Sandpiper

Bishop’s “Sandpiper” is deeply influenced by William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence.” Blake, a visionary figure in the British Romantic poetry movement, worked as a printer and a poet. Much of his poetry, he claimed, came from talking with angels, such as Uriel. Like Bishop, Blake was fascinated with the natural world. The first lines of “Auguries of Innocence” are:

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons

Shudders Hell thr' all its regions" (Blake, William. “Auguries of Innocence.” 1863. Poetry Foundation.)

Bishop repeats the words “world” (Lines 2 and 13) and “grains” (Lines 12, 19, 20) in her poem “Sandpiper,” which also includes the word “sand” as part of the titular compound word. Furthermore, the first animals in Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” are birds. While Blake chooses a robin and a dove instead of a sandpiper, Bishop focuses on both the first type of animal that Blakes does and the first type of natural feature that Blake presents. Bishop also implies that the unnamed “something” (Line 17) that the sandpiper searches for could be Blake’s ideas of infinity and eternity.

Another literary figure who influenced Bishop was her lifelong friend Marianne Moore. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Bishop “combined flexible meters with microscopically sharp observations to achieve a broken, tense lyricism, reminiscent of Moore” (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 1491). Moore also wrote about animals similar to the sandpiper, as seen in her poem “Pigeons.”