The poem
He sleeps on the top of a mast. - Bunyan
He sleeps on the top of a mast with his eyes fast closed. The sails fall away below him like the sheets of his bed, leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper's head.
Asleep he was transported there, asleep he curled in a gilded ball on the mast's top, or climbed inside a gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride.
"I am founded on marble pillars," said a cloud. "I never move. See the pillars there in the sea?" Secure in introspection he peers at the watery pillars of his reflection.
A gull had wings under his and remarked that the air was "like marble." He said: "Up here I tower through the sky for the marble wings on my tower-top fly."
But he sleeps on the top of his mast with his eyes closed tight. The gull inquired into his dream, which was, "I must not fall. The spangled sea below wants me to fall. It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all."
Harold Bloom (professor and critic at Yale) has this to say: “Its five stanzas essentially are variations upon its epigraph, from Bunyan: ‘He sleeps on the top of a mast.’ Bunyan's trope concerns the condition of unbelief; Bishop's does not. Think of her three personae as exemplifying three rhetorical stances, and so as being three kinds of poet, or even three poets: cloud, gull, unbeliever. The cloud is Wordsworth…
Read the whole commentHarold Bloom (professor and critic at Yale) has this to say: “Its five stanzas essentially are variations upon its epigraph, from Bunyan: ‘He sleeps on the top of a mast.’ Bunyan's trope concerns the condition of unbelief; Bishop's does not. Think of her three personae as exemplifying three rhetorical stances, and so as being three kinds of poet, or even three poets: cloud, gull, unbeliever. The cloud is Wordsworth or Stevens. The gull is Shelley or Hart Crane. The unbeliever is Dickinson or Bishop. None of them has the advantage; the spangled sea wants to destroy them all. The cloud, powerful in introspection, regards not the sea but his own subjectivity. The gull, more visionary still, beholds neither sea nor air but his own aspiration. The unbeliever observes nothing, but the sea is truly observed in his dream:
which was, ‘I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.’
I think that is the reality of Bishop's famous eye. Like Dickinson's, its truest precursor, it confronts the truth: what is most worth seeing is impossible to see, at least with open eyes. “