised against the real. This explains why wheel-power is will-to-power. But technology also assaults nature in that it harnesses natural energies (“went rolling down mechanically”) which stand ready for human design. Technology orders the real into standing resource. This is the escha-tological trajectory of the Assyrian wheel. As a finite, totalizing system with a rolling telos of its own, the wheel is lethal to nature and to man both relegated to “standing reserve.”

23The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such. Yet when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. (Heidegger 1977, 26-27)

24Technology and enframing knowledge transform man, the orderer of standing reserve into standing reserve. This explains the displacement of narratorial perspective, the lyrical subject position being replaced by the chariot. Technology as instrument has taken over. This also explains why the Assyrian wheel becomes what Ernst Gombrich called an apotropaic image, an image which terrifies and paralyzes the viewer. The posture of the Assyrian warrior as lord and master of the universe is enframed by technology which has become monstrously autonomous. “Wading at Wellfleet” strikingly starts at the moment when war as technology, as enframing knowledge takes over.

25Let me take this one step further. Martin Heidegger analyzes technology as techne, in the sense of crafstmanship. The world in which the design and execution of the Assyrian sculpture was brought forth, its “work-world” (Heidegger 1971, 40-41) is gone but it may have survived in our culture as the paradigm of mimetic and realistic art, in museums, in the epic poetry which tells the narratives of war and conquest and, I would venture, in hypotyposis and ekphrasis. They all have in common the hope that words will “cite and sight” their objects, to use W. J. T. Mitchell’s well-known phrase. The ekphrastic hope of the artist and the scopic desire of the reader are that words have the capacity to vividly describe and, in effect, reproduce an object before our very eyes. This notion of ekphrastic hope, whether analysed by Liliane Louvel, W. J. T. Mitchell, Murray Krieger or Wendy Steiner, precisely fits what Elizabeth Bishop rejected, namely “the immediacy of identification” (Bishop in Estess & Schwartz, 278):

I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous. (Bishop in Estess & Schwartz, 278)

26The hope that words may cite and sight, the ambition of immediate perception, unmediated vision may bespeak an archaic desire for presence, circularity and closure, repetition and immutability, which the sculptured wheel still embodies. In that sense, wishing to duplicate reality in words or in sculptured images is a holistic attempt to enframe the real. Its danger is akin to the danger inherent in any wheel-like mastery. It is even sinful if Marianne Moore’s reading of a ghost ryhme (sun/shin/sin) is to be trusted (“Lying so close, they catch the sun, /the spokes directed at the shin”). Circularity contaminates ekphrastic hope with the monstrosity of mastery.

27But the poem goes beyond the danger inherent in the ekphrastic hope for holistic enframing. It also turns to the other mode of bearing-forth, to the conceit as the alternative mode of creation and cognition which hinges on language:

A thousand warriors in the sea
could not consider such a war
as that the sea contrives

but hasn’t put in action yet.

28This unique enjambement calls attention to the etymological opposition between “consider” (considerare, knowledge through sight) and “contrives” (cum—tropos, knowledge through imagination). As cum—tropos the figure of speech at the core of poetic discourse indicates, to contrive means to project the poet’s imaginative power onto the sea. But Elizabeth Bishop immediately stresses the imaginary, textual nature of such a projection.

This morning’s glitterings reveal
the sea is “all a case of knives.”

29The quotation is the turning point of the poem in that it destroys adherence to reality by calling to mind the larger parergonal domain of cultured references which conjure up George Herbert as an alien, fictional presence. Quoting is a cognitive act of verbal recollection which sutures the speaker’s morning experience of watching with textuality. And the quotation being a threshold to textuality, it sets off an interpretive impulse in the readers of “Wading at Wellfleet” who try to account for its meaning by inferring it from the quotation, from a larger encoded text. This unfortunately overlooks the fact that quoting suspends the visual (hypotypotic) description of the beach or sea so as to keep it from becoming a sensorial object of contemplation. The seen/scene becomes subordinate to a larger, pre-existing textual domain of cultured memories and ekphrastic representations. It therefore thwarts or undermines the desire that descriptive words be transparent and convey the real landscape to the reader’s eyes. The quotation does not replace but disposes of the description. Quoting results in an absent description which points to a non-transparent literary medium. Blocking transparency thus means doing away with the very notion that the sensorial presence of the real in the text is desirable. This further explains why the poem stresses the potentiality of imagination which is dealt with in terms of projection onto the real and not in terms of translation and presence (“A thousand warriors in the sea/could not consider”). Poetic imagination is less a retention of descriptive power than a “protension” (Husserl) of power-to-be, protension defining the intentionality of a temporal consciousness oriented towards the past, present and future. The concluding “yet” is given prominence because it points to imagination as poetical power, as protension, as potential and limit. Seen as potential, the power of imagination lies in its fecundity, its ability to bear-forth what has not been yet. In that perspective, the present tense (“the sea contrives”) stands in contrast to wheel-power as power having been, power exhibited and exhausted. The Complete Poems bear testimony to this potential power:

[…] is the beginning of a painting,
A piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,
And all of wood. Watch it closely.
(“The Monument,” CP 24-25).

30Or borrowing from Octavio Paz’s poem,

Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world. (“January First,” CP 273).

31It seems that the potential power of poetry has its source in the very nature of language which “pollinates,” brings forth other words:

Everything only connected by “and” and “and.”
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. (“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” CP 58).

32However, there is an ethical limit set to the generative powers of imagination in Wading at Wellfleet. I see it in the final comparison of the powers of imagination and rhetoric with those of technology.

This morning’s glitterings reveal
the sea is “all a case of knives.”

Lying so close they catch the sun
the spokes directed at the shin.
The chariot front is blue and great.

The war rests wholly with the waves:
they try revolving, but the wheels
give way; they will not bear the weight. (CP 7)

33The poem shifts from the description of the Assyrian wheel as technology to the markedly anti-realistic, symbolic and therefore rhetorical images of the wave as wheel, and of the sea as warrior. A set of repetitions meaningfully underline their closeness as well as their irreducible difference: the same word, “chariot,” refers to the Assyrian sculpture and to the literary image of the chariot as wave. The same word (“they”) refers to differing antecedent words (“This morning’s glitterings,” “knives,” “the spokes,” “the blades,” “the waves,” “they catch,” “they take”). However, despite repetition and closeness, a line must be drawn between the technological chariot from stanza one and the literary chariot, (“blue and great”), from the end. The literary conceit of the sea as warrior, the symbol of the waves as wheels that “give way; they will not bear the weight,” are two rhetorical substitutes which will always fall short of reality. Unlike the technological wheels which are set upon man and nature, the literary waves are more than likely to fail to translate reality. They have no aim, no telos, no center, no frame, no ontological presence. They forego any action upon the real. They are imagined by a poet aware of their limits. The poet as sleight-of-hand artist creates what Octavio Paz called “apparitions”:

The apparitions are manifest,
their bodies weigh less than light,
lasting as long as this phrase lasts. (Bishop 276).

34Rhetoric uses nature as metaphor not as standing reserve. It offers the weightless safeguard of reflectivity, non-mastery and opacity in the war waged by technology, mastery, representation. Because rhetorical images cannot be the transparent medium of a sensory experience they contribute to an opaque artwork which claims the status of simulacrum and opens up the realm of hermeneutics.

35Drawing these sketchy thoughts to a close, I see in “Wading at Wellfleet” Elizabeth Bishop’s assertion that the value of poetry is not its power to act upon the real but to reflect on the real. Poetry as detour helps read war and history in the light of art. This perspective values in poetry what is usually devalued, namely poetry’s inability to live up to its hope for full presence. This self-conscious and self-imposed limit is precisely what makes poetry morally indispensable in times of distress. It does not offer an alternative to enframing knowledge since poetry as poiesis also proceeds from episteme and knowledge and runs the same risks. As a reflexive mode of being-in-the world, poetry develops self-awareness about its own ethos, its own ethical limits as discursive power. Therefore it may help reveal—Martin Heidegger would say “unconceal”—the dangers that befall a believer in immediate vision: transparency and realism. When poetry self-consciously opts for symbolic, anti-realistic, rhetorical and citational creations, it constitutes a statement of its own epistemology. Two conclusions may be drawn from this. First, “Wading at Wellfleet” goes against the Modernist and Poundian rejection of rhetoric and symbolism considered inferior to the transparent, organicist image. The very failure of rhetoric to achieve iconicity and presence, the ekphrastic fear that the word-image, word-reality dialectics will never be overcome by any Aufhebung, are reappraised here as what empowers poetry. The opaque poem demystifies referentiality and foregrounds the generative nature of language. Second, this is a po-ethical stance which explains the role Elizabeth Bishop ascribes to literature. It accounts for her view of the poet as reader “of old books” (“Visits to St Elizabeth’s” [CP 135]) against a world “of books gone flat” in a literary and pragmatic manner rather than in an external, top down rejection of Ezra Pound’s poetics and politics. “Wading at Wellfleet” could be Elizabeth Bishop’s early non-Poundian stance. Naturally I read her early distrust of the Modernist and Futuristic fascination with technology, speed, mastery and will-to-power by inference, but it also happens to be congruent with her much later view of the poet as survivor of ruins, as namer, as list-maker. Bonnie Costello perceptively noted that at the end of her life Elizabeth Bishop used to list words, “finding pleasure in a simple act of enumeration.”: “I want now—now that it’s too late—to learn the name of everything. [July 1974.]” (Costello 212). And Bonnie Costello adds: “Bishop goes on for two pages in this journal listing the wildflowers near the house.” (Costello 210) just as she did in “North Haven”:

This month, our favorite one is full of flowers:
Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,
Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,
the fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.
(CP 188)

36I find this urge to list words strongly reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Ninth Duino Elegy,” in which he came to express his gratitude for the uniqueness of human life, his thankfulness for being in this world and no other, no matter what, even when “the world’s night is spreading its darkness” (Heidegger), even in times of distress, even if we live only “once”:

Once and once only for
each thing-then no more.
For us as well. Once.
Then no more… ever.
But to have been as one,
though but the once,
with this world,
never can be undone.
[…]
Could it not be that we
are here to say: house,
bridge, cistern, gate,
pitcher, flowering tree,
window-or at most:
monolith… skyscraper?
But to say them in a way
they, themselves, never
knew themselves to be?6

37These words are “Minimal incoherent fragments” but their value comes from their being “the opposite of History, creator of ruins” (Bishop 275). Their po-ethical power is to pollinate other words and to be pollinated by a poet who will bring forth weightless creations.

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