Transfiguration, Mystery, and Metaphysicality

In many of her poetic works, Elizabeth Bishop evokes the liminal boundary between land and sea as a site of transience, sublimity, and mystery, representing a borderline between what lies within and outside of the realm of human understanding. In Bishop’s poem “At the Fishhouses,” the borderline between land and sea—which is structurally mirrored in the form of the poem itself—also functions as a site of upending transformation, introducing the possibility of a multiplicity of realities. Ultimately, by using various structural, linguistic, and thematic approaches that implicitly and explicitly invoke the theme of transfiguration in her poem “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop creates an escalating and contradictory sense of transformation within the physical world that leads to a culminating breach into the metaphysical realm.

Reflecting the idea of “borderlines” in its form, the poem is divided into three stanzas: the first stanza focuses on the terrain and physical environment onshore and around the fishhouses; the second stanza—which is significantly shorter—moves to the “water’s edge” and represents a distinct boundary in the poem’s structure and tone; finally, the longer third stanza turns towards the seascape and the sense of mystery, metaphysicality, and transience it epitomizes.¹ For the purposes of analysis, I will reveal the ways in which Bishop thematically, structurally, and linguistically constructs a transformative borderline by separating the poem into six discrete sections that represent shifts in the poem’s tone or themes. I do so in order to enable a more thorough analysis of Bishop’s gradual shift towards transfiguration throughout the poem, revealing the intricate interplay of physicality and metaphysicality across the three stanzas. The first section is comprised of lines 1-31 (“Although it is a cold evening . . . where the ironwork has rusted”); the second section is comprised of lines 32-40 (“The old man accepts a Lucky Strike . . . the blade of which is almost torn away”); the third section is comprised of lines 41-46 (“Down at the water’s edge . . . at intervals of four or five feet”); the fourth section is comprised of lines 47-66 (“Cold dark deep and absolutely clear . . . above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones”); the fifth section is comprised of lines 67-77 (“I have seen it over and over . . . then briny, then surely burn your tongue”); and the sixth section is comprised of lines 78-83 (“It’s like what we imagine knowledge to be . . . our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown”). 

The first section of the poem (lines 1-31) creates a preliminary sense of deviation from physical reality through contradictory representations of light and dark; in addition, Bishop linguistically establishes an initial aura of “reversal” or “inversion” that continues to develop alongside the escalating theme of transfiguration. The opening word of the poem, “although,” creates an immediate sense of contrast and opposition, as Bishop concedes the evening’s “coldness” by describing the simultaneous vivacity of the fishhouses, with air that “smells so strong of codfish / it makes one’s nose run and eyes water.”² Additionally, descriptions of contradictory qualities of light create a contrasting visual landscape. While the poem opens by describing the fisherman in “a dark purple-brown” twilight, with his net “in the gloaming almost invisible,” the poem shifts towards depictions of an almost mystical luminosity.³ Although the sea is described as “opaque”––subtly foretelling descriptions of the sea’s “grayness” in later stanzas––the benches are described as “silver,” the field is depicted as a “sparse bright sprinkle of grass,” and the wheelbarrows are defined by their “iridescence”: “and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies.”⁴ While the first section is defined by its groundedness in the physical environment of the fishhouses and the surrounding landscape—in addition to implication of the passing of time, such as descriptions of the “worn” shuttle and “rusted” ironwork—the speaker’s inconsistent portrayals of darkness and lightness evoke a quality of transient illusoriness that contrasts the section’s tangibility, introducing the possibility of a transfigured reality.⁵

In the poem’s second section (lines 32-40), Bishop invokes the human experience of physical reality by representing the old man’s manipulation of and tactile relationship with the natural world, imbuing the section with a feeling of familiarity that contrasts the ensuing representations of the seascape as unknowable and inaccessible. The second section differs from the previous section in its stark movement from a sweeping representation of the scene’s visual landscape to an intimate portrayal of the old man; in contrast to the first section’s absence of a self-reflexive narrative voice, the speaker brings their first-person perspective into the poem with the line “He was a friend of my grandfather,” suggesting a familial relationship with one another and evoking their shared associations with the landscape as they “talk of the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring.”⁶ In many ways, this section is defined by its portrayal of an innately human experience of the natural world: the fisherman’s connection to his physical environment is tactile, practical, and grounded in an assumption of its mundane predictability. However, by describing the scales of fish as “sequins” and “the principal beauty,” Bishop establishes a schism between the old man’s pragmatic relationship with the seascape and its seemingly impenetrable essence. Therefore, building upon the first section’s illusory depictions of light that signaled a deviation from reality, the second section presents the poem’s landscape as a contradiction: “graspable” and tactile, yet abstruse and enigmatic.

The poem’s third section and second stanza (lines 41-46), which bridges the first and final stanzas by conjuring the “water’s edge,” summons the borderline between the land and sea that represents a structural boundary in the poem from the previous stanza that describes the deviated—yet familiar—errestrial landscape to later depictions of the enigmatic, unpredictable, and shifting seascape. As if embodying the liminal edge of the shoreline in its language and thematic structure, the section utilizes discrete linguistic and visual contrasts that reproduce the opposition of land and sea.⁷ Alongside establishing the contradictory visual qualities of the landscape and seascape by describing the tree trunks as “silver” and the ocean as “gray”—recalling the speaker’s description of the sea’s opacity in the first section—Bishop also introduces a sense of opposition through contrasting directional movements. Descriptions of the sea are accompanied by repetition of the word “down” and language that conjures descension: “tree trunks are laid horizontally / across the gray stones, down and down / at intervals of four or five feet.”Conversely, descriptions of the land are associated with upward movements: “at the place / where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp.”⁸ However while the “edge” between land and sea is explicitly and directionally constructed–both by use of the word “edge” and by the juxtaposition of upward and downward movements (“up the long ramp / descending into the water”)—it simultaneously remains undefined and mitigated by the tree trunks that, in some way, obscure the borderline between the two elements. The obscurity of the exact “meeting point” between land and sea, and yet the simultaneous linguistic and thematic emphasis on the contrasts of both realms, contributes to a sense of the dissolution of physical reality that guides the poem’s transformative breach into the environment’s metaphysicality.

The fourth section (lines 47-66), which initiates the poem’s final stanza with the first of three repetitions of the sharp, rhythmic line “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,” is defined by themes of transfiguration, as the seal is depicted through both its acquired immortality and its personified qualities, creating a sense of the natural world as at once interconnected with and inaccessible to the human world. In addition, while associating with the emphasis on light and shadow in the first segment of the poem, this section inverts the previous sense of iridescence and escalates the use of repetition and enjambment that linguistically echoes the movement of water. In this section, Bishop initially transfigures the sea into an unfamiliar, mystical, and inaccessible force in the line “element bearable to no mortal” and consequently transforms the fish and seals into immortal beings in the ensuing line “to fish and to seals.”⁹ In between the two sets of ellipses that suggest a divergence, Bishop assigns anthropomorphic qualities to the seal and, in doing so, shatters the sense of disconnection between “mortal” humans and the natural world that she initially created by invoking the sea’s mysterious inaccessibility and the seal’s immortality: “He stood up in the water and regarded me / steadily, moving his head a little . . . with a sort of shrug / as if it were against his better judgment.”¹⁰ Therefore, despite suggesting that the sea and “immortal” nonhuman creatures surpass human understanding, Bishop simultaneously digresses—therefore transfiguring her original meaning within the confines of ellipses—and creates a sense of familiarity and connectedness with the seal. Additionally, the speaker draws attention to the seascape’s opacity with the repetition of the word “gray” when describing the water and the stones, and further conveys the landscape’s qualities of lightness and darkness when depicting the firs that are “bluish, associating with their shadows.”¹¹ Finally, the last two lines of the poem represent an initial breach into the metaphysical realm as the speaker imagines the water “suspended / above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones,” strikingly extending the possibility of transfiguration to the most foundational element of the poem’s physical reality.¹²

Additionally, the fifth section of the poem (lines 67-77) climactically upends and transfigures the familiarity of the natural world when water is “transmuted” to fire—therefore extending the reversal of elements—and implicates the reader as an explicit presence in the poem, inverting its previous narrative form with the introduction of an additional perspective. By repeating the phrase “above the stones” and through repetition of ‘s’ sibilants, the first four lines of this section lead to a climactic escalation of the poem’s themes:

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same

slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,

icily free above the stones,

above the stones and then the world.¹³

Because the first three lines employ enjambment, alliteration, and repetition that echo the sonic qualities of moving water, the final phrase—“and then the world”—signals a jolting shift in the poem’s sense of reality; auditorily, the phrase upends the ‘s’ scheme in the prior lines.¹⁴ However, this final phrase also represents an expansion of the poetry’s visual and thematic landscape, and it dilates to encompass an entire physical—and simultaneously metaphysical—world beyond the fishhouses. The ensuing lines signal a similar inversion of the poem’s physical landscape; for example, the elements are explicitly reversed in the line “as if water were a transmutation of fire,” indicating Bishop’s continued movement away from physical reality and towards the converging—and equally real––realms of imagination, illusion, and mystery.¹⁵ In contrast to the description of water as “icily free above the stones,” the fire is conversely portrayed to “feed on stones and [burn] with a dark gray flame.”¹⁶ The transposition of the poem’s landscape into a profoundly unfamiliar and mysterious reality is mirrored by the abrupt introduction of a second-person character, entangling the reader with the world of the poem. In addition, the addition of a second person character—and the transgression of the speaker’s voice into the reader’s exterior world that it implies—inverts the previous stanzas’ sense of perspective and suggests that the poem’s reality is now expanding beyond a solely self-referential framework. Ultimately, the transformation of elements and the addition of a second-person presence further provides a basis for the breach into abstraction, metaphysicality, and unreality that defines the concluding segment of the poem.

Finally, the sixth section of the poem (lines 78-83) represents the climax of the transfiguration theme as the poem moves from the physical to the metaphysical realm. In the line “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be,” the introduction of the first-person plural extends the inclusion of the second-person “you” in the previous lines, implying and sustaining the thematic transition from specificity to universality. After the use of a colon that marks a poetic faultline, the use of short, episodic word and phrase fragments—alongside the continued use of alliteration, repetition and enjambment—seems to mirror the “flowing” turbulence of water: 

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.¹⁷                   

Beyond the explicit introduction of knowledge as a metaphorical framework for the final section of the poem, it seems as though Bishop dismantles the physical world of the fishhouses through transfigurations: the world is a corporeal being, with a “cold hard mouth” and “rocky breasts”; the knowledge, described as if water, is both “flowing and drawn,” suggesting a dichotomy in directions of movement; finally, the poem extends itself into the timeless, as the past, present, and future collide in the final illumination that “our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.”¹⁸ To the reader, it seems as though the escalation of transfiguration—as concrete and abstract realities transform, invert, and collide into one another—culminates in an epiphanic breach into the eternal: the aspects of the world that cannot be observed, understood, or physically bound. 

In her poem “At the Fishhouses,” poet Elizabeth Bishop establishes an intensifying theme of transfiguration through the use of thematic and structural contradiction and inversion; ultimately, the poem concludes with a climactic transformation from the physical world to the metaphysical realm of knowledge. While Bishop evokes the juncture between land and sea as a transformative boundary, she also subtly indicates the absence of sky. In the first section, the descriptions of the quality of light seem to detachedly invoke the sky as a presence and source of luminosity; despite this, the poem thematically and structurally centers around the liminal borderline between the physical landscape of the fishhouses and the mysterious, inaccessible, and timeless seascape that encircles it. However, the final sections of the poem signal a shift towards the “above” realm that seems to gradually lead to a sense of being airborne: “icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world.”¹⁹ The final word of “At the Fishhouses,” “flown,” seems to suggest that the poem, like knowledge, is taking flight, ascending beyond the physical experience of humanity and into a realm that is far more esoteric, variable, and everlasting. Bishop implicitly poses the question: what does it mean to navigate a reality that surpasses our perception and comprehension in its complexity, unpredictability, and boundlessness?

1. Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses,” Poetry Foundation, 1979, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52192/at-the-fishhouses, 41, accessed 7 March 2024.
2. Bishop, 7-8.
3. Bishop, 4-5.
4. Bishop, 13, 27, 23-25.
5. Bishop, 6, 31.
6. Bishop, 33-3.
7. Bishop, 41.
8. Bishop, 41-42.
9. Bishop, 48-49.
10. Bishop, 55-59.
11. Bishop, 63.
12. Bishop, 65-66.
13. Bishop, 67-70.
14. Bishop, 70.
15. Bishop, 74.
16. Bishop, 69, 75.
17. Bishop, 78-83.
18. Bishop, 80-83.
19. Bishop, 69-70.