This essay originally appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of Poetry Magazine.

If you were compiling a list of Places Appropriate for Poetic Thoughts, the beach probably would rank somewhere near the top, on par with “in a dark wood” and well above “in an Outback Steakhouse.”  In general, of course, this has less to do with the beach as a lived experience (that is, a place you can eat oysters and play skee-ball) than with the beach as a concept (a territory that is marginal, shifting and adjacent to a vast and impenetrable element).  Or to put it another way, for most writers the beach is less important than “the beach.” Consider, for example, the way in which the British critic Gabriel Josipovici describes his arrival in Los Angeles in his elegant and peculiar book Touch:

On my first visit … I surprised my hosts—and myself—by asking to be taken down to the sea.  I found that, more even than wanting to visit the streets down which Philip Marlowe had walked, or any of the city’s great museums, which my hosts were eager to show me, I wanted to dip my hand in the Pacific.  We drove out of town and along the coast in the direction of the Getty Museum.  They stopped the car and I got out and went across the dirty beach and bent down where the waves lapped the shore … Within a very short while, of course, I could recall nothing of that moment, only my sense of myself hurrying across the sand and the feeling of disappointment that the water did not seem in any way distinctive.

Josipovici isn’t interested in the actual “dirty beach,” he’s interested in the possibilities the beach represents, in particular the intuition that a “touch” can confirm one’s arrival in a place that previously existed only in imagination.  Borrowing from the work of the historian Peter Brown, Josipovici concludes that his desire to put a hand in the Pacific related to the ancient belief that pilgrimage culminates in a personal encounter—a shared touch—with the saint whose blessing is sought.  It’s a pleasingly subtle finale to a subtly pleasing essay.

But it’s also incomplete.  Whether or not the desire for physical contact relates to the longings of the medieval pilgrim (or the modern essayist), it doesn’t explain why Josipovici needed to touch the ocean in particular.  After all, if he’d chosen to touch a fish taco instead, he’d still have been in Los Angeles.  What is it about the sea – and more specifically, the way we think about beaches – that makes Josipovici’s anecdote moving and persuasive, rather than just another sad tale of tacos foregone?  Why does it seem so appropriate that he marked his passage by visiting the shore?  And why have so many poets preceded him down to the water’s edge, to make their own obscure offerings to the tide?

*          *          *

“These sands,” said the naturalist Henry Beston of Cape Cod, “might be the beginning or the end of a world.”  The point is basic, but it matters – whatever else the shoreline may be, it’s a boundary between one thing and another (or as Josipovici might say, it’s a place at which a touch can occur).  And boundaries, as all poets know, are meant to be tested, probed and, when necessary, crossed.  One of the best illustrations of the beach as a site of poetic border-blurring occurs in Book IV of the Odyssey, in which Menelaus describes his long journey home from Troy.  Having been marooned in Egypt for twenty days, Menelaus learns that his escape depends on finagling a solution out of Proteus, the shape-changing God known as The Old Man of the Sea.  As Menelaus puts it, getting the better of Proteus involves some slightly gory trickery on the part of Proteus’s daughter, Eidothea:

…she came back with four sealskins,
all freshly stripped, to deceive her father blind.
She scooped out lurking places deep in the sand
and sat there waiting as we approached her post,
then couching us side-by-side she flung a sealskin
over each man’s back.  Now there was an ambush
that would have overpowered us all – overpowering,
true, the awful reek of all those sea-fed brutes!
Who’d dream of bedding down with a monster of the deep?

When Proteus arrives on the beach, he mistakes Menelaus and his men for the seals he usually tends “like a shepherd with his flock.”  He lies down among the “seals” and falls asleep.  At once, Menelaus and his companions seize the God, who (as Eidothea had warned) begins rapidly shifting through a multitude of forms – “a great bearded lion,” “a serpent,” “a torrent of water,” “a tree with soaring branchtops.”  At last, exhausted, he assumes his original shape, and Menelaus is able to force him to explain how the Greeks might return to Sparta.

So here we have:  (1) Men disguised as seals; (2) Seals described as sheep; (3) A God portrayed as a man (“a shepherd”) who then becomes an array of animals, plants and elements; and (4) A scenario in which a “true” form and “true” directions are produced only by physical force (a kind of touch).  And of course, it all takes place in an area that’s sometimes bare land, other times covered by water.  That last fact matters, too – just try imagining this scene in, say, the middle of a broccoli patch.  The beach isn’t simply part of the scene; it’s part of what makes the scene work.  Just as Josipovici looks to the shore in order to officially mark his arrival in a new place (that is, to make a transition) so Menelaus must fight on the sand in order to return to an old one (that is, to stop making transitions).  Either way, the beach is the place where change occurs.

*          *          *

There are two ways to think about this aspect of the shore as it relates to Menelaus’ battle with Proteus.  The first is to focus on the fact that the change in question eventually ceases – that a form emerges out of formlessness, meaning is achieved, order is established and so on.  If you favor a systematic approach to literature, this aspect of Menelaus’ confrontation probably will appeal to you.  But if you’re a more disorderly sort of reader, what’s more interesting is the humor and strangeness of the piled-up crossings and re-crossings of borders – land/sea/man/animal/God – and the comical, frightening, desperate process that seems, as Keats might say, like being “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,” only with a fairly irritable “reaching after fact & reason.”  It’s the struggle, not the struggle’s successful conclusion, that stays in the imagination and seems distinctly poetic.  Or think of it this way:  Menelaus is a hero and king when he wrests a definite form and a clear answer from Proteus; he’s a hero and king when he sails the water and when he assumes his dominion on land.  But while he’s scrambling on the beach, sloughing off a sealskin, clutching a lion that’s a serpent that’s a stream of water – then he’s reading (or writing) poetry.

*          *          *

The beach, then, is an area that lends itself to discussions of in-betweeness, hybridity and unstable identities; in other words, promising terrain for poets and people who spend a lot of time thinking about post-colonial theory.  But of course, borders aren’t always flexible, and if the shore is a boundary that’s constantly tested by the tide, it remains a boundary nonetheless.  Indeed, the very fact that a beach implies change means that it also implies separation – in order for “x” to become “y,” there must be a discrete “x” and “y.”  This is why beach poems are often about failure, especially a failure to understand or communicate.  For example:

I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning…
—Stevie Smith

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar…
—Matthew Arnold

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock.  In the end,
the water was too cold for us…
—Robert Lowell

Death, and change, and darkness everlasting,
Deaf, that hears not what the daystar saith,
Blind, past all remembrance and forecasting,
Dead, past memory that it once drew breath;
These, above the washing tides and wasting,
Reign, and rule, this land of utter death…
—Algernon Charles Swinburne

If the beach is, in daily life, often a cheerful, goofy place filled with waterslides and regrettable swimsuits, in poetry it’s more frequently a territory that causes even Whitman to say things like, “Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me/ Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.”

*          *          *

This is, at least in part, because there’s something potentially sad about metaphor.  After all, if we can only describe one thing in terms of something else, then there’s no one, true, eternal word to be said about anything.  And as a place where two elements meet, the beach is a kind of metaphor for the conditions of metaphor—a double failure, then, if you’re secretly wishing to be free of comparisons and changes.  In his strange beach poem “The Merman,” Paul Muldoon is concerned with exactly this kind of disappointment:

He was ploughing his single furrow
Through the green, heavy sward
Of water.  I was sowing winter wheat
At the shoreline, when our farms met.
Not a furrow, quite, I argued.
Nothing would come of his long acre
But breaker growing out of breaker,
The wind-scythe, the rain-harrow.
Had he no wish to own such land
As he might plough round in a day?
What of friendship, love?  Such qualities?
He remembered these same fields of corn or hay
When swathes ran high along the ground,
Hearing the cries of one in difficulties.

In Muldoon’s poem (an updating of Frost’s “Mending Wall”), the beach isn’t a place where elements blend, however violently; instead, the shore is a hard line between two realms.  If we think about Menelaus and Proteus, it’s not surprising to find a merman near a beach – as a shared territory, it draws shared forms.  But this merman is seen exclusively through the language of the farmer on shore.  As the critic Tim Kendall argues:

Lacking any sense of empathy, the farmer appropriates the merman’s domain to fit his own limited vision … The merman is seen as different from humankind, unable to share the farmer’s values, and his apparently irrelevant response seems only to stress his ignorance of friendship and of love.

As Kendall probably would agree, though, the most interesting thing about “The Merman” isn’t this disjunction, but rather the way in which the failures of the farmer’s language go beyond simple inappropriateness.  What matters—and what makes the poem so strange—is that the two figures aren’t merely separate, they’re alienated.

The word “alien” stems from the Latin “alius,” meaning “other.”  In Muldoon’s poem – and indeed, in many beach poems – the sense of strangeness comes from realizing that in comparing one thing to another, we’re making it impossible for the two things to be manifestations of a larger whole.  The act of comparison is an act of division, just as the beach will always remind us that the land isn’t the sea.  Consequently, when Muldoon’s farmer tries to make the merman into himself—and fails, as he must—he foregrounds an aspect of language that’s already built into the poem’s placement.  Rather than thinking that the merman is a type of person, we’re reminded instead that he is “alien”:  that he is “other.”

*          *          *

Which brings us to an odd but important question:  Why does Elizabeth Bishop have a thing for seals?  Or at least, why does she go out of her way to throw one into “At the Fishhouses”?  As you may recall, that poem ends by claiming that sea water

…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.

This is a rare instance of Bishop in High Style – conspicuously poetic, darkly grand.  But before all the talk about knowledge and the “cold hard mouth/ of the world,” there’s the slightly whimsical appearance of a seal:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.

What’s a joke about a seal doing in this deadly serious meditation?  For the most part, critics have tended to put the seal off as “comic relief” that shows Bishop “nervously relaxing with a little satire of her immersion” (Robert Dale Parker), or as a mere interruption in her “progress toward the sea” (Vicki Graham).  Almost everyone thinks the seal is funny.

But it’s not—or at least, not entirely.  In order to see why, it helps to remember that “At the Fishhouses” is, among other things, one of the great beach poems.  And just as the beach is neither land nor water—neither self nor other—beach poems often involve a figure that represents or comments on the possibilities that are going to be set in relation without necessarily being committed to any of them.  For Homer, this figure is Proteus; for Mathew Arnold in “Dover Beach,” it’s the speaker’s “love”; for Whitman in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” it’s a mocking-bird; for Stevens in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” it’s Ramon Fernandez; for Muldoon, it’s a merman.

*          *          *

For Bishop, it’s a seal.  “At the Fishhouses” is a poem about, among other things, our alienation from our own knowledge of the world.  While it’s true that Bishop could have attempted to make that point by simply writing about water that is “cold dark deep and absolutely clear,” she’s able to make it much more convincingly by including her supposedly amusing seal.  Because like Muldoon’s merman, the seal represents a kind of failure – and again, it’s a failure of depiction and communication.  It matters, first, that the seal is not only a mammal, but one associated with the ability to take on human form in stories about selkies from Irish and Scottish folklore.  As with Muldoon’s merman, this places the seal closer to us, and allows us think some kind of exchange might be possible.  (To understand how deliberate and essential this choice is, try imaging Bishop singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” to, say, a crab.)  Indeed, the seal is given “judgment,” “a sort of shrug,” an interest in music – a series of human characteristics that are likely the reason so many readers have found this section of the poem “comic.”

But there’s something very serious about these anthropomorphizations, and about the jarringly light tone in which they’re delivered.  The seal, as Bishop knows, is an animal.  No matter how human it may seem, no matter how familiar its gestures may look, there is ultimately no possibility of any exchange beyond a mutually uncomprehending gaze.  The seal is just a seal.  And the curiously “off” tone of this section – its dissonant jauntiness – is Bishop’s admission that she cannot make this particular “other” into another form of herself.  Despite the Baptist hymals, she’s alone on the beach.

*          *          *

This is why we’re prepared for the more explicit and profound depiction of alienation with which the poem closes.  If the water is “knowledge,” it’s a knowledge we can barely touch and never hold:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

Josipovici would understand the fascination and regret that mingle in these lines.  No matter how often we approach the sea, Bishop is saying, we can never arrive anywhere but another beach.  And like so many poets before us, we are left on the sands, facing the waves, anticipating a meeting toward which we will never stop traveling, and at which we will never arrive.