Sandpiper

“The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop (1946)

Like “the Sandpiper,” “The Fish” describes an animal in extensive detail. However, the speaker of “The Fish” interacts with the animal, catches it on her line and releases it, while the speaker of “Sandpiper” only observes the titular bird. Catching the fish allows the speaker to see many more details on its body but takes it outside of its natural environment. In contrast, the speaker of “Sandpiper” sees the bird from such a distance that she has to correct herself about one detail (what the bird is looking at). However, this distance allows her to include the bird in the context of his home, rather than out of place.

“The Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop (1957)

This is another poem from the book in which “Sandpiper” appears: Questions of Travel. Though the poem was originally published in The New Yorker in 1957, Bishop dedicated it to poetic inspiration and friend Robert Lowell in 1965. While the sandpiper runs along the shoreline—the intersection of water and earth—the armadillo witnesses the intersection of humans and the natural world. Bishop describes the armadillo leaving the scene where people’s fire balloons fall to the earth.