The Elegiac Tradition and the Imagined Geography of the Sea and the Shore

Author(s): Rebecca Mills

Source: Interdisciplinary Literary Studies , Vol. 17, No. 4 (2015), pp. 493-516
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/intelitestud.17.4.0493

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 • The Elegiac Tradition and the Imagined
Geography of the Sea and the Shore
rebecca mills

abstract
This article investigates the prevalence of the sea and the seashore in the elegiac
tradition from a geocritical perspective, including poems by John Milton,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Lowell, Carolyn Kizer, Sylvia
Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop. I draw attention to the prevalence and recurrence
of oceanic and littoral topographies in elegies from both Britain and America,
and from different periods, in order to demonstrate a geography-based
continuity within the tradition and genre, thereby challenging and developing
popular critical narratives of shift and rupture in the heritage of elegy. By
extension, I illustrate the relevance of geocriticism to poetry, specifically in the
investigation of elegiac strategies connected to the drawing of cartographies
of imagination, emotion and memory. Focusing on the elegiac seashore—
in particular Plath’s “Berck-Plage” and Bishop’s “North Haven,” in addition
to the cultural imaginary of the ocean that they draw upon—enables the
connection of specific perspectives on death and loss to specific kinds of spatial
imaginations.

keywords: elegy, geography, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, sea

Elegies are poetic responses to death that commemorate and console, medi-
tate upon loss and mortality, and express grief and other emotions linked
to bereavement. The elegiac tradition has accrued conventions, tropes, and
recurring images, and, as a genre, elegy tends to be drawn toward bordered

interdisciplinary literary studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2015

Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 494 rebecca mills

geographies as a way of metaphorically charting the line between life and

death. The sea as a site of destruction and death, and the shore as a limi-
nal and often uncanny zone between life and death, permeate the Western
cultural imaginary. From the burial at “full fathom five” in The Tempest and
the “watery floor” where Milton’s Lycidas lay, to the “eternal note of sadness”
on Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and the waves that “Break, break, break” on
Tennyson’s shores, images of the sea and the seashore are flooded with loss
and melancholy. In modern elegy, even though the sea has been charted
and its storms and floods can be forecast, locating loss and the dead by or in
the sea persists, as in Sylvia Plath’s “Berck-Plage” (1963) and Robert Lowell’s
“A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (1946). As well as drawing on images
of a destructive sea and unstable beach, narratives of coasts and shores in
modern elegy are also influenced by practices of leisure and tourism, and
thereby nostalgia, as in Elizabeth Bishop’s “North Haven” (1978), reflect-
ing developments in the cultures of the seaside. The varying inflections of
the littoral geographies in this poem reflect distinctive elegiac moods and
emotions, while retaining the sense of anxiety and uncertainty caused by
placing a commemorative poem on the slippery and shifting ground of the
shore, wracked by waves and tides or in the depths of the sea.
I want to draw attention to the prevalence and recurrence of oceanic
and littoral topographies in elegies from both Britain and America, and
from different periods, in order to demonstrate a geography-based conti-
nuity within the tradition and genre, thereby challenging and developing
popular critical narratives of shift and rupture in the heritage of elegy. By
extension, I illustrate the relevance of geocriticism to poetry, specifically in
the investigation of elegiac strategies connected to the delineating of car-
tographies of imagination, emotion, and memory. Focusing on the elegiac
seashore and the cultural imaginary of the ocean that poets such as Plath,
Lowell, and Bishop draw upon enables the connection of specific perspec-
tives on death and loss to specific kinds of spatial imaginations. The placing
of the dead by the shore so that the ocean may mourn them is an extension
of the “pathetic fallacy of nature’s lament” (Sacks 21) evident throughout the
elegiac tradition. We see this function in Thomas Hardy’s elegy for Charles
Algernon Swinburne, “A Singer Asleep” (1914), for example, where “In this
fair niche above the unslumbering sea, / That sentrys up and down all night,
all day” (1–2), Swinburne is “pillowed eternally” (5). The figuring of the sea
in elegy goes beyond the pathetic fallacy to actual geography, as specific
locations on the coast and in the sea are transformed into sites of mourning

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 495

via the elegiac impulse; the shore is a liminal zone where stability meets
fluctuation, and horizon represents the boundary between the known and
unknown. This reading of elegiac seascapes, therefore, emphasizes par-
ticularity—mapping the specific seascape of the elegy, noting how the sea
is bordered and navigated, and analyzing the variations in the frequently
invoked tropes of the sea as a site of death.
Geocriticism has not yet been directed toward poetry to any great
extent—and even less attention has been paid to subsets such as elegy.1
Scholarship of elegy has not yet paid much attention to the spatial dimen-
sions of the genre or the recurrence of geographies such as the seascape,
preferring to privilege the historical aspects of elegy. The continuity in oce-
anic cartography I observe here contrasts with a popular critical position
that holds the landscape of the traditional pastoral elegy to be marked by
sunrises, weeping willows, and mythological deities, while the topography
of the modern elegy is shadowed by the sinister sterility of the hospital
room and the frenetic mobility of the city.2 This narrative of shift in the
evolution of the elegy is informed by a historically and socially contextual-
izing approach; Sandra Gilbert emphasizes the role of World War I and the
Holocaust, technological developments that both prolong life and destroy
it, and the receding influence of Christian tradition, in causing the rejection
of consolation and challenges to commemoration.3 Of “Berck-Plage,” for
example, she writes that the elegy “dramatizes the gulf between nineteenth-
century views of how death should at least seem to the hopeful believer and
twentieth-century visions of ‘modern death’ ” (331). Jahan Ramazani, on a
similar note, calls twentieth-century elegy “unresolved, violent, ambivalent,
questioning the dead, the self and tradition” (4), suggesting a shift from
“normative” mourning to “melancholic mourning,” and that “instead of res-
urrecting the dead in some substitute, instead of curing themselves through
displacement, modern elegists ‘practice losing farther, losing faster’ so that
the ‘One Art’ of the modern elegy is not transcendence or redemption of
loss but immersion in it” (4).4 This idea of historical change can be chal-
lenged by observing the presence in the tradition of both “melancholic” and
“normative” mourning before World War I, as well as afterward—and the
reflection of these moods in the spatial praxis of the elegy.
This focus on the temporal dimension in general literary criticism
has been noted and questioned by scholars such as Raymond Williams
and Edward Said from Marxist and postcolonial perspectives respectively.
Williams’s rejection of nostalgia for an idyllic pastoral “ ‘Old England’ and

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 496 rebecca mills

its timeless agricultural rhythms” (20) in The Country and the City (1973)
serves as a starting point for my own challenge to a narrative of shift and
change in the elegiac tradition based purely on historicity and changes in
social rituals and practices related to death and dying. Williams describes
this search for an English Arcadia as a “problem of perspective” (18), com-
paring the quest to being on an escalator going backward:

The apparent resting places, the successive Old Englands to which

we are confidently referred but which then start to move and recede,
have some actual significance when they are looked at in their own
terms. . . . But again, what seemed a single escalator, a perpetual reces-
sion into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated
movement: Old England, rural settlement, the rural virtues—all these,
in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite d ­ ifferent
values are being brought into question. (21–22)

Williams uses the spatial to reassert the particularity of each era—indeed,

challenging the very idea of the “era” by challenging the uniformity of
progression. My focus on the spatial dimension in elegy is from a perspec-
tive that does not consider modern elegy a bastardized or mutated form of
pastoral elegy, but as a culmination point of continuities, regressions, allu-
sions, and innovations, as well as shifts and changes in the genre and in the
“structure of feeling” (35) that produces it.
Said similarly uses the spatial to challenge the temporal, writing
in Culture and Imperialism (1993), “What I have tried to do is a kind of
geographical enquiry into historical experience, and I have kept in mind
the idea that the earth is in effect one world, in which empty uninhabited
spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geog-
raphy, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography” (5).
For Said, this struggle is over territory rather than topography, with all the
militaristic and imperialistic connotations of the former term. Said states
that “Europe did command the world; the imperial map did license the
cultural vision” (56), and charts the explicit and implicit spillage of impe-
rial values and attitudes into canonical nineteenth-century texts by Charles
Dickens and Jane Austen, for instance. Said’s focus is on politics rather than
poetry—his discussion of Yeats, for instance, is framed in terms of Irish
resistance and British oppression, rather than the close-reading of Yeats’s
verse. Williams and Said focus primarily on social spaces, from nations to

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 497

rural communities, and their analysis of literature is informed by questions

of economics and politics. I want to extend this consideration of the ten-
sion between the historical and geographical dimensions of literature to the
more imaginative, emotional texts of the elegy, using deliberately apolitical
readings to show how individual responses to death are shaped by a shared
geographical heritage situated within literary tradition. As postmodern
geographer Edward Soja writes, “To be sure, these ‘life-stories’ have a geog-
raphy too; they have milieu, immediate locales, provocative emplacements
which affect thought and action. The historical imagination is never com-
pletely spaceless” (14). By emphasizing the spatiality of “life-stories”—or
indeed “death-stories”—I also reassert particularity and individuality, as
well as highlighting tensions between the demands of the settings of the
elegiac tradition and the need for individual representation.
I want to include lyric poetry in the geocritical consideration of litera-
ture. Influenced by Williams and Said, as well as the “spatial turn” of the
mid-twentieth century when philosophers and sociologists such as Michel
Foucault and Frederic Jameson began to intensively analyze space and spa-
tial relations in cultures and societies,5 geocriticism “enables productive
ways of thinking about space, place and mapping” (Tally 3) and thereby
“provides a critical theory and practice of spatiality in relation to litera-
ture” (Tally 144). The term geocriticism is relatively recent, dating back to
Bertrand Westphal’s usage in Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2007),
although literary geography has been an increasingly active and widespread
critical approach since the spatial turn, disseminating and promoting the
significance of space.6 Tally and Westphal are primarily concerned with the
literary cartographies and spaces of fiction and occasionally epic poetry;
although Tally observes that “Literary cartography, as I am using this term,
need not be limited to narrative works. It is certainly true that iconographic
poetry or non-narrative description could appear to be all the more map-
like, insofar as they already appear to be straightforward representations of
space, whether in the forms of various spatial arrangements of lines on a
page or of depictions of the geographical space exterior to literature” (49),
he goes on to link cartography to spatial ideas of “plot.” Tally’s ideas of
“writer as map-maker” and the “act of writing as a form of mapping or car-
tographic activity” (45) and the processes of surveying, selection, and shad-
ing that this involves (45) certainly do apply to poetry and elegy. Indeed,
poets and elegists often self-consciously use the idea of the map as both a
navigating device to orient themselves within the world of grief, and as an

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 498 rebecca mills

artifact to trigger memories associated with a certain place linked to the

dead person, as in Thomas Hardy’s “The Place on the Map” (1914):

So, the map revives her words, the spot, the time,
And the thing we found we had to face before the next year’s prime;
The charted coast stares bright,
And its episode comes back in pantomime. (21–24)

As Eve Sorum points out, here “Geography mediates memory and facili-
tates the mourning process, but it also thwarts the speaker’s desire to
inhabit either past or present fully” (560). The event has been replaced
by its ghostly re-enactment, even as the “chart” replaces the “coast.” This
question of mediation, of a shifting and elastic distance between the elegist
and the geography of mourning—and the placement of the dead within
the elegiac terrain—becomes particularly evident in littoral elegies, which
allow both immersion by the ocean and retreat to dry land. My discussion
of the seascape, therefore, aims to contribute both to extending the field of
geocriticism toward emotional and transformative geographies sketched in
nonnarrative poetry, as well as diverting elegiac criticism from its preoc-
cupation with chronology and history. To do this, I turn to geographers
who consider the human, cultural, and imaginative dimensions of space
and cartography.

“more delicate than the historians’ are

the map-makers’ colors”

“Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. / Shadows, or are they shallows, at

its edges” (1–2) writes Bishop in “The Map,” concluding, “More delicate than
the historians’ are the map-makers’ colours” (27). It is in the shifting terrain
of the shore, of beaches, coastlines, shoals and sandbars, the indeterminate
site of shadows and shallows—and the difficulty of determining which is
which—that the littoral elegist places themselves and their dead. “You left
North Haven, anchored in its rock / Afloat in mystic blue” (26–27), writes
Bishop in “North Haven,” an elegy for her friend Robert Lowell, which
delineates the contours of an island off the coast of Maine. “Waves wallow
in their wash, go out and out, / Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs, / The
beach increasing” (IV. 13–15) writes Lowell in “The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket,” dedicated to Warren Winslow, dead at sea.7 Ramazani observes

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 499

that Winslow’s body in this poem undergoes “uncanny invigoration” that

“threatens to destabilize the usual division between the living and the dead.
. . . [N]o discursive space in the poem seems safe from the reach of the
lusty dead” (229). Seashore elegies share this sense of instability and anxiety,
which echoes the encroaching waves and tides; the bodies placed in them
rarely stay put. To approach these edges between life and death, I apply
Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between the map and the landscape painting and
Denis Cosgrove’s articulation of geographic vision.
Cosgrove emphasizes the significance of poetry and literature in geo-
graphical study; he writes of images, including maps and photographs as
well as “written descriptions . . . which pay special attention to the poetics
of place and landscape form” (Geography and Vision 3), arguing as follows:
“[W]hat holds the category together is the capacity of such images to rep-
resent geographical vision in the dual sense of communicating eyewitness
knowledge and interpretation of geographical realities, and of conveying
the forms and ideas, the hopes and fears that constitute imagined geog-
raphies” (3). Both “geographical realities” and “imagined geographies” are
important elements of both the form and content of elegy. The ocean, as
David Kennedy has pointed out, has been a setting of elegiac writing (6)
since Edward King was drowned in the Irish Sea, which became the aes-
theticized pastoral “watery floor” governed by sea-nymphs and Neptune:
“That came in Neptune’s plea. / He ask’d the waves, and ask’d the felon
winds, / ‘What hard mishap hath doom’d this gentle swain?’ ” (168). Even as
clergyman Edward King was transformed into Lycidas, the “gentle swain,”
so did the chaotic sea become a site of responsive winds, order, and hier-
archy, the poem ending on a note of hope for resurrection. Both real and
imagined geographies shape the elegy.
Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes between perspectives on maps and land-
scapes, care linked to imagined geographies and their form—both poetic
and topographical—and to the difference in mode between the “mystic
blue” of “North Haven” and the receding waves and dying crabs of “The
Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” Tuan observes:

The map is God’s view of the world since its sightlines are parallel
and extend to infinity; orthographic map projection dates back to
the ancient Greeks. The landscape picture, with its objects organized
around a focal point of converging sightlines, is much closer to the
human way of looking at the world, yet it appeared in Europe only in
the fifteenth century. (123)

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 500 rebecca mills

Tuan’s depiction contrasts the state of being all-seeing and outside

­temporality with limited vision and engagement with time and distance.
Cosgrove describes a similar detached deity as he compares viewing a globe,
or the earth from space, to “Apollo’s eye”: “Separated but not disconnected
from the earth, Apollo embodies a desire for wholeness and a will to power,
a dream of transcendence and an appeal to radiance” (Apollo’s Eye 2). This
contrast between the all-seeing, godlike cartographer, and the spatially and
temporally bound human, echoes Jahan Ramazani’s distinction between
“immersion” in loss, which he links to modern elegy, and “transcendence”
over grief, which he connects to elegies of “normative mourning” and heal-
ing. This distinction is further illustrated in the difference between the
shores of “North Haven” and Lowell’s Nantucket, as well as in other modern
and pre-World War I elegies.
The contrasting “forms and ideas, hopes and fears” that make up the
imagined geographies of the littoral elegy emphasize the multiplicity of ele-
giac narratives throughout the history of the genre, challenging the singular
narrative of a movement toward melancholy suggested by critics. Indeed,
the same elegy can have varying seascapes and shores perceived from the
vantage point of different emotional states, as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s
“In Memoriam A.H.H.” (completed in 1849). The speaker places the dead
on a “pleasant shore / In the hearing of the wave” (19.3–4), but the shore is
also linked to the speaker’s own lapses in faith and hope:

If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,

I heard a voice “believe no more”
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep; (124.9–12)

The ocean’s constant attack on the shore, and the dangerous and unhal-
lowed depths of the ocean, are associated with emptiness, death, and loss
throughout the Western literary tradition—Milton’s Neptune and nymphs
are an attempt to control the “the whelming tide / Visit’st the bottom of the
monstrous world” (“Lycidas” 157–58). “Lycidas” is ultimately cartographic,
according to Tuan’s formulation; the “monstrosity” of the sea is mastered
via the nymphs and gods, Lycidas is retrieved from the Irish Sea and placed
within the Arcadian imagined geography of Ancient Greece, and the
emphasis at the end of the poem is on sunrise—the radiance of Apollo’s
vision as well as the regeneration of nature and the resurrection promised
by the Christian perspective. We see this mastery of grief at the end of

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 501

“In Memoriam,” and an acceptance of grief via the cartographic strategies

of selection and containment in “North Haven.”
The “monstrous world” of the ocean and its devouring tides, waves,
and storms also forms a strand in the tradition of the elegiac geography.
This strand is woven into Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, where
Ariel sings “Full fathom five / Thy father lies” to a man who appears to have
lost his father in a shipwreck—and this lyric also introduces the trans-
formative potential of the ocean with the “sea-change / into something rich
and strange” that happens to the body. Echoes of the devouring ocean and
“Ariel’s Song” resurface throughout the elegiac tradition, reflecting, I sug-
gest, the human perspective on landscape, and the “immersion” into grief
suggested by Ramazani as represented by the “Godless deep.” The idea of
“fathoms”—paradoxically suggesting unfathomable distances—is present
in “In Memoriam,” in which Tennyson uses the image to convey his dis-
tress at parting from his beloved friend, and his doubt regarding his friend’s
place in the hands of God-as-sailor: “the roaring wells / Should gulf him
fathom-deep in brine; / And hands so often clasp’d in mine, / Should toss
with tangle and with shells” (10.17–20).

“there, in the nowhere”

Tennyson’s frequent moments of melancholy and preoccupation with

engulfment are evident in Lowell’s poem, where a drowned sailor whose
“open, staring eyes / Were lustreless dead-lights / Or cabin-windows on a
stranded hulk” (10–12) is left in the sea: “We weight the body, close / Its eyes
and heave it seaward whence it came” (12–13). The pronoun here is signifi-
cant; it implicates the elegist in the action, showing the human involvement
in the landscape. The emphasis is on literal immersion:

only bones abide

There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed
Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news
Of IS, the whited monster. (3.16–19)

The sea is a graveyard here—and not only dangerous and monstrous,

but described as a “nowhere.” Although Massachusetts place names such
as Nantucket, Sciasconset, and Madaket are given—the poem begins
in “A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket” (1.1)—these eventually lose

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 502 rebecca mills

orientational meaning, and the spaces of the poem become a chaotic

­whirlpool of ­influences. As Albert Gelpi points out, “Lowell’s ­principle
literary sources for this feat of sustained rhetorical virtuosity are the Bible,
Milton, and the Shakespearean grandiloquence of Moby Dick. Between
Genesis and Apocalypse the poem shows all disorder—the amoral violence
of nature, the immoral violence of human beings against nature and
each other” (61). A violence against human perspectives on geography
and memory is also evident: later in the poem, Lowell comments on the
“unstoned graves” of the Quakers in the ocean, showing a rejection of both
cartographic markings and attempts to impose a human perspective on its
surface. Lowell also rejects the possibility of appeal to Milton’s supernatural
deities or the mythological guardians of the dead in the pastoral elegy:

When you are powerless

To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back. (1.20–24)

“Earth-shaker” was an epithet for Poseidon/Neptune, while Orpheus

is a common figure in the pastoral tradition. Here death in the sea is an
ending, and the body, rather than becoming something “rich and strange,”
has “lusterless” eyes, drained of light—there is no “appeal to radiance,” as
described by Cosgrove, or attempt at transcendence. Nevertheless, some-
thing of the more traditional mode of elegy does persist in this poem in
the pathetic fallacy: “The winds’ wings beat upon the stones, / Cousin, and
scream for you and the claws rush / At the sea’s throat” (2.13–15).8
Lowell’s turbulent imagined geography, inflected by hopelessness,
emptiness, and a rejection of the ritual consolations of the pastoral mode
has precursors not only in the bleaker parts of “In Memoriam” but also
in “Dover Beach,” in which waves represent “the turbid ebb and flow / Of
human misery” (17–18), personified in the “melancholy, long, withdrawing
roar” (26) of the “Sea of Faith” (22). This melancholy infuses the littoral
geography of Plath’s “Berck-Plage,” which opens “This is the sea, then, this
great abeyance” (1.1).9 Plath draws on some of the transformative potential
of “Ariel’s Song,” and the tradition of the monstrous ocean and unstable,
combined with a “human perspective” on landscape. While “The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket” certainly shows the fragility of the human body—
and mind—in the face of an all-powerful ocean and the finality of death,

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 503

there the focus is on the dead rather than the elegist, whose identity is
­subsumed into the anonymous “we.” In “Berck-Plage,” the elegist projects a
presence onto the scene as an anxious observer with fallible, doubled vision
that reflects the liminality of the shore as an uneasy between land and water.
“Berck-Plage” is Plath’s elegy for Percy Kaye, a neighbor in Devon who
died of cancer in 1962, a few months before Plath killed herself. Although
Percy Kaye died in an inland village in Devon, the poem begins at Berck-
Plage, a seashore resort and sanatorium on the French coast visited by Ted
Hughes and Plath in June 1961 (Gilbert 295). Placing this death by the shore
not only draws on the littoral elegiac tradition but also has led critics to
connect “Berck-Plage” with other oceanic poems associated with Plath’s
father, who died when she was eight. “Berck-Plage” is comparatively one of
the least studied poems in Ariel, and, as with many other poems by Plath, is
rarely read without a biographical/psychological slant focusing on her mar-
riage, suicide attempts and suicide, and relationship with her dead father.
As well as Gilbert, critics Peter J. Lowe and Jack Folsom, for instance, have
contributed extensive analyses within this framework, noting that the beach
is an edge dividing life from death (Lowe 23), but their critical emphasis has
been on historicizing the poem. Lowe emphasizes a “markedly bleak” (41)
tone and “absence of hope” (41) for resurrection or renewal, reinforcing the
critical notion that modern elegy is hostile to consolation. Folsom simi-
larly notes unstable oppositions: “Beside the sea, the locus of beauty and
the source of life, we are made to watch a deathscaped travesty of spiritual-
ity and procreation reminiscent of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ ” (536). Gilbert
describes the development of Plath’s oceanic imaginary as a “sea-change”
from “something rich and strange” to “a dark water of annihilation” (314);
while her reading is informed by biography, she extends the poem’s con-
notations and its setting “between life and death” (330) to World War II
cultural traumas and Cold War anxieties (329). Maeve O’Brien broadens
biographical readings of “Berck-Plage” by further studying the historical
influences of the poem, and Plath’s engagement with the legacy of World
War II.
While the aforementioned critics discern the liminal potential and
stratified borders and geographies of “Berck-Plage,” they do not dwell
on them. Focusing on the particularity of the site demonstrates that the
human perspective of the landscape painting in “Berck-Plage,” empha-
sized through imagery related to damaged eyes and shifting vision, as well
as memento mori, creates an unstable liminal site between life and death.
Phenomenologist geographer Edward S. Casey distinguishes between

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 504 rebecca mills

cartography and painting as follows: “Maps aim (at least officially) at

­representing the exact contours of land and sea masses and the precise dis-
tances between them—a cartographic concern—whereas landscape paint-
ings attempt to convey the sensuous aspects of the environing place-world”
(xiv). This distinction is evident in the precision of Bishop’s descriptions
of landscape and seascape, for instance, the limning of bay and bedrock
on “North Haven,” as opposed to the relentless emphasis on the responses
of the human body and its fragility, and the human mind and its fallibility
and dependence on sensory experience and perception for navigating the
scene. As an elegiac geography, “Berck-Plage” simultaneously severs and
maintains connection with the dead, with both land and humans becoming
immersed in death. The opening three sections, each of nine couplet stan-
zas, deal with the dual nature of the resort/sanatorium on the beach, super-
imposing scenes of holiday-making with markers of disease, disability, and
perversion. Bikinis, ice cream vendors and fish are viewed as obscene and
ghostly, and the beach is littered with dismembered limbs. Seaside elements
invade the inland scenes: “The gray sky lowers, the hills like a green sea”
(5.1), making the land itself unsafe and unstable.10
This littoral landscape of binary opposition in “Berck-Plage” connotes
convergence, if not conflict, between stability/lability and permanence/flux.
Border-crossings occur through formal structure and typographical layout.
Text becomes landscape: “The bent print bulging before him like scenery”
(2.5). The structure of the elegy on the page echoes this transformation. As
O’Brien points out, “Berck-Plage” is made up of disconnected vocabulary,
and its short, spaced-out verse structure assigns meaning to textual gaps
and blank spaces. . . . Plath is negotiating with textual presence and absence”
(101). I connect this “textual presence and absence” to sea and land, with the
sea an invasive site of absence; the couplets draw opposing lines, while the
combination of enjambment and caesurae suggests movement between and
within them, echoing waves, tides, and destructive floods:

While a green pool opens its eye,

Sick with what it has swallowed—

Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers

Two lovers unstick themselves. (2.9–12)

The “green pool” moving into the following line creates a sense of engulf-
ment, of both body parts and less tangible visual and aural elements—but
the motion is in both directions because of the tenses of “opens” and

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 505

“has swallowed” and the ambiguity of “opens” and sick.” The pool, a
­self-contained feature of the landscape that lies between the sea and the
land, is engulfed by the human activity on the beach and forced to swallow
“limbs, images, shrieks.” The “eye” of the pool corresponds with “images,”
while swallowing corresponds with another use of the throat muscles—the
shrieks.
The landscape is inscribed with the human body, its parts and actions,
but is thereby infected with its disease. The pause between the “shrieks” and
the “concrete bunkers” suggests the withdrawing of the water and its sickly
swallowing, revealing the heavy structures on the beach and the physi-
cal actions of the “lovers,” and marking a shift from parts to wholes and
joinings. As O’Brien points out, the town of Berck was occupied by Nazi
German troops: “The physical presence of concrete bunkers imprints war
onto the landscape” (103). The “imagined geography” of the seashore there-
fore combines the markers of war and death and the leisure/convalescence
culture that pervades the place twenty years later. These are distorted and
exaggerated, however, through the fearful gaze of the speaker, making the
seashore an uneasy mixture of elements and uncanny splitting and dou-
bling. Casey suggests that viewing a landscape painting “lacks a practical
intentionality” (xiv); as opposed to the action of travel that often results
from reading a map: “paintings call mainly upon darting eye movements
and slight shifts of stance” (xv). The observer in “Berck-Plage” receives and
translates impressions rather than actively affects the environment.
These impressions often suggest fragmented vision of dismembered
parts of wholes. Fish are compared to body-parts and the sea is also split
from a single “abeyance” to multiple creatures:

The sea, that crystallized these,

Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress. (1.17–18)

These perceptual shifts contribute to what geographer Yvonne Rydin

calls the “threatening and disruptive” (152) otherness of beach-sites. The
observer’s perspective of the seaside, undomesticated despite the holiday-
makers, is inflected by the uncanny site. The “many-snaked” sea with its
sibilant alliteration is not only onomatopoeic but evokes the “monstrous
ocean,” and its “crystallizing” effect becomes the transformative fluid of
“Ariel’s Song” from The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth
suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (1.2.400–403). The
instability of the sea reinforces the doubled and transformative vision of
the observer: the sea is both abeyance and snake, a duality reinforced by

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 506 rebecca mills

the enjambment between lines 15 and 18. The sun is a “poultice” (1.2) and
a holiday-maker dons dark glasses to become a priest in a “black cassock”
(1.13), thus obscuring both his eyes and his vision, and adding to the recur-
ring ocular imagery, and imagery of funeral rites, within the poem. The
splintered vision, body, and landscape in “Berck-Plage” contrasts with
what Cosgrove called “a desire for wholeness” (2) in the cartographer/god’s
perspective; wholeness is repeatedly denied—even the lines of the poem
are frequently fragments of clauses rather than full sentences. The unstable
double vision of the observer and the infringement of the borders between
land and sea inspire a deep sense of unease, as the poem recalls the ocean’s
power to immerse land and body in death.

illuminations

Plath subverts holiday and leisure sites and activities into something sinis-
ter and ghostly in “Berck-Plage,” but other twentieth-century elegists treat
the shore as a site of nostalgia and fond, if sorrowful, memory. Nostalgia
informs Hardy’s “The Place on the Map,” in which a coast marked on a
piece of paper has come to be shorthand for the “Weeks and weeks we had
loved beneath that blazing blue,” (13). The uncanny potential of the liminal
seashore can also invoke friendly ghosts, as in Carolyn Kizer’s “The Great
Blue Heron” (1984) in which a “spectral bird” is connected with the elegist’s
dead mother and the past.

Oh great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned
So many rockets ago,
So many smokes and fires
And beach-lights and water-glow
Reflecting pinwheel and flare: (33–38)

In contrast to the draining ocean and stormy darkness of “The Quaker

Graveyard in Nantucket” and the shifting scenes of “Berck-Plage,” the
emphasis here is on lights, even if temporary, from past fireworks and
celebrations—a gesture toward radiance. Echoing the calmer seas of “In
Memoriam,” “Lycidas” and “North Haven” also use light to illuminate the
god’s-eye view of the cartographer, resulting in the power to transcend grief
and death. In contrast to “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” where the
sea is a “nowhere” and “Berck-Plage,” where the sea is an abeyance, driven

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 507

to escape the land, in “North Haven,” the sea is a frame for land, forming a
connective site between the dead and the living.
“North Haven,” Bishop’s elegy for her long-time friend Robert Lowell,
suggests the desires and dreams for wholeness and transcendence that
Cosgrove assigns to cartographers. The poem is illuminated by color-
ful descriptions of flower-filled meadows and bird-song, and a desire for
wholeness is apparent in the attempt to contain and thereby manage grief
and loss by mapping the archipelago and the coastland of Maine as a site of
absence within “the blue frontiers of bay” (10). In relation to the mainland,
North Haven is situated within Penobscot Bay, which forms a triangle of sea
behind it; on its Eastern side, facing the ocean, is the island of Vinalhaven,
and beyond this is the Atlantic Ocean. Bishop places the memory of the
dead on the island of North Haven and surrounds the island with a sea
of serenity and peace rather than the destruction and invasion of Plath’s
poem; like “The Great Blue Heron,” “North Haven” is nostalgic. While Plath
faces the imagined geography of the “great abeyance” (in reality the English
Channel with Eastbourne and Hastings approximately on the other side),
retreating before its invasion inland as it spreads death and erases mean-
ing, Bishop’s gaze and ocean here are bordered by the mainland and other
islands, suggesting stable ground beyond the waters.
Critics assign different motives to Bishop’s preoccupation with cartog-
raphies and marine environments; Jan Gordon suggests the influence of
Bishop’s travels, and calls Bishop a “map-maker” who is “fixated by bounda-
ries, where each participant loses domain” (304), and Margaret Dickie cor-
relates map and body in Bishop’s oceanic work, suggesting the encoding
of erotic attachment to women (3). The general critical consensus is that
Bishop’s maps are labile (a term that connotes fluidity rather than the dan-
ger of Plath’s unstable shores in “Berck-Plage” and the devouring and eras-
ing “nowhere” of “The Quaker Grave in Nantucket”). Lorrie Gold notes of
“North Haven” that “As much as death, the poem’s subject is change within
an order of the non-changing” (275). Sara Meyer emphasizes the shifting
nature of Bishop’s maps:

[T]he cartographic logic searches for meanings and identities not

within members of a net but in their inter-relations. Such logic of
spatial arrangement defies selfhood and autonomous self-regulating
economies because it places the subject at a junction of diverse foci of
meaning—allowing fluctuating, multiple interpretations, as bound-
ary lines and acts of positioning are constantly changing. (238)

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 508 rebecca mills

Meyer implies that Bishop’s cartographies lack a “self ”: “Another facet of

Bishop’s defiance of placement is her reluctance to disclose a self, to join
the confessional tide engulfing the American poetry scene in her time. The
map, a two-dimensional artifact lacking a center, resembles Bishop’s seem-
ingly selfless poetry” (238). While Bishop rejected the confessional mode,
and severely criticized Lowell’s role in the movement, a self of a sort is
evident in both the personal reminiscence and the cartography of “North
Haven” if the metaphor of mapping is looked at more closely. If “North
Haven” is read from a cartographical basis, the poem is not only designed
to mark fluctuation, but also specifically drawn to border grief and even
death. The elegy itself thus becomes both map and metaphor, both within
the representation of the map on the page and as a map itself. Mayer’s asser-
tions of “selflessness” and “lacking center” negate the process of selection
inherent to map-making—maps are representative rather than exhaustive.
Geographer Denis Wood suggests mapping as a way of knowing and seeing:
“And this, essentially is what maps give us, reality, a reality that exceeds our
vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve no other way”
(4–5). As Seamus Heaney notes in The Redress of Poetry (1995) of Bishop’s
“famous gift for observation” (172), “Her detachment is chronic, and yet
the combination of attentiveness and precision which she brings to bear
upon things is so intense the detachment almost evaporates” (172–73). This
combination of detachment and attention is evident in the strategies of
selection and arrangement afforded by the cartographic gaze.
“North Haven” comprises six stanzas of five lines each; the lines are of
varying lengths, sketching a wavering line of bays and peninsulas along the
right side of the page. Bishop uses italics and parentheses to create a varied
typographical topography, and capital letters to mark the names of flora
and fauna, suggesting the legend of a map. She was aware of the effect of
the poem’s layout on the page and the effect of gaps in shaping the whole,
remarking in a 1978 letter to American academic and poet Frank Bidart
that “There should be a wider space after the first stanza—the others equal
spaces” (One Art: The Selected Letters 624). There is indeed a gap between
the first stanza, which maps the speaker’s visual perceptions of the scene,
and the rest of “North Haven,” emphasizing the present disconnection of
the deceased from a place of shared meaning and nostalgia. There is a fur-
ther dimension to this gap; W. David Shaw notes that

Elegiac composition has a double aspect. When print domesticates

the strange, making irregular states of mind more patterned and

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 509

regular, it can subdue distress and moderate pain. But a cadenced

voice may seem suddenly strange or unfamiliar when the blank space
that encroaches on a truncated line helps a reader visualize the ele-
gist’s own fear of being engulfed. (226)

Shaw refers here to the rhythms of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”; the watery
imagery of being “engulfed,” however, applies to “North Haven” as well. The
blank space between the present position of the speaker and the mourning
and memorial of the rest of the elegy serves a similar barrier to “engulfment”
(or Ramazani’s “immersion”)—the pause to draw a deep breath, perhaps, or
to arrange thoughts into the scene sketched in the following stanzas. While
in “Berck-Plage” the print layout heightens the oppositions and tensions
of the poem and its landscape, augmenting its uncanny vision and under-
mining the regularity of its couplets and stanzas, in “North Haven,” the
geographical imagination allows judicious placement of formal mourning
and grief in a way without “engulfment” and “immersion.”
The cartographer’s quest for a whole vision is echoed in the full
­sentences connected by enjambment; in “Berck-Plage” the fragmented
clauses and lines of the poem reflect the shifting and fracturing scene. The
opening stanza is from the perspective of the all-seeing cartographer:

I can make out the rigging of a schooner

a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still (1–3; italics in original)

As opposed to the “still virulence” of Plath’s poem, where “still” connotes

stagnancy and entrapment, here “still” evokes the calmness of the air, and
the stillness of death and preservative powers of elegy that inflect the word
“still” throughout the tradition.11 The mapping of “North Haven” continues
as the elegist/cartographer identifies and documents the color of the sea,
the clarity of the sky, and the only type of cloud visible. Gold suggests of
“North Haven” that “we’re on the ground experiencing . . . around us or
above us; we’re not up there at the top of the poem’s canvas, getting our
aerial look down” (271). The search for wholeness is evident both in this
all-encompassing perspective and experience. The “new cones” also hint
at springtime and thereby renewal in the tradition of elegiac convention;
as critics such as Bonnie Costello have noted that “Like so many pasto-
ral elegies, [“North Haven”] takes solace in nature’s power to renew itself ”
(Questions of Mastery 211).12

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 510 rebecca mills

Despite the calm conveyed by the first stanza, the second stanza evokes
the instability of the littoral site, particularly in elegy; Bishop describes
the islands as “free within the blue frontiers of bay” (10). Cosgrove states,
“securing the immutability of the mobile has been a constant obsession of
cartography. It is fundamental to the map’s claim to be more than an imagi-
native picture” (Geography and Vision 168). Lowell has “left North Haven,
anchored in its rock, / afloat in mystic blue” (26–27); the island remains
in an “imagined geography” between fixity and flux. However, this state
can also describe the placing of the dead; his past inscribed into the rock,
while the rest of him is “afloat”—and this could be in sea or sky. Even if
the observer/cartographer is omnivident within the sphere of the “blue
frontiers,” she is not omnipotent; she cannot keep death at an indefinable
and shifting distance. The elegy itself as a cartographic artifact, however,
remains fixed, reflecting the state of Lowell’s poems, which could no longer
be revised further. “North Haven” therefore marks the point where Lowell’s
poems have been left behind, and become static, as well as serving as a
reminder of nature’s renewal.
The ocular motif of “North Haven,” begun in the opening stanza with
the insistence on the speaker’s powers of sight is furthered by listing the
Euphrasia officinalis, commonly known as “eyebright,” and once used as a
remedy for weak eyes (OED). The fauna as well as the flora of the island are
documented; the crossing of the border by the dead is accompanied by the
lamentation of the sparrow’s song. The eye imagery continues here, but it
is left unclear whether the cartographer herself is crying; the clear vision
and detachment that enables the mapping of sorrow are maintained. The
expression of emotion is assigned to nature, echoing the pathetic fallacy of
the elegiac convention; nature’s purpose is to “repeat, repeat, repeat; revise,
revise, revise” (20). In the elegiac tradition, repetition “creates a sense of
continuity, of an unbroken pattern such as one may oppose to the extreme
discontinuity of death” (Sacks 22) and “functions to control the expression
of grief while also keeping that expression in motion” (Sacks 23). According
to Costello, “North Haven” “[refuses] the conventional consolations of
elegy: the renewal of nature and the permanence of art” (Questions of
Mastery 211) and correspondingly that “the poem affirms the human capac-
ity to remember, and to change through and with memory. It also makes
clear that the act of memorializing experience in art is not a form of mas-
tery over loss” (Questions of Mastery 210). However, in “North Haven” the
cartographic perspective enables the mastery and thereby management of
grief as it brings the order of the map out of the chaos of grief. The purpose

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 511

of repetition is comparable to that of mapping. A map is a pattern, a way

of fixing the fluid while allowing for potential instability, as whirlpools and
currents are marked on maritime maps. Maps connect the disjunctive, and
border and thus help to define and contain absence and silence. The expres-
sion of grief here is thereby mediated—even mastered—through its cartog-
raphy. The map of “North Haven” consoles; because it charts a leave-taking
while drawing a map that factors in both memory and absence, and because
transience and mortality form essential territories of this cartography, the
map defines and enables their acceptance.

“ariel’s song”: mapping death at sea

The destructive and transformative powers invoked by Shakespeare’s

“Ariel’s Song” from The Tempest resonate throughout the elegiac tradition,
and I return to a brief consideration of this seminal text to conclude my
discussion of the sea and elegy.

Full fathom five thy Father lies,

Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich, and strange:
Sea-Nymphs hourly ring his knell. (1.2.397–403)

Ian Baucom notes in “Hydrographies” (1999) that “Ariel’s idiom, we realize

on re-examining his song, is not coronary but cartographic—or to be more
precise, hydrographic” (302), going on to imprint a fluid identity onto the
supposed corpse:

What Ariel has found drowned is not something deceased but some-
thing liminal. This mutating subject merges with its new oceanic
space of inhabitation. As its boundaries collapse, it liquefies, becom-
ing a catalog of the things that wash over it. (303)

While it is true that the border between sea and the corpse is blurred, within
the context of this discussion, there is a further dimension to “Ariel’s Song”
and Baucom’s argument. A tension between cartography and humanity is

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 512 rebecca mills

evident, and a concomitant tension between transcendence and immer-

sion. The governing bodies of the ocean are hinted at with “Sea-nymphs,”
but unlike in “Lycidas,” they sing a lamentation rather than provide succor.
Cartography is suggested by giving the depth of “Full fathom five,” but we
are not told how far it is from land. The struggle to place the dead, to navi-
gate a devouring ocean, and to come to terms with the changes brought
about by death in the dead and the survivors, and find an appropriate
ritual, all date back centuries. Although the littoral elegists may draw from
a common geographical source, the multiple narratives of surrender and
mastery of grief create their own topographies. Many elegists of the twenti-
eth century and before combine elements of immersion and transcendence
in some form; they are rarely embodied as clearly and distinctively as in
the elegies discussed here. The painting of a landscape that reflects fear and
disease, with borders between life and death that cannot hold, as well as
the marking of death and absence by using a map and showing death in
the distance, are attempts to define and navigate the terrain of loss. These
poems show that death and grief need a geography as well as a history.

rebecca mills completed her PhD thesis “Post-War Elegy and the
Geographic Imagination” at the University of Exeter Penryn Campus,
supported by a European Social Fund scholarship for studies in Literature
and the Environment. She has taught modern literature and poetry at the
University of Exeter and criticism and theory at Plymouth University.
Publications include “A ‘Knossos of Coincidence’: Elegy and the ‘Chance
of Space’ in the Urban Geographies of ‘Birthday Letters’ ” in the Ted Hughes
Society Journal.

notes

1. See, for instance, Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in Post-War Poetry, edited
by David Cooper and Neal Alexander (2013).
2. For more on the pastoral elegy and its conventions, see Ellen Zetzel Lambert’s
Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy: Convention from Theocritus to
Milton (1976), Peter Sacks’s (1985) The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from
Spenser to Yeats), and Iain Twiddy’s (2012) Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary
British and Irish Poetry.
3. Vickery in The Modern Elegiac Temper (2006) also historicizes the elegy, and
describes an elegiac mode of “regret, sorrow, confusion, and alienation to

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 tradition and geography of the sea and the shore 513

outright despair” (1) that saturates poetry and literature in general beyond the
conventional elegiac genre. For a survey of the elegy and its various strands and
periods of criticism, see David Kennedy (2007) Elegy.
4. Ramazani refers to Bishop’s poem “One Art,” but does not discuss her work in
detail.
5. Michel Foucault’s comment in “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias” (1967) that
“the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the
epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of
the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” is often cited as
influential in developing a space-based mode of thought. The significance of
spatial analysis is carried into postmodern thought, summarized by Frederic
Jameson’s remark in Post-Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1984) that “I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our
psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories
of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high
modernism proper” (24).
6. Wesley A. Kort summarizes the focus of literary geographical studies as
­follows: Indeed, spatial language in a narrative can be active, meaningful, and
primary. The various locations of a narrative can be read as constituting a kind
of “geographical synthesis” in the narrative analogous to the kind of synthesis
of actions and events we refer to as the narrative’s plot. A narrative’s “geogra-
phy” can set limits and boundaries to the narrative world, determining, for
example, what occurs, what is possible, and what can and cannot be expected
(15). Kort’s focus is on the “narrative world” of fiction, rather than lyric poetry.
Nevertheless, the same principles he articulates stand in elegy.
7. Albert Gelpi (1986) observes in “The Reign of the Kingfisher” (Robert Lowell:
Essays on the Poetry, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese) that “The
mourning for Lowell’s cousin Warren Winslow, killed and buried at sea dur-
ing World War II, comes to be viewed symbolically in the context of salva-
tion history, framed by the epigraph from Genesis and the gnomic last line
adumbrating the end of the world: “The Lord survives the rainbow of his will”
(61). For a psychoanalytic/biographical reading of “The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket,” see Jay Martin’s “Grief and Nothingness: Loss and Mourning in
Lowell’s Poetry” in the same volume.
8. For more on Milton, violent language, and form in “The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket,” see Marjorie Perloff ’s “Death by Water: The Winslow Elegies of
Robert Lowell” (1967) and Ramazani’s discussion (227–30).
9. For more on the idea of the “great abeyance,” see Sandra Gilbert’s Modern Dying
(310–17).
10. O’Brien (2013) suggests an alternative invasion in “Berck-Plage.” She points out
that the D-Day landings were less than 150 miles from the site, perhaps influ-
encing the depiction of bodies in the ocean and limbs on the shore (100).
11. See, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais”: “Come away! / Haste, while
the vault of blue Italian day / Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still / He lies,

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 514 rebecca mills

as if in dewy sleep he lay”; (49–52) and in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”: “Do we

indeed desire the dead / Should still be near us at our side?” (51.1–2).
12. Costello discusses the pastoral and Bishop further in the Oxford Handbook of
Elegy (2010) 324–43.

works cited

Alexander, Neal, and David Cooper, ed. 2013. Poetry & Geography: Space & Place
in Post-War Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Arnold, Matthew. 1994. “Dover Beach.” In Dover Beach and Other Poems, edited
by Candace Ward. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Bishop, Elizabeth. 2004. Complete Poems. London: Chatto and Windus.
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