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Title: Poems

Author: Marianne Moore

Release date: August 3, 2020 [eBook #62833]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***

POEMS

BY MARIANNE MOORE

LONDON
THE EGOIST PRESS
2 Robert Street, Adelphi, W.C.

1921

Several of these poems appeared in The Egoist;
others in The Dial, Others and Contact.

CONTENTS

PEDANTIC LITERALIST  5
TO A STEAM ROLLER  6
DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT  6
THOSE VARIOUS SCALPELS  7
FEED ME, ALSO, RIVER GOD,  8
TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ON TAGORE  8
HE MADE THIS SCREEN  9
TALISMAN  9
BLACK EARTH 10
“HE WROTE THE HISTORY BOOK,” IT SAID 12
YOU ARE LIKE THE REALISTIC PRODUCT OF AN IDEALISTIC  
   SEARCH FOR GOLD AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW 12
REINFORCEMENTS 13
ROSES ONLY 13
IN THIS AGE OF HARD TRYING NONCHALANCE IS GOOD, AND   14
THE FISH 14
MY APISH COUSINS 16
WHEN I BUY PICTURES 17
PICKING AND CHOOSING 18
ENGLAND 19
DOCK RATS 20
RADICAL 21
POETRY 22
IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR 23
IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH? 24

[Pg 5]

POEMS

BY MARIANNE MOORE

 

PEDANTIC LITERALIST

Prince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost, white torch—“with pow’r to say unkind things with kindness, and the most irritating things in the midst of love and tears,” you invite destruction.
You are like the meditative man with the perfunctory heart; its carved cordiality ran to and fro at first, like an inlaid and roy’l immutable production;
then afterward “neglected to be painful” and “deluded him with loitering formality, doing its duty as if it did it not,” presenting an obstruction
to the motive that it served. What stood erect in you, has withered. A little “palm-tree of turned wood” informs your once spontaneous core in its immutable reduction.

[Pg 6]

TO A STEAM ROLLER

The illustration is nothing to you without the application. You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.
Sparkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block. Were not “impersonal judgment in æsthetic matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you
might fairly achieve it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
 

DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS
PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT

With an elephant to ride upon—“with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,” she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes. Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose in the shape of an elephant, she clambered up and chose to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows of æsthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose them ephemera, and have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows, which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios.

[Pg 7]

THOSE VARIOUS SCALPELS

Those various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes struck from thin glass successively at random—the inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two fighting-cocks head to head in stone—like sculptured scimitars re- peating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes, flowers of ice
and snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships: your raised hand an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux, with regard to which guides are so affirmative: your other hand
a bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from Persia and the fractional magnificence of Florentine goldwork—a collection of half a dozen little objects made fine with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue: a lemon, a
pear and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a magnificent square cathedral of uniform and at the same time, diverse appearance—a species of vertical vineyard rustling in the storm of conventional opinion. Are they weapons or scalpels? Whetted
to brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is su- perior to opportunity, these things are rich instruments with which to experiment but surgery is not tentative: why dissect destiny with instruments which are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny itself?

[Pg 8]

FEED ME, ALSO, RIVER GOD,

lest by diminished vitality and abated vigilance, I become food for crocodiles—for that quicksand of gluttony which is legion. It is there—close at hand— on either side of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride
and stoutness of heart: “The bricks are fallen down, we will build with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down, we will change to cedars”? I am not ambitious to dress stones, to renew forts, nor to match my value in action, against their ability to catch
up with arrested prosperity. I am not like them, indefatigable, but if you are a god you will not discriminate against me. Yet—if you may fulfil none but prayers dressed as gifts in return for your gifts—disregard the request.
 

TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ON TAGORE

It is made clear by the phrase, even the mood—by virtue of which he says
the thing he thinks—that it pays, to cut gems even in these conscience-less days;
but the jewel that always outshines ordinary jewels, is your praise.

[Pg 9]

HE MADE THIS SCREEN

not of silver nor of coral, but of weatherbeaten laurel.
Here, he introduced a sea uniform like tapestry;
here, a fig-tree; there, a face; there, a dragon circling space—
designating here, a bower; there, a pointed passion-flower.
 

TALISMAN

Under a splintered mast, torn from ship and cast near her hull,
a stumbling shepherd found embedded in the ground, a sea-gull
of lapis lazuli, a scarab of the sea, with wings spread—
curling its coral feet, parting its beak to greet men long dead.

[Pg 10]

BLACK EARTH

Openly, yes, with the naturalness of the hippopotamus or the alligator when it climbs out on the bank to experience the
sun, I do these things which I do, which please no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub- merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
in view was a renaissance; shall I say the contrary? The sediment of the river which encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used
to it, it may remain there; do away with it and I am myself done away with, for the patina of circumstance can but enrich what was
there to begin with. This elephant skin which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of the coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light
can filter—cut into checkers by rut upon rut of unpreventable experience— it is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
hairy toed. Black but beautiful, my back is full of the history of power. Of power? What is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never
be cut into by a wooden spear; through- out childhood to the present time, the unity of life and death has been expressed by the circumference
described by my trunk; nevertheless, I perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after all; and I am on my guard; external poise, it [Pg 11]
has its centre well nurtured—we know where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of
the wind. I see and I hear, unlike the wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear;
that tree trunk without roots, accustomed to shout its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact by who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that
spiritual brother to the coral plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to
the I of each, a kind of fretful speech which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is? Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that
phenomenon the above formation, translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely— that on which darts cannot strike decisively the first
time, a substance needful as an instance of the indestructibility of matter; it has looked at the electricity and at the earth-
quake and is still here; the name means thick. Will depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no beautiful element of unreason under it?

[Pg 12]

“HE WROTE THE HISTORY BOOK,” IT SAID

There! You shed a ray of whimsicality on a mask of profundity so terrific that I have been dumbfounded by it oftener than I care to say. The book? Titles are chaff.
Authentically brief and full of energy, you contribute to your father’s legibility and are sufficiently synthetic. Thank you for showing me your father’s autograph.
 

YOU ARE LIKE THE REALISTIC PRODUCT
OF AN IDEALISTIC SEARCH FOR GOLD
AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW

Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape vine, twine your anatomy round the pruned and polished stem, chameleon. Fire laid upon an emerald as long as the Dark King’s massy one, could not snap the spectrum up for food as you have done.

[Pg 13]

REINFORCEMENTS

The vestibule to experience is not to be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are going to their work with this idea, advancing like a school of fish through
still water—waiting to change the course or dismiss the idea of movement, till forced to. The words of the Greeks ring in our ears, but they are vain in comparison with a sight like this.
The pulse of intention does not move so that one can see it, and moral machinery is not labelled, but the future of time is determined by the power of volition.
 

ROSES ONLY

You do not seem to realise that beauty is a liability rather than an asset—that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp, conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking for everything self-dependent, anything an
ambitious civilisation might produce: for you, unaided to attempt through sheer reserve, to confute presumptions resulting from observation, is idle. You cannot make us think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence. You would look, minus thorns—like a what-is-this, a mere
peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-ordination? Guarding the infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently, your thorns are the best part of you.

[Pg 14]

IN THIS AGE OF HARD TRYING
NONCHALANCE IS GOOD, AND

really, it is not the business of the gods to bake clay pots. They did not do it in this instance. A few revolved upon the axes of their worth as if excessive popularity might be a pot;
they did not venture the profession of humility. The polished wedge that might have split the firmament was dumb. At last it threw itself away and falling down, conferred on some poor fool, a privilege.
Taller by the length of a conversation of five hundred years than all the others, there was one, whose tales of what could never have been actual— were better than the haggish, uncompanionable drawl
of certitude; his by- play was more terrible in its effectiveness than the fiercest frontal attack. The staff, the bag, the feigned inconsequence of manner, best bespeak that weapon, self protectiveness.
 

THE FISH

wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like
an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the [Pg 15]
sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlike swift- ness into the crevices— in and out, illuminating
the turquoise sea of bodies. The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff, whereupon the stars,
pink rice grains, ink bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green lilies and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other.
All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice— all the physical features of
ac- cident—lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it; the chasm side is
dead. Repeated evidence has proved that it can live on what cannot revive its youth. The sea grows old in it.

[Pg 16]

MY APISH COUSINS

winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras, supreme in their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin and strictly practical appendages were there, the small cats and the parrakeet— trivial and humdrum on examination, destroying bark and portions of the food it could not eat.
I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent than it is dim. It is difficult to recall the ornament, speech, and precise manner of what one might call the minor acquaintances twenty years back; but I shall never forget—that Gilgamesh among the hairy carnivora—that cat with the
wedge-shaped, slate-gray marks on its forelegs and the resolute tail, astringently remarking: “They have imposed on us with their pale, half fledged protestations, trembling about in inarticulate frenzy, saying it is not for all of us to understand art, finding it all so difficult, examining the thing
as if it were something inconceivably arcanic, as symmetrically frigid as something carved out of chrysopras or marble—strict with tension, malignant in its power over us and deeper than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp, rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber and fur.”

[Pg 17]

WHEN I BUY PICTURES

or what is closer to the truth, when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor, I fix upon that which would give me pleasure in my average moments: the satire upon curiosity, in which no more is discernible than the intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite—the old thing, the medi- æval decorated hat box, in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass and deer, both white and brown, and birds and seated people; it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps—in letters stand-
ing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse; or that which is better without words, which means just as much or just as little as it is understood to mean by the observer—the grave of Adam, prefigured by himself; a bed of beans or artichokes in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hiero—
glyphic in three parts; it may be anything. Too stern an intellectual emphasis, i- ronic or other—upon this quality or that, detracts from one’s enjoyment; it must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved tri- umph easily be honoured—that which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is, it must make known the fact that it has been displayed to acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it; and it must admit that it is the work of X, if X produced it; of Y, if made by Y. It must be a voluntary gift with the name written on it.

[Pg 18]

PICKING AND CHOOSING

Literature is a phase of life: if one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly, what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive when they are true; the opaque allusion—the simulated flight
upward—accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact that Shaw is selfconscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re- warding? that James is all that has been said of him but is not profound? It is not Hardy the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man
“interpreting life through the medium of the emotions.” If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the critic should know what he likes. Gordon Craig with his “this is I” and “this is mine,” with his three wise men, his “sad French greens” and his Chinese cherries—Gordon Craig, so
inclinational and unashamed—has carried the precept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And Burke is a psychologist—of acute, raccoon- like curiosity. Summa diligentia; to the humbug, whose name is so amusing—very young and ve-
ry rushed, Cæsar crossed the Alps on the “top of a diligence.” We are not daft about the meaning but this familiarity with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming- bug, the candles are not wired for electricity. Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger—remember Xenophon; only the most rudimentary sort of behaviour is necessary to put us on the scent; a “right good salvo of barks,” a few “strong wrinkles” puckering the skin between the ears, are all we ask.

[Pg 19]

ENGLAND

with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral; with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been
extracted; and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions: and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly” in whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one’s object—substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability, all of museum quality: and America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof readers, no silkworms, no digressions;
the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country—in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter “a” in psalm and calm when pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very noticeable but
why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no con-
clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able
to say, “I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fish than I do,”—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi- ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.

[Pg 20]

DOCK RATS

There are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily as we do—who seem to feel that it is a good place to come home to. On what a river; wide—twinkling like a chopped sea under some of the finest shipping in the
world: the square-rigged four-master, the liner, the battleship, like the two- thirds submerged section of an iceberg; the tug—strong moving thing, dipping and pushing, the bell striking as it comes; the steam yacht, lying like a new made arrow on the
stream; the ferry-boat—a head assigned, one to each compartment, making a row of chessmen set for play. When the wind is from the east, the smell is of apples; of hay, the aroma increased and decreased suddenly as the wind changes;
of rope; of mountain leaves for florists. When it is from the west, it is an elixir. There is occasionally a parrakeet arrived from Brazil, clasping and clawing; or a monkey—tail and feet in readiness for an over-
ture. All palms and tail; how delightful! There is the sea, moving the bulk- head with its horse strength; and the multiplicity of rudders and propellers; the signals, shrill, questioning, peremptory, diverse; the wharf cats and the barge dogs—it
is easy to overestimate the value of such things. One does not live in such a place from motives of expediency but because to one who has been accustomed to it, shipping is the most congenial thing in the world.

[Pg 21]

RADICAL

Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predefined to be thick. The world is but a circumstance, a mis- erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition, imagination, outgrowth,
nutriment, with everything crammed belligerent- ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon- opoly— a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat to the color of the set-
ting sun and stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand- ing still and turning to look back at it— as much as to say my happiest moment has been funereal in comparison with this, the con- ditions of life pre-
determined slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For it? Dismiss agrarian lore; it tells him this: that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

[Pg 22]

POETRY

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a
high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us—that we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat, holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician—case after case could be cited did one wish it; nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among us can be “literalists of the imagination”—above insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion— the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is, on the other hand, genuine then you are interested in poetry.

[Pg 23]

IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR

not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the fineness of early civilization art but by virtue of its originality, with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia- tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band of incandescence that was color, keep its stripe: it also is one of
those things into which much that is peculiar can be read; complexity is not a crime but carry it to the point of murki- ness and nothing is plain. A complexity moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting it-
self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a- bout as if to bewilder with the dismal fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has been—at the antipodes from the init- ial great truths. “Part of it was crawling, part of it was about to crawl, the rest was torpid in its lair.” In the short legged, fit- ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiæ—we have the classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. Know that it will be there when it says: “I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”

[Pg 24]

IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH?

Why so desolate? And why multiply in phantasmagoria about fishes, what disgusts you? Could not all personal upheaval in the name of freedom, be tabood?
Is it Nineveh and are you Jonah in the sweltering east wind of your wishes? I, myself have stood there by the aquarium, looking at the Statue of Liberty.

Printed at the Pelican Press, 2 Carmelite Street, E.C.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Typographical errors have been silently corrected.