In Distrust of Merits (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Marianne Moore
- First Published: 1944
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: History, Religion, War, Death or dying, Soldiers
The Poem
Marianne Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits” is a poem so artfully constructed that although it seems to read like prose, it actually follows a consistent pattern that contains many conventional poetic forms. Each of the eight stanzas comprises ten lines. The first four lines of each stanza form a quatrain in which the second and fourth lines rhyme, while the next two lines are decasyllabic (ten syllables to a line). These lines are followed by another quatrain that differs from the first one in that both alternating lines rhyme. Although Moore imposes this formal...
[The entire page is 1486 words long]
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