Sandpiper

“Sandpiper” by Elizabeth Bishop was published in The New Yorker in 1962 and included in her 1965 poetry collection titled Questions of Travel. Questions of Travel was published after her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poems, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, one of many high points in her illustrious career.

“Sandpiper” is a free verse poem containing 20 lines with a consistent rhyme scheme and flexible meter (lines that have rhythm, but the rhythm fluctuates). “Sandpiper” is inspired by the British Romantic poet William Blake and the naturalist philosophy of the Romantics. Bishop, writing at the end of the Modernist period, agrees with but also furthers the ideas of Blake and other Romantic poets. She explores finding meaning in the mundane, the sublime power of nature, and the spaces between things.

Poet Biography

In 1911, Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Before her first birthday, her father passed away, and her mother was committed to a psychiatric facility when Elizabeth was only five years old. She was raised by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, her paternal grandparents in Worcester, and her aunt in South Boston.