Comparing Bishop

’s "At The Fishhouses" And Rich’s "Diving Into The
Wreck" Essay, Research Paper

Roger Gilbert

Two of their most familiar and oft-anthologized

poems—Bishop’s "At the Fishhouses" and Rich’s "Diving Into the

Wreck"—reveal some surprising affinities of trope and language while casting

into relief the fundamental differences between the poets, which revolve around questions

of knowledge, history, and, in a key metaphor for both poems, immersion. Most prominently,

both poems allegorize the sea as a medium of pure knowing wholly distinct from the

compromised, constructed world above. Bishop famously says of the icy water off Nova

Scotia that "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear,

moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from

the rocky breasts / forever, flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is

historical, flowing and flown" (66). "Historical" in this final line

assumes a double meaning: Our knowledge is necessarily historical inasmuch as it occurs in

time and is therefore subject to the transience of all temporal things, "flowing and

flown"; but it is also knowledge of history, of the lives and events that precede our

own and give it meaning. Thus the history of this particular Nova Scotia fishing village

proves to be closely bound up with Bishop’s own painful childhood and its formation of her

present self. The old man the speaker meets near the water "was a friend of my

grandfather," she tells us, and like the "ancient wooden capstan" with its

"melancholy stains, like dried blood," his presence speaks of a past beyond

recovery. "We talk of the decline in the population," she reports dryly, her

euphemistic language failing to obscure that the real subject of their conversation is

death—her grandfather’s included, as the "was" in the preceding line

poignantly attests.

Rich’s allegory is no less clear-cut than Bishop’s, but she is not quite as explicit in

her association of the sea with knowledge, choosing at first to characterize it by

negation: "the sea is another story / the sea is not a question of power / I

have to learn alone / to turn my body without force / in the deep

element" (Fact 163). The world of the "sun-flooded schooner" with

its "sundry equipment" of ladders, knives, books, and masks is governed, like

the human world at large, by the will to power, the effort to master and subjugate one’s

environment. But the sea does not yield to such efforts, requiring a different approach,

gradual, patient, "without force." As becomes clear in the course of the poem,

this is because the sea marks a dimension beyond the reach of change, action, or

intervention. Like memory, the sea preserves traces of past traumas that can only be

inspected, acknowledged, and laboriously brought to light, never revised or effaced. Like

Bishop’s sea, then, Rich’s is ineluctably historical, but unlike Bishop’s, the kind of

knowledge it contains is not "flowing and flown" but stable, solid, "more

permanent than fish or weed." The wreck is not going anywhere.

If both poems draw metaphorical maps in which the sea embodies a pure or imagined

knowledge beyond the reach of all human agency, they differ crucially in the ways they

approach this alien realm. The two poems share a fundamentally downward trajectory; both

begin above sea level and then chart an incremental descent that carries them past its

threshold. Bishop and Rich employ similar poetic devices to evoke this movement, crafting

strongly transitional passages that mimic in their cadence and syntax the sinking motions

they describe. Bishop’s passage is especially ingenious in its interplay of form and

matter:

Down at the water’s edge, at the place

where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp

descending into the water, thin silver

tree trunks are laid horizontally

across the gray stones, down and down

at intervals of four or five feet.

This passage itself forms the descending ramp it names, made up of regular horizontal

lines each containing "four or five feet." The corresponding passage in Rich’s

poem also gives a drumlike emphasis to the word down:

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

In both passages the transition from land to sea is measured and gradual, but in Rich’s

poem it is quite clearly a matter of active agency, a willed descent undertaken in the

face of enormous difficulty. Bishop is more cir

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