Getting Back to the Origins of Christianity: Natural versus Artificial Elements in Elizabeth Bishop’s Seascape Gabriela Běhounková College

Elizabeth Bishop never considered herself a believer. “I dislike the didacticism, not to say condescension, of the practicing Christians I know,”[1] she wrote to her biographer Anne Stevenson in 1964. However, her poems suggest that her aversion to organized religion didn’t completely undermine her interest in spirituality. In “Seascape” a series of comparisons between the physical and the spiritual is drawn by figurative language in the context of a Renaissance cartoon for a tapestry.

The poem opens up with an image of a tropical scenery which, according to the author’s notes for a poetry reading, derives from a time when she was “out in a small inboard motorboat, fishing in the evening, in that [Key West] harbor where Stevens dreamed of living on a houseboat”[2]:This celestial seascape, with white herons got up as angels, Flying high as they want and as far as they want sidewiseIn tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections[3]The subject introduces the seascape as “celestial”, supporting the idea of an earthly paradise by likening white herons to angels. The simile works both on the grounds of the birds’ color and their ability to fly.The herons are further depicted as they “fly high as they want and as far as they want...