theparisreview:

“When John Ashbery reviewed Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems in 1969 for The New York Times, his review was accompanied by an illustration: two giant snails stretching from under their shells to touch one another. Ashbery never mentions the mollusks in his review, but beneath the image is an excerpt of Bishop’s prose poem ‘Giant Snail.’

“‘I give the impression of mysterious ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of my will,’ Bishop’s mollusca persona muses, and one senses how very likely a proxy he is for the poet herself.

“Bishop is not the only writer to have found solace or some of herself in a snail. Her coil-shelled critter was an homage to a paean by her mentor Marianne Moore. Moore’s ‘To a Snail’ is a discourse on poetics that culminates ‘in the absence of feet’ and ‘the curious phenomenon of your occiptal horn.’ Moore seized on the snail’s self-sufficiency and endless ability to contract, praising its ‘grace’ and ‘modesty.’

“Moore’s praise of the snail was self-promoting, while Bishop’s portrait of the mollusk is tinged with sorrow. ‘But O! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me,’ Bishop’s snail wallows before collapsing in defeat: ‘All night I shall be like a sleeping ear.’

“Bishop’s snail was on a self-determined journey: ‘I have set myself a goal, a / certain rock, but it may well be dawn before I get there.’ He shares that determination with the snail one finds in Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Kew Gardens.’

“Although their destinations differ, Bishop’s snail labors with the same ferocity as Woolf’s: ‘It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it,’ Woolf writes, ‘differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it.’ Moving from one side of the flowerbed to another, traversing a tiny terrain that Woolf magnifies into cliffs, lakes, and boulders, the snail finds himself in the path of the many human characters of the story.”

(more …)

—Casey N. Cep, “A Snail’s Pace”