A.R. Ammons’ long poem “Corsons Inlet” reports a morning’s walk near a beach in New Jersey. It begins matter-of-factly, “I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning,” and the first stanza summarizes the itinerary. Although it reads like a diary entry, the poem is also a manifesto for a particular kind of free verse in which there will be:

… no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to  precept.

The American city, with its rectangular blocks and buildings, represents thought as organized, articulated, and linear. In the city, nature has been humbled to design. Similarly, in a sonnet or a villanelle, language has been forced into a form. But Ammons reports that on the Jersey shore,

I was released from forms,

from the perpendiculars,

      straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends

               of sight:

The narrator offers precise observations about changes that occur gradually. For instance, a dune is really different from a creek, but there is no point where one turns to the other. The “transition is clear / as any sharpness: but ‘sharpness’ spread out … ”

The poem’s layout–with its ragged margins and sudden blank lines–resembles the shapes of nature on a sandy coastline on a muggy, hazy day. On the dunes, and elsewhere “in nature there are few sharp lines.”

If the poem were all about vagueness, it would be dull. And if nature were truly formless, it could not be captured in words, no matter how loose and free. But Ammons detects tight order at small scales. The order turns blurry only from further away–a model for his own poetic form.

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:

blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:

snail shell:

            pulsations of order

            in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,

broken down, transferred through membranes

to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no

lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together

            and against, of millions of events: this,

                         so that I make

                         no form of

                         formlessness:

“Carapace of crab” is a fragment of tightly observed, onomatopoeic, self-conscious verse, but it is adrift in a larger poem whose form is loose and impressionistic.

I have cited examples of vagueness in space. Ammons is also interested in  vagueness over time.

thousands of tree swallows

               gathering for flight:

               an order held

               in constant change: a congregation

rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

          as one event,

                      not chaos: preparations for

flight from winter, …

As someone who once wrote a whole long poem about entropy, I am especially interested in this passage. I had treated disorder as problematic, both morally and aesthetically. For Ammons’ narrator, receptivity to vagueness and resistance to distinctions are not just valid aesthetic choices, but also moral imperatives. He identifies structure with “propaganda” and even “terror” (political words) but reports his acceptance of nature:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

          from outside: I have

          drawn no lines:

 …

so I am willing to go along, to accept

the becoming

thought

The Poetry Foundation provides the text of Bishop’s masterpiece “At the Fishhouses” (1948) along with a recording of the author reading it (not necessarily as well as it could be read).

She introduces the color silver early and returns to it often. In fact:

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over …

But nothing in the poem is actually silver. That is just an appearance, a misleading feature of the surface of things. For instance, “the silver of the benches … is of an apparent translucence …” The wheelbarrows look beautifully silver because of the “small iridescent flies crawling on them.”

The opposite of false silver is the profound and true depth of the sea. “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear” is the comma-free phrase that Bishop strikingly repeats. The temptation in the poem is to plunge through silvery appearances to the real “element bearable to no mortal,” the ocean water that would kill by freezing or drowning. It is a temptation that Bishop suggests early and then repeatedly defers or avoids. Immediately after first invoking the “cold dark deep,” she digresses:

… 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.

Singing Baptist hymns to a seal is amusing. Even if you don’t happen to find it funny (as I do), I think you will agree that it has the form of a joke, meant to deflect the question of how to relate to the “clear gray icy water” that would ache your bones and burn your hand if you entered it. Buried in the joke is the serious idea of “total immersion.” Plunging into the ocean at Nova Scotia would be like facing the ultimate truth that we try to defer. Of that water, Bishop writes,

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free …

If silvery surfaces and deadly depths are two crucial ideas in the poem, a third is the human observer. The poem begins with apparently objective and scientifically precise description. But then the narrator comes in:

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring. …

The narrator, like all mortal beings, inhabits a world of change. All the things she observes have developed and will cease, like the wheelbarrows that have come to be “plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail” or the cod that will disappear from overfishing. The last line of the poem says explicitly that “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.” You cannot truly experience the freezing depths without dying in them: a metaphor for the unbearableness of truth. The poem is about flinching.

Bishop’s mentor Marianne Moore had written “A Graveyard” about a similar view of the ocean. In that poem, an unnamed man stands in the way of the sea, annoyingly blocking the view. But Moore tries to forgive him because it is natural to want to immerse oneself:

it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing
but you cannot stand in the middle of this:
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.

In Bishop’s poem, the ocean seems to come from a living source, even a human one:

drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn …

I would normally resist a biographical interpretation, but Bishop inserts herself in the poem (“he was a friend of my grandfather”) and reminds us that human knowledge is temporal and personal. So it is relevant that Elizabeth Bishop had to move to her grandparents’ home in Nova Scotia at age five, after her father had died and her mother was institutionalized with mental illness. In this poem, the frigid, salty water flows from breasts that should feed a daughter warm, sweet, sustaining milk. The metaphor (stated in a line of iambic pentameter) is agonizingly lonely. But Bishop’s seal friend, her grandfather’s dwindling connections, her love of surfaces–“beautiful herring scales”–, her subtle homage to Marianne Moore, and the writing of the poem itself show how we can digress and postpone what we know that we know.