force in this scene, grow old within this teeming shelter? Moore not only does not answer these questions, she does not even admit that she has asked them. The poem pretends that it works visually, whereas it should warn readers that images in poems are not always what they seem to be.

Obscurity itself became a hallmark of modern poetry. Poets such as Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, though widely celebrated in literary circles, were often considered elitist, their work dense with allusions and full of poetic techniques that were beyond the ken of the average reader, if there ever were such a creature. Moore certainly became a part of this tradition, though her work was never seen as elusive as that of either Stevens or Eliot. Indeed, she is considered to be one of the more accessible of America’s modern poets. But by writing a poetry that, in many cases, didn’t even look like poetry, and by constructing poems whose subject was the form of the poem itself, Moore helped to change the way people read poetry and thought about their surroundings.

Just as the sublime became a staple of Romantic verse, changes in human perception became a staple of modern poetry. Moore contributed to that in her acute observations of the natural world and her visual display of poems. “The Fish,” for example, a rhymed syllabic poem, uses a rigidly fixed form to describe organic natural processes. However, connections can be made between the two. For example, from the first to the second stanza, Moore runs over the words “an / injured fan.” Visually, this looks like the very thing she describes. Similarly, the dominance of particular sounds helps to draw attention to her subject. The “k” sounds throughout the seventh stanza, for instance, give the poem a choppy and rough sound as well as look. This is appropriate for describing an edifice that has literally been attacked and scarred by the violent sea that surrounds it. Ultimately, the artificiality of the form for its subject asks readers to more carefully consider how the poem says what it does. This technique helps focus readers’ attention on the relationship between sea and cliff, rather than on any one thing. By doing so, readers see the interrelationships of all things and processes in the natural world: animals (for example, the sea creatures); sea, sun, gravity, etc. By concentrating so much on how the poem means, rather than what it means, Moore participates in the twentieth century’s obsession with epistemology, which asks the question: “How do we know what we know?”

Critic Pamela White Hadas sees in “The Fish” an allegory of sorts, a myth that Moore wrote to understand her own life’s story. Hadas writes, “This strange poem is the work of a thirty-year-old woman whose rather unnervingly cool sympathies lie with a battered and violated nature. It is a poem about injury of wholeness, resentful but resigned deprivation.” Ironically, Moore sees herself in this violated nature. Her attempt to understand it is also an attempt to understand herself and her relationship to the natural world. That her attempt results in both insight and confusion attests to its success. In the end readers understand that it is not a ques- tion of whether or not human beings are part of or separate from nature, but rather to what extent are we part of and separate from it? By focusing on the process of knowing as well as its product, Moore creates a distinctly modern poem from a conventionally Romantic subject.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Fish,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Semansky publishes widely in the field of twentieth century poetry and culture.

Marianne Moore’s poetic depiction of the sea offers special challenges to her readers. For one, there is a disparity between the largeness of the subject “the sea” and the specificity of Moore’s formal methodology in treating it; the connection between the two is subtle and generally difficult to apprehend. We see this when we realize that, despite the attention given to her poems of the sea, we are left with an interesting, unanswered question: What is Moore’s sea as sea and as poetic construction? For a second, no single verbal formulation seems satisfactory for the many features of the sea that Moore treats when she writes about it. Her focus is constantly shifting and the reader is hard pressed to keep up with her. In “The Fish,” for instance, she successively glimpses so many things—the fish, water like black jade, an injured mussel, barnacles, a wave, the sunlight, a cliff, etc.—that she hardly seems to be writing about the sea itself. Indeed, of this poem Bonnie Costello says, “We are not interested in the sea as such.” (As we shall see below, however, this is not the case.) Finally, the challenge derives in part from Moore’s method, which is sufficiently subtle and mystifying that she is sometimes able to represent the sea formally even if she is not saying anything directly about it in the content of the poem. This is the case in “Sojourn in the Whale,” which—as far as I can tell—has not hitherto been recognized as being significantly about the sea, among other things. No doubt related to the difficulties of reading Moore’s poems in general, such things almost convince one that her sea is inaccessible.

Faced with such difficulties, it has proven expedient for Moore’s critics to generalize her sea and, all too often, to settle for assigning abstract and/or symbolic meanings and values to it. Bernard Engle, for example, says that “in ‘The Fish’ the sea [is] a challenge and threat, a symbol of forces to be resisted with bravery and independence. The ever-present perils of existence are the subject of her poem on the sea, significantly entitled ‘A Grave.’ In it the sea is beautiful, tempting, and challenging. But it concedes nothing; it is totally inhuman; and, more than impersonal, it is malign.” And George Nitchie says that “the sea in ‘A Grave,’ ‘Novices,’or ‘The Fish’ . . . exempli[fies] the essential nonhumanness of the nonhuman.” Finally, without trying to assimilate all of the tags put on Moore’s sea in the various discussions of this or that poem, we can note that Pamela White Hadas has reached the furthest in trying to grasp Moore’s writing about the sea as a subject possessing larger meanings and values. For Hadas, Moore’s sea is many things—“an image of language,” an analog of “all that has been written before one,” an example of freedom gained by surrendering, an analog for “unconscious force,” an analog for poetry itself, and even an analog for Moore’s conversational style.

It is not that Engle, Nitchie, Hadas, and others who have taken this approach are wrong in their choice of labels. Rather, it is that they do not show us exactly what it is that Moore treats when she writes of the sea—what her sea is as sea—nor how she constructs it. There is need for further analysis and elucidation in this connection. In particular, it is important to note that, whether Moore writes about the sea at length or alludes to it in passing, the central thing she keeps returning to is the wave—water rising or surging. Sometimes the wave breaks, “turn[s] and twist[s]”, and there is even the “drama of water against rocks,” but her recurring point of focus is the wave. Moreover, her wave is generally built up by an accumulation of small, measured, formal units. Geometric patterns are at the heart of the representation of water in motion in all four of her extended sea-poems, although they are more pronounced—and apparently more crucial to her sense of how to represent a wave—in “Sojourn in the Whale,” “The Fish,” and “A Grave,” than in “Novices.” They are also evident in the poems where she treats the sea less lengthily. Finally, these patterns are generally consistent with Moore’s notion of prosody. “Prosody,” she says, “is a tool; poetry is ‘a maze, a trap, a web’—Professor Richards’ epitome.” Of importance here are the metaphors of maze, trap, and web, for Moore’s prosody is often complicated by the extension of syntactical structures into geometric patterns.

More often than not, Moore’s geometric waves are couched in syntactical constructions— particularly, the sentence—and in manipulations of a sequence of sentences, rather than in line and stanza arrangements. In keeping with her own sense of her work, the shape and rhythm of her waves is “governed by the pull of the sentence”; the rhythm is “built in” the sentence. As the analyses below will show, we begin to understand her work with water in the sea-poems better, and to understand the poems themselves better, when we examine their sentences. Then we discover that her sentences—what she does in them individually and with them collectively— are not only syntactic but prosodic undertakings. They are more or less loosely measured units whose lengths and masses and movements she manipulates—often syllabically—for the purpose of creating and shaping space, motion, rhythm, and design. Relevant here is W. S. Merwin’s observation that, “in a world of technique,” which is at least a partially accurate description of Moore’s world in the sea-poems, “motions tend to become methods” (his italics). This handling of the sentence (or any syntactical unit) as a syllabic unit of motion would seem to constitute a new—a modern—variation of syllabic metrics.

Then, too, particularly among the four seapoems, Moore’s waves are more often than not prosodically or formally implied rather than directly described or stated; the action—the rhythm—is deemed sufficient in itself without the reiterated statement of wave as subject. The statement might treat something else—the fate of Ireland, the repetitive movements of an injured mussel, the grave-like nature of the sea, the failings of certain “good and alive young men.” Nevertheless, the formal implication of wave brings meaning into the poem. This is deliberate, according to principle: “With regard to form,” Moore wrote in 1934, “I value an effect of naturalness and feel that the motion of the composition should reinforce the meaning and make it cumulatively impressive.” “An effect of naturalness” and “the motion of the composition”: in large part, this is what her wave-making is about; hers is something of a craftish wave, an aesthetic wave.

This quality notwithstanding, in “The Fish” and “A Grave” there is a definite attempt to give the movement and rhythm of the poem over as much as possible to the naturalistic action of the sea. The same holds true for “Sojourn in the Whale” and “Novices.” Indeed, one could argue that the attempt to do this increasingly dominates the four poems as a sequence—a sequence that runs from “Sojourn in the Whale” (1917) to “The Fish” (1918) to “A Grave” (1921) to “Novices” (1923). What is being pursued in this sequence is the effect of contact with, or a verbal embodiment of, water-in-motion, the wave. Moreover, since Moore’s chief means of achieving this effect is by formal implication as opposed to descriptive statement, we could say that her formal means—her syntax and prosody—perform a naturalistic function in these poems. With them, she makes her waves. As she said in “Things Others Never Notice” regarding one of William Carlos Williams’ water passages: “With the bee’s sense of polarity he searches for a flower, and that flower is representation. Likenesses here are not reminders of the object, they are it.” That her main primary work with this particular naturalistic representation engaged Moore throughout four poems and over a period of some half dozen years is evidence of both the inexhaustible variety inherent in it and of the strength of her attraction to it.

The importance of the effect of contact with physical reality—and the representation thereof— cannot be over-emphasized. Insofar as the waves in the sea-poems are concerned, this is the central, recurring “truth” among all of the others; without it, perhaps the others would not be possible; certainly, they would be presented very differently from how they are. Rhythm is at the heart of this effect, the rhythm of water in motion. However, this is never the burden of the statements in the poems but the means, the vehicle, for conveying them. Again, Moore’s waves are structuralmetaphoric waves that speak of other things—the fate of Ireland, the rule of age-old accident over natural phenomena, the limits of “volition” and “consciousness,” a language that can stand on equal terms with the potentially overwhelming forces of the physical world. Perhaps this use of metaphor is something of what Robert Duncan had in mind when he said in “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” that Moore’s “metaphor is never a device but a meaningful disclosure.”

In section three of “Novices,” Moore comes closest to saying directly what she herself is doing in and with her verse about the sea, but then, that poem is not about her own work with representation but about the failings of the “good and alive young men.” Nevertheless, it is the case that she succeeds where they fail. Here, too, she seems to suggest that expressing themselves well of the sea, whether as fact or as metaphor, is a test of the powers of language and art. That she kept coming back to this test, handling it differently—yet similarly— each time, suggests its importance to her. Indeed, writing of T. S. Eliot’s poems, Moore says that “correspondences of allusion provide an unmistakable logic of preference,” an idea that applies directly to her work with the sea, where a “logic of preference” for the geometric-syntactic-rhythmic representation of waves is displayed.

Indeed, the range of writing in which she cultivated this “preference” is larger than the poems. In her unpublished notebooks and in her criticism, Moore frequently refers to the sea and to writing about it. Of the former, Bonnie Costello says that Moore’s “notebooks are filled not only with long, detailed presentations of ‘facts’ but with quotations about the need for the factual in art” and that the “notebooks [are] full of passages about the sea.” As for her criticism, in her reviews Moore’s discussion of her contemporaries’ writing frequently includes illustrative quotations from their work that pertain to the sea, or to water in other bodies and forms, and these are often associated with the notion of the value of faithful, effective representation of physical reality. The comment cited above regarding one of Williams’ water passages is an excellent example of this kind of thing. Such observations are critical- theoretical echoes of what she herself is engaged with in the sea-poems. They constitute another form as well as further instances of the “correspondences of allusion [that] provide an unmistakable logic of preference”—a “logic of preference” for a certain event in the experience of natural phenomena, for a certain rhythm and subject matter in writing, for a certain kind and quality of representation, for a certain moment in the act of writing, for a certain moment in the act of reading.

On first reading, the statement that “correspondences of allusion provide an unmistakable logic of preference” might seem flat and mechanical. Reflecting on it, however, we realize that “correspondences” are not identical but diverse and that a “logic of preference” that would either satisfy or describe Marianne Moore would not be rigid and closed but variable and open. Reconsidering, then, that Moore presented the combination of the principle of representation and water-in-motion in various ways in her writing over the years, we begin to notice a quality of this writing in general that is important to her work with waves in the sea-poems. This is its projective transformational quality— the fact that over a period of several years it variously depicts and embodies and represents something (water-in-motion, in general, and waves, in particular) that, in itself, constantly changes as it exists in time and space, and in our experience of it. Now and then, this quality is expressed directly in the poems. In the words of “A Grave,” “the ocean . . . / advances as usual.” And in the closing lines of “Novices,” there is an image of a seemingly perpetually moving ocean eternally “crashing itself out in one long hiss of spray.” Or, or borrow some lines from Wallace Stevens’s poem, “That Which Cannot Be Fixed,” which Moore cites in the review “A Bold Virtuoso”, and which work very well to describe her own sea: “there is / A beating and a beating in the centre of / The sea, a strength that tumbles everywhere.” These are all images of something that, the longer it stays the same, the more it changes: the inexhaustible variety of forms in flux that waves, or the sea in motion, take. And for Moore, the proper rendering of this matter seems to have required a new and slightly different reenactment of its wave-ness, along with others of its recurrent actions, each time she came to it. Hence, the projective-transformational quality of the sea-poems—the sense that they constitute a sequence of representations of waves projected through four transformations. This quality is visible in the poems at least partly in the different prosodic-syntactic ways in which they embody waves, in their different geometrical features, and perhaps even in their different tones and points of view and subjects and larger meanings. Moreover, it allows us to recognize that in each of the poems a wave is “held up for us to see,” that in each of them the sea “advances as usual,” and that in each of them there is abundant evidence in both form and content of that “strength that tumbles everywhere.” In short, it allows us to see in these poems a great deal of the uniformity in variety, and variety in uniformity, that is a fact of the sea. But, as an illustration of these ideas, let me make a few observations about three of the sea-poems—“Sojourn in the Whale,” “The Fish,” and “A Grave.”

Initially, Moore pinpoints her interest regarding the sea and water in “Sojourn in the Whale” (1917) as “water in motion.” But while the statement of subject is general, the prosodic and formal construction that embodies the activity of “water in motion” is specific and detailed; in particular, the last few lines of the poem are made to do what they say. The effect is as if obstructed water suddenly rose “automatically.” A major source of this effect, a pivot or reversal mechanism is built around the penultimate sentence of the poem: “Water in motion is far / from level.” Structure and rhythm and meaning pivot geometrically around this sentence.

Visually and prosodically, the effect of the last stanza is like that of a wave or a swell, first building and spreading, then overflowing at the end. This effect is paralleled in the pattern achieved with the lengths of the six sentences in the poem. There is a fairly regular reduction of the number of syllables per sentence—from sentence to sentence— through the pivotal fifth sentence. Then, in the last sentence—in accord with the idea of obstructed water suddenly rising “automatically” and surprisingly, the syllable count per sentence suddenly increases, approximately to what it was in the fourth sentence. At the same time, this effect is further particularized by variations in the syllablecounts (the lengths) of—and by the pauses among—the phrases and clauses of the last three sentences. Altogether, these things take us past the pivot so that we experience the lift as Moore’s “water in motion” “rise[s] automatically.” The implication is that the rising of the water, and the formal building capable of reenacting it, continues after the ending of the poem. This work in and with the six sentences makes the effect of the poem, and illustrates something of what Moore meant when she remarked to Donald Hall that she was “governed by the pull of the sentence.” To repeat, this is a key notion with respect to all of the sea-poems.

What Moore did in “Sojourn in the Whale” was to reenact the movement of a trough followed by a mounting swell or wave. This is to say that she gave the rhythm of the poem over to the embodiment of that action. Similarly, her concern in “The Fish” (1918) was to reenact the action of a wave as it builds, crashes into a cliff, then recedes. Again, too, the mechanisms that give the poem over to the activity of the sea are caught up in the syllabics, the syntax, and a geometrical formal design.

We sight the line of the wave, so to speak, if we notice the relative syllabic lengths of the seven sentences in the poem. There are 6, 28, 57, 49, 54, 20, and 6 syllables per sentence. The design embodied here becomes more obvious if the sentences are typed out at full length across an extrawide page; then they make a visual pattern that looks like this:

Sentence 1: ———. 2: ————————————. 3: ———————————. 4: —————————————. 5: ————————————————. 6: ———————. 7: ———.

Syllabically, or visually, this is a palindromic pattern in that, like a palindrome (e.g., deified), it starts at a certain point (sentence 1), progresses through a series of steps (sentences 2 and 3) to a middle point (sentence 4), then reverses itself and progresses backwards through the aforementioned series of steps (sentences 5 and 6) to its beginning point (sentence 7). In both form and content, sentences one through three incorporate the approaching- building of the wave. The fourth or middle sentence—slightly shorter than the ones on either side of it—likewise incorporates the impact of the wave on the cliff and the subsequent backwash. And sentences five through seven, whose content is not directly about the wave, formally present the receding-diminishment of the wave. Like a similar pattern in her poem “To a Chameleon,” this wave is illustrative of Moore’s self-proclaimed liking of symmetry.

Like the pattern among the sentences of “Sojourn in the Whale,” this wave is not an incidental feature of the poem but the very essence of its heard, formal design—the primary shape of the sound and rhythm that address the ear. Moore’s remark that she was “governed by the pull of the sentence” is especially relevant here. The individual and cumulative “pull” of the seven sentences of the poem is this wave; to read the poem properly is—among other things—a matter of recognizing and accounting for the sentences as wave. In that sense, the whole poem is a process of wave-building, waveimpacting, and wave-diminishing, which should not be ignored. Nor should it matter that only two of the seven sentences (three and four) directly refer to and enact the wave in their content inasmuch as each of the seven sentences formally holds its own unique place in the poem; once the wave’s shape and path are perceived, we see that its activity can be and is formally implied as well as directly stated. Indeed, Moore’s formally implying this activity becomes another means by which she can and does allow meaning to enter the poem. We can—and apparently should—read the poem which such formally induced meaning in mind.

To do so is to recognize that—in addition to everything else they say and do—the seven sentences bespeak moments in time and locations in space germane to the approaching-building, impacting- backwashing, receding-diminishing of the wave. The changes in the lengths and masses of the sentences parallel changes in the size of the wave. Contrary to Bonnie Costello’s notion that “we are not interested in the sea as such” in this poem, the poem is the story of a wave. Thus, the first sentence—“ The Fish / wade / through black jade”— bespeaks that moment when the wave, still small, begins to take shape and that location, at some distance from the shore, where it begins to form. This sentence’s elliptical, compressed quality is perhaps intended as metaphor for the power that generates the wave. In sentence two, closer to the shore and increasing in size, the wave in passing imparts motion to an injured mussel in a heap of mussels; moved by successive waves, the mussel keeps “opening and shutting itself like / an / injured fan.” Still closer to the shore—and still greater in body, the wave is directly mentioned in sentence three. Now, it is perceived as carrying barnacles, and its mass and motion refract and give motion to the sunlight in the water. At the beginning of sentence four (the middle sentence), the wave is again mentioned directly—as it impacts on the cliff: “The water drives a wedge / of iron through the iron edge / of the cliff.” The rest of this sentence appropriately treats the immediate backwash effect. The wave has begun to recede and diminish, and in their progressively shorter lengths and lighter masses, the remaining three sentences provide formal metaphors for the measured termination of this action. The separation between the content and the formal “pull” in these three sentences is interesting; perhaps it is intended as metaphor for the diminishing power of the wave. The poem does not resolve the observations and apparent paradoxes of the last three sentences but recedes out of them with the wave. The last sentence suggests a lifted gaze and a look at the broad expanse of the sea—at a distance in space from the shore—and, unlike the highly compressed first sentence, it makes a general statement about the sea as a whole: “The sea grows old in it.” Appropriately, this expansive but weary-sounding statement parallels the disappearance of the wave.

“A Grave” (1921), the next extended sea-poem Moore composed, has no tightly constructed syllabic stanzas like the two preceding poems but is all of a piece in free verse, and while it too possesses geometrical qualities of design, it lacks the neat, symmetrical kind of form of “The Fish.” Perhaps Moore was interested in giving a poem over still further to the naturalistic action of water in motion, and sought a different way to do this in the syntactic manipulations, the free verse, and the less rigid structuring of “A Grave.” Be that as it may, the poem conveys a greater sense of the threatening, unpredictable, indifferent nature of the sea in relation to human life than does “The Fish.”

Subtle though they are, the geometrical formal features of “A Grave” are crucial to the poem, and have to do with the way in which Moore creates and utilizes space in it. For instance, the poem is divided into two large halves of eleven lines each by lines one and twelve, which are syllabically the same (7 syllables) and are the two shortest lines in the poem. These halves are used differently, the first dominated by stasis and the second by action, motion. Among the ideas of the poem, the stasis of the first half, which is characterized by the standing, looking, and wearing of a look of the man who has taken the view from others, is synonymous with the “volition” and “consciousness” mentioned in the last line, while the action or motion of the second half, which is characterized by the activities of the fishermen, the wrinkles, the birds, the tortoise shell, and the ocean itself, is synonymous with the “turn[ing] and twist[ing]” mentioned in that line. Altogether, Moore transforms the space in stasis of the first half of the poem into the space in motion of the second half, simultaneously giving the movement and rhythm of the poem over to the inhuman action of the sea.

An important element of this undertaking is a building-pattern that goes from less to more in the measures of the poem. With line lengths varying between 7 and 24 syllables in the poem, there is no clear dividing point between long and short lines. Rather, counting syllables per line, we notice that the first half is dominated by shorter lines and the second half by longer lines, with a syllable difference between the two halves of 168 syllables (first half) and 197 syllables (second half). An important part of this building, the last eight lines are some of the longest in the poem, both sonically and syllabically. The building is also reflected in the lengths of the four sentences of the poem, which contain 68, 67, 92, and 138 syllables, respectively— another instance of Moore’s working with “the pull of the sentence.” Necessarily, the effect of the shorter lines of the first half of the poem, together with the first two shorter sentences, is synonymous with the stasis and the “volition” and “consciousness” of that half, while the effect of the longer lines of the second half, together with the last two longer sentences, is synonymous with the action or motion—essentially, the “turn[ing] and twist[ing]”—of that half. This is to say that a characteristic effect of the whole poem is generated at its very beginning by the transition from the first line (a shorter line) to the second line (a longer line). You can hear the stasis of the first line give way to the “turn[ing] and twist[ing]” of the second line: “Man looking into the sea / taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself.” Significantly, the second half of the poem begins with two pairs of lines which repeat this pattern and effect twice—in itself a building or increase.

In general, if the purpose of the building in the poem is to increase the space in the lines and sentences toward the end of the poem, then the use of this space is to increase both the allusions to the sea’s dangerous nature and the reenactment of its inhuman activity. We see Moore creating and using space in this way, when we look at what she does inside her sentences. This is still another aspect of her work with “the pull of the sentence” in this poem. In several respects, the key point of her sentences—at least the first three of them—is their middles, and what she does there.

In the first one, the line, “it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,” is both the middle line and the middle clause of the sentence. It is also syllabically at the middle of the sentence, with 27 syllables before it and 26 after it. Not only is it a line whose content emphasizes standing in the middle of things, but it stands in the middle of things itself. Moreover, near or at its middle—and therefore at the middle of the sentence—is the infinitive “to stand,” which is the syllable and word middle not only of the line but of the whole, centered and balanced sentence. Then, immediately after this centering of things—and the effect of stasis that comes with it, we have the exception which undercuts it (my emphasis): “but you cannot stand in the middle of this; / the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.” At this point, with this first reference to the inhuman nature of the sea, the poem suddenly opens up—expands—to include the terrible consequences of someone’s tumbling into that “turn[ing] and twist[ing]” grave. Or, to put it differently, the shift from less to more space, from stasis to motion, from “volition” and “consciousness” to the mindless “turn[ing] and twist[ing]” of the sea, begins here.

A similar thing happens in sentence two, where the tonally heightened exception, “repression, however,” marks the line and word and syllable middles of the sentence, and initiates the expansion of the sentence and a repetition of the aforementioned shift.

Things change subtly in sentence three, which is—suddenly—a longer, more spacious sentence. While a colon marks the line middle of this sentence, dividing it into two three-line units, there is no stated exception that generates space here, and the word and syllable middles, which come in the line after the colon, do not seem to matter very much tonally or quantitatively. However, with the abrupt quality of extension signaled by the colon, there is a sense that additional space is simply taken, assumed—as if the sea-grave suddenly opened up beneath one. Moreover, allusions to the threatening, grave-like sea, and (implicitly) embodiment of the sea’s action into the rhythm of the poem, are not reserved for the second half of the sentence but pervade the whole thing. In both content and syntax, the poem’s embodiment of the nature and action of the sea increases.

The increase continues in sentence four, which abruptly assumes still more space to itself. With no particular tonal or quantitative or descriptive emphasis placed on its middle—certainly no strong emphasis as in sentences one and two—all of its seven lines treat the “beautiful” but dangerous world of the sea. The birds and the tortoise shell replace the man and the fishermen of the preceding sentences, as possible representatives of some degree of “volition” and “consciousness,” but even they are subject to the power of the sea. Altogether, sentence by sentence, any human attempt “to stand in the middle” of things—whether the poem or the sea—is rendered increasingly impossible as, sentence by sentence, the “turn[ing] and twist[ing]” action of the sea is increasingly embodied in the poem.

The form this embodiment takes is that of an incoming wave. As Moore says in sentence four, “the ocean . . . / advances as usual.” Also, as in “The Fish,” the construction of the wave occurs syntactically and is formally implied rather than directly stated; it is embodied in those lines and clauses that make direct reference to the sea. The prototype of the building-mechanisms in the poem, the wave starts out small in sentence one, with one line: “the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.” This increases to two lines in sentence two: “repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; / the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look”. In sentence three, which is less amenable to counting in this way, the cumulative reference to the sea’s nature or action is something like three to four lines. And in sentence four, if we choose to omit the lines about the birds and the tortoise shell, at least five of the seven lines embody the wave. Altogether throughout the poem, there is increasing direct reference to the sea’s nature or action, and increasing formal representation of the approaching-building action of a single wave. Subtler than “The Fish” in its representation of water in motion, “A Grave” reaches further with its ability to touch the heart of the reader with the inhuman “turn[ing] and twist[ing]” of that motion or action.

Apart from the general ideas summed up earlier, the chief revelation of these analyses is the extent of Moore’s work with the sentence, and with a larger, sentence-based, geometrical form, in the sea-poems. As it has been described here, this work involves at least three kinds of manipulations of the sentence: one having to do with content and/or form, including rhythm, inside a sentence; one having to do with the length of a sentence; and one having to do with the placement of a sentence in a geometrical sequence of sentences. These manipulations describe or apply to all of the sentences in the three poems, although some of the sentences are more striking in certain respects than others. Whatever might have been the case in the writing, all three manipulations register simultaneously in reading. It is when we examine the poems that we discern the manipulations. To mention some of the more striking sentences: in the diminishing-thenbuilding sentence pattern of “Sojourn in the Whale,” there is the pivotal fifth sentence with its important pronouncement about “water in motion.” In “The Fish,” there are the first and the last sentences, with their identical lengths, their contrasting contents and rhythms, and their associations with the beginning and the ending of the wave. Also in this poem, there is the brilliant middle sentence, which is slightly shorter than the sentences before and after it (a consequence of the impact), and in which the wave crashes into the cliff in the first half of the sentence, and the consequent backwash is registered in the second half of the sentence. And in “A Grave,” there is the subtly centered and balanced first sentence with its attention to the middle of things—and its sudden “twist and turn,” or expansion, via exception. Perhaps it is significant that these sentences all mark turning points and boundary lines (beginnings and endings). In sum: with these manipulations, Moore implicitly and explicitly states and / or reenacts sea-water-inmotion— chiefly, waves—in the form and content of the three study poems. Among other things, this work is ample testimony to her admission that she was “governed by the pull of the sentence.” At the same time, this work is an excellent illustration of Ron Silliman’s observation in “The New Sentence” that

it is at the level of the sentence that the use value and the exchange value of any statement unfold into view.

As such, the sentence is the hinge unit of any literary product.

Larger literary products, such as poems, are like completed machines. Any individual sentence might be a piston. It will not get you down the road by itself, but you cannot move the automobile without it.

My sense is that Moore’s phrase “the pull of the sentence” refers to the same subtle complex of language and literary phenomena as Silliman’s phrase “the use value and the exchange value of any statement.”

Although a more thorough examination of these phenomena lies outside the scope of this essay, a crucial question that must be asked—an ideal one—is: How do the main elements of Moore’s sentence in the sea-poems participate in the determination of the poems’ “use value” and “exchange value”? In a highly relevant passage that focuses directly on the function of sentence elements in modern poetry, Roland Barthes characterizes modern poetry in “Is There Any Poetic Writing?” as “an explosion of words” and says that it

destroys the spontaneously functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis. It retains only the outward shape of relationships, their music, but not their reality. The Word shines forth above a line of relationships emptied of their content, grammar is bereft of its purpose, it becomes prosody and is no longer anything but an inflexion which lasts only to present the Word.

While this might be true for some modern poems, we are on more solid ground with the seapoems if we take them not as “explosion[s] of words” (a questionable metaphor) but as reenactments of water activity, and if we make their sentences the focus of our reading. Taking this approach, we see that Moore does not destroy “the spontaneously functional nature of language,” but that she calculatedly heightens it, or gives it more to do, by making it state and/or reenact the activity of water-in-motion. As we have seen, the syntax carries the burden of this reenactment in the content, the length, the location, the form, and the function of the sentence, individually and as a unit in a larger, geometrical form. At the same time, her “lexical basis” is given over to making images and abstract statements—and even rhythmic constructions— that complement, extend, and deepen the effect of the reenactment. So, while it is true that “grammar . . . becomes prosody” in the sea-poems, this is not done at the expense of its function but as a more complete utilization of it, and rather than reducing grammar to “an [empty] inflexion which lasts only to present the Word,” it gives grammar the much more lively and demanding task of appropriately carrying rhythm and image and abstract statement. Rhythm here, we should note, is a twosided thing, including the rhythm of wave and the rhythm of a natural speaking voice, both of which Moore achieves in the sea-poems.

We see the central role of rhythm in this context still more clearly, when we note that—at the level of the sentence as well as at the level of the poem’s overall form—it is the basis of correspondence in the “correspondences of allusion [to the sea, which] provide [the] unmistakable logic of [Moore’s] preference” for wave. (Similarly, in her criticism rhythm is the basis of her interest in many of her citations of her contemporaries’ writing about the sea, or water in other bodies or forms, which I have commented on above.) As we have seen, when it comes to waves and what is done with them in the sentences and the overall forms of the sea-poems, the “allusions” might appear at times in the content, or in the form, or in both, making for some variety of “correspondences.” And underlying all of them is the one thing: rhythm. Although much of the “logic of preference” has vanished with Moore because she never explained it, the one thing she did say something about is rhythm. For instance, her self-announced “passion for rhythm” is well-known, as is her statement that she preferred to think of her poems as “experiments in rhythm.” These emphases take on new meaning here. Similarly, she says in “Poetry and Criticism,” “Rhythm was my prime objective. If I succeeded in embodying a rhythm that preoccupied me, I was satisfied.” Obviously, the wave was such a rhythm. Then, there is also her notion of a personal relation to rhythm: “You don’t devise a rhythm,” she says in “Feeling and Precision,” “the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of personality.” Finally, going a step further with respect to the possibility of a special connection between the person and the rhythm of the sea, there is her observation that, “The many water metaphors in the work of Wallace Stevens are striking evidence . . . of his affinity—say, synonymity—with rhythm.” Here she quotes the lines cited earlier from Stevens’ “That Which Cannot Be Fixed”—with their unique image of wave-action: “there is / A beating and a beating in the centre of / The sea, a strength that tumbles everywhere.” The evidence suggests that Moore herself possessed a similar “affinity—say, synonymity—with rhythm,” one associated with the sea generally, and with waves specificially. And so, the sentences in the sea-poems are “radiograph[ s] of [her] personality,” and in them we find “a strength that tumbles everywhere,” a strength that is hers, as well as the sea’s.

Source: Jerrald Ranta, “Marianne Moore’s Sea and the Sentence,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. 15, No. 2, Fall 1988, pp. 245–57.

In “The Fish,” for instance, Moore employs a typically intricate stanzaic pattern along with evocative, sensual language to create a scene as unfathomable as it initially seems specific. The first three sentences are clear enough. The fish “wade through [the] black jade” of a sea where “submerged shafts of the / sun . . . move themselves with spotlight swiftness.” Nevertheless, even within those sentences, Moore has hinted at the broken vision to follow. She describes the movement of one of the “crow-blue mussel-shells” with curious indirection. The movement of the sand helps a viewer to infer rather than to observe directly the broken movement of the shells. We know only that “one keeps / adjusting the ash heaps, / opening and shutting itself like / an / injured fan.” The rest of the poem develops this hint of submerged movement and emphasizes its potential for violence: “The water drives a wedge / of iron through the iron edge / of the cliff” and the cliff itself shows “external / marks of abuse,” both natural and deliberately inflicted. Having developed the apparent specificity of the poem to this point, Moore dissolves the scene in a flood of ambiguity. One side of the cliff provides a sheltered pool for sea life. In describing it, Moore begins a new stanza with a new sentence, a technique which, in her poems, often foretells dissolution.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
accident—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 it can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.

Contradiction dominates these images. “Lack of cornice,” if it means a natural curve to the edge of the cliff, is certainly a physical feature of accident; but “dynamite grooves, burns, and / hatchet strokes” are just as surely not accidental. They are human interventions that “stand out” on the cliff. Thus, it should not be surprising that “the chasm side is dead.” That announcement, however, makes the next two sentences entirely incomprehensible. If the chasm side is dead, ravaged as it clearly has been by the force of the water it contains, how does it live on the barnacles that adhere to its surface, on the shifting mussel shells that may or may not contain live mussels, and on the rest of the sliding mass of sea life that it shelters? Finally, why does the sea, clearly the most active and powerful force in this scene, grow old within this teeming shelter? Moore not only does not answer these questions, she does not even admit that she has asked them. The poem pretends that it works visually, whereas it should warn readers that images in poems are not always what they seem to be. Source: Taffy Martin, “Craftsmanship Disfigured and Restored,” in Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist, University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 92–112.

“The Fish” (1918) are among the poems responsible for association of Moore’s verse with the seminal movement of the Imagists in the pre-World War I period. She said simply, “I like to describe things.” Moore correctly insisted that she was not one of the Imagists. They, of course, had no monopoly on a tenet essential to their poetry: language “should endeavor to arrest you, and to make you see a physical thing, and prevent your gliding through an abstract process.” On that basis alone, however, they could claim Moore’s work. She said simply, “I like to describe things.” She was a fine descriptive poet whose keen sense of the visual and shifting images is perfected in “The Fish.” The initial perspective is that of an observer looking down into the sea as she stands on the coast. The words of the title, “The Fish,” run over to the opening lines:

wade
through black jade.

The typography is not mimetic, as it was for “Chameleon”; spacing, on first glance, is more jagged and seems to contradict the expectations of the movement of fish. The space between the lines, between the verb “wade” and the phrase “through black jade” (preceded by the use of the title as the subject of the poem’s first verb), prevents one from darting through inattentively. The almost startling image depicts the slow motion of the fish and the stillness of the water, its resistance, color, sheen, and polish. Both literal and figurative, the image is not only powerful in itself, but prepares the reader for the poem’s final subject—the “defiant edifice.” The eyes move down to see crow-blue mussel shells: “one keeps / adjusting the ash-heaps; / opening and shutting itself like / an / injured fan.” Again, the singular images are visually interesting and anticipate the conclusion—the seascape is both beautiful and treacherous. The scene quickens. There is a succession of changing actions:

The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—

The barnacles play tricks on the eyes. The sense of the water’s stillness has been dissipated. Nothing is inert; the poet’s eyes, the water, the light—all are fluid. The color changes; there is a “turquoise sea / of bodies.” The coast is rocky.

The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, inkbespattered
jelly-fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

The effect is kaleidoscopic, but the precision of the images gives one the experience of standing alongside the sentient poet. Then the action of the eyes is arrested by the wrecked ship:

All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of

accident—
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 can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.

The ocean, the source of life, is also a place of conflict, danger, and destruction. The sense of dying life within the sea garden hovers over the poem in much the same way that a theme hovers over a Picasso painting without being articulated. The poem’s final statement, “The sea grows old in it [the damaged and deteriorating vessel],” is similar to the “barnacles which encrust the side / of the wave” in reversing the usual habit of “saying and thinking,” but different in the fact that the old sea is no illusion. The complexity of the statement stimulates a meditation on time and change in “the world’s body” that the dissolving images clearly define. The typography delineates the music of the poem. On a minor scale, the hard rhymes are dominant: “wade . . . jade,” “keeps . . . heaps,” “side . . . hide,” “pink . . . ink-,” “ac- . . . lack”; but the sibilants in “keeps” and “heaps” introduce the words that also mimic the sound of the sea: “swiftness” and “crevices,” “the” and “sea,” “this” and “edifice.” The old-fashioned word “edifice” attracts attention to itself and contrasts with “spotlight swiftness” at the same time that the language echoes the slapping and shishing of the waves. Alternations in stress patterns of syllables for pairs of rhyming words, “an” and “fan,” “green” and “submarine,” “all” and “external” or “dead” and “repeated” lighten the music; and the unrhymed last line of each stanza points up the subtle discordant tones. The final eye rhyme is a musical pun: “it can live / on what cannot revive . . .” The form is synonymous with the content. The modulations of sound and images, the expressive use of space in the line and stanzaic arrangements—all work together in the contemplation of a scene to which the fish alert the observer. In the poem, Moore’s vision is both imagistic and extra-imagist. By describing movement in space she was able to escape the Imagists’ tendency toward stasis; this tendency was frustrating, for example, to Williams because it limited the choice and development of subjects. The major reason she was not a “pure” Imagist, however, is apparent in the “vivid exposition consonant with the best use of metaphor,” as Moore said of Eliot’s verse. Fascinated as she was with the visual object and the phenomenal world, she always respected the natural shapes, colors, textures, and autonomous physical values of what she saw. In this she was like the modern painters she admired, was aligned with Williams, and was not a visionary or mystic; but her penchant for exposition was strong and seldom denied in the poems, as the commentary beginning with “All” in “The Fish” indicates. Source: Elizabeth Phillips, “The Art of Singular Forms,” in Marianne Moore, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982, pp. 21–68.