Reaffirmations: Late Period Poems
[In the following essay, Engel offers a critical overview of the poetry produced by Moore from the late 1950s through the publication of “Prevalent at One Time” in the fall of 1970, the last of her verse to appear during her lifetime.]
Publication in 1961 of A Marianne Moore Reader indicated the poet's arrival as a celebrity and as a writer known to a wider public than critics and her fellow modernists. The Reader gives a sampling of her essays and reviews, twenty-three pieces from Collected Poems and twenty-four from Fables, an interview with Donald Hall, all of Like a Bulwark (1956) and O to Be a Dragon (1959), and five “other poems,” four of them recent and one, “Sun,” a reprinting of a poem that first appeared in 1916. The prose includes “The Ford Correspondence” (1956-57), letters between Moore and a Ford representative concerning the naming of a new model. Moore made a number of imaginative suggestions, but the company eventually settled for the Ford family name Edsel. The correspondence is amusing in itself, and the fact that the Edsel failed to attract the public seems a fate the company deserved for rejecting Moore's proposals. Fame brought its usual penalties, however. Moore was besieged for the rest of her life with requests from authors of term papers and dissertations, amateur poets, and other writers.
LIKE A BULWARK
The eleven poems published in 1956 under the title Like a Bulwark had all previously appeared in magazines; in acknowledging permission to reprint them, Moore remarked that “Tom Fool” and “The Staff of Aesculapius” were “much improved” by magazine editors—an acknowledgment few poets would have the courage to print.
The 1981 printing opens with “Like a Bulwark,” a poem that first appeared as “At Rest in the Blast” and then as “Bulwarked Against Fate.” The “object” dealt with is the poet herself, who is conceived of as one of those armored, self-sufficient creatures of whom Moore was fond. The poem opens in the third person, with an abrupt one-word sentence (“Affirmed”) giving an appropriately hard, almost staccato tone to the assertion that the object is disciplined by what gives it value. By the third line, the poem is in the second person, directly addressing its object: “you,” it says, “take the blame and are inviolate.” The connective is “and,” not “yet,” for the poet wants to present two direct assertions. This creature—the poet's own spirit—thus is self-sacrificing and innocent. But it is also deservedly proud. Though “tempest-tossed,” it is not “abased”; it is made compact by the “blast” that assaults it until it becomes fortified, “a bulwark against fate.” It is, indeed, compressed to the density of lead.
The closing lines probably are intended as a pun on this experience, the salutary effects of compression reminding the poet of bullets fired in military salute, and this in turn reminding her of the “bulwark” or fortress of spirit that is, in its way, as worthy of formal honors as a military post. The poem is another celebration of the armored spirit; it might also be read as a comment upon poetic style, an assertion of the virtues of compression. It is an example of the highly compact work that Moore thought was firmest and had the best chance of surviving. The poem is much revised from the magazine version.
From the thoughts of Old Glory that closed “Like a Bulwark” it is an easy move to “Apparition of Splendor” which presents the porcupine as an example of a bulwark. Here what is praised, however, is the creature's “symmetry” with nature. The poem opens with allusions to an animal seemingly “miraculous” that was pictured by Dürer, allusions hinting at spiritual and aesthetic status for the porcupine. The third stanza remarks factually that the porcupine has “never shot a quill”; in thus correcting a persistent folk belief, the poem gains an air of authenticity that is supported by the specific descriptions of the animal's barbs that are intermingled in stanzas 4 and 5 with further allusions to fictional and fairy-tale porcupines.
Through the first five stanzas we are presented with the half-literal, half-legendary creature that is somehow in harmony with the forest surrounding it. Belief in the existence of such harmony seems to suggest that the forest, the world itself, shares some of the “joyous fantasy” the poem delights in. The last stanza then hails the porcupine for his steadfastness and peacefulness; the editorializing of the stanza grows directly, detail, from the picture already given. If the animal is in part the “apparition” mentioned in the title, it is one of “splendor” because it is a “resister” to the oppressive and the insistent: it is, indeed, like a bulwark.
The paradox that both the white and the dark are associated with truthfulness leads to assertion of the value of truthfulness in “Then the Ermine:,” a poem treating its subject with an intense seriousness that is not betrayed by the ironic humor that infuses it. Truthfulness is the opening concern, the title and first line alluding to the idealism of Clitophon, son of Kalander in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. The poet tells us that she too has idealism, wanting to be regarded as trustworthy in her assertion that she saw a bat abroad in the daytime. In the bat's insecure but courageous persistence in its aims, it reminded her not of heavy-handed “bravado” but of a duke's motto, “I spurn to change or to take fright.” This causes her to reflect that she too does not change and is not “craven”—though she cannot say for sure that it would always be difficult to frighten her. The air of thoughtful reflection, of conversational intimacy with the reader, seems intended to carry him along into the more compressed reflections in the last four stanzas. Thought of the bat's “wavering” flight—like that of a jack-in-the-green, the man concealed in boughs who took part in May Day rites—leads to the possibility of failure.
If she does not achieve her aims, she remarks in the fifth stanza, the physiography of Johann Lavater will have “another admirer.” Lavater was a Swiss versifier and pastor whose best-known work is a study of physiognomy. Both physiography, the description of nature and natural objects, and physiognomy, the study of human appearances, were of interest to Moore herself; her speaker seems to be remarking that if she fails in her own presentations she will admire all the more intensely the skill Lavater demonstrated. His art, it appears, lay particularly in his ability to make the obscure lucid, a skill “now a novelty,” the speaker asserts.
Yet, since “nothing's certain,” we should allow others the expression of changeability we may not desire in ourselves. A palisandre settee—one decorated with human, animal, and plant figures—may properly show in one and the same scene a crow “in full dress” and a shepherdess, representatives of utter naturalness and of highly artificial dignity. Such obvious expression is acceptable; however, the “wavering” bat and the poet who fears that she may fail have their potential also. The “foiled explosiveness” they represent prophesies action to come that may give success to their efforts though being, paradoxically, “a concealer.” Like the bulwark and the armored animals that Moore admired, concealed possibility has power, here a power of “implosion,” of bursting inward like the violets depicted by Dürer. The poem closes with the line “even darker,” seemingly an allusion to color symbolism in which the violet stands for love of truth. Such color symbolism also perhaps accounts for description of the crow as “ebony violet” and for mention of a shepherdess (who is possibly from Ionia, a province named for the violet). The title seems to indicate a continuation, taking up the ermine which is also a symbol of truth.
Ideal behavior is not quiescent nor dull, but spirited; this is evident in the next two poems, “Tom Fool at Jamaica” and “The Web One Weaves of Italy.” Tom Fool was a race horse, much praised by a New York Times sportswriter referred to in Moore's notes. Her speaker treats the horse, like the porcupine, as an “apparition of splendor”; but emphasis now is upon the belief that excellence of performance indicates the presence of such underlying moral qualities as persistence in the face of difficulty and resolution to perform to the best of one's ability—qualities Jonah exhibited in his famous voyage. Though purposeful, Jonah did not pretend to infallibility; indeed, instead of working for impossible perfection, it would be better to imitate the schoolboy who, too young to be limited by realism, showed a man on a mule blocked by a snail. To feel with ardor, as the boy did, this is “submerged magnificence,” and this is the quality of Tom Fool.
This consideration of possibility within the improbable may be owing to Moore's own mixed feelings, for her notes say that, though attracted to the horse by the sportswriter's description, she was bothered by its connection with gambling. In any case, the speaker moves on with comments on the horse, citing a remark that Tom Fool finds the resolution to make the extra spurt that is the “mark of a champion.” A bit of playfulness in alluding to a picture of Tom Fool printed on April Fool's Day serves to keep the presentation from overwhelming seriousness, as does the familiar reference to a racetrack announcer as “Signor” rather than “Mr.” Capossela (he is mentioned deliberately; for, as the poem remarks, he told an interviewer that he does not bet on horse races). The fourth stanza then is a climax: what a moralist can find to admire, after all, is some of the color and seeming artistry of a race scene; forgetting the purpose for a moment, one can enjoy the colors, rhythms, and harmonies. Half-humorously, the poet brings the stanza up short with the remark “well—this is a rhapsody.” We gather that extended rhapsodizing would be out of place because the purpose of horse racing cannot be excluded from any complete picture.
Rather than continue with the racing scene, she turns in the last stanza to consideration of other kinds of “champions.” Fittingly she alludes to noted performers of jazz, another quasi-art wherein style is more important than substance. A couple of quick references to racetrack sights leads to the ending, “But Tom Fool. …” The inconclusiveness suggests that complete description of the horse's qualities is impossible. Illustrative of Moore's confidence in her ability to include the humorous, almost ludicrous, without destroying a poem is her reference in the last two lines to the sight of “a monkey / on a greyhound”—an example of racing, to be sure, but hardly one to please a horse-race fan. Moore's speaker, of course, is suggesting slyly that what is important is the moral excellence the poet saw in aesthetic appeals and strength of character, not degrees of status among gambling enterprises.
That spectacle may be nonintellectual but not necessarily mindless is suggested in “The Web One Weaves of Italy.” So much goes on in Italy, the poet remarks, that the visitor hardly knows where to turn. What goes on is a list of tourist activities including a crossbow tournament, peach fairs, and mule shows. But these are regarded here as a “modern mythologica/esopica,” a series of activities having, like Aesop's fables themselves, moral implications despite—perhaps even because of—their qualities as “nonchalances of the mind.” What happens is “quite different” from the formal education given at a Sorbonne; yet it is “not entirely” unlike intellectual enterprise, for in its Aesop-like suggestiveness it is something “more than … spectacle.” The poem ends with the assertion that “Because the heart is in it all is well.” It is the presence of “the heart,” we gather, that enables seemingly trivial activities to share some of the qualities of wisdom or knowledge presumably imparted by a university: the heart and the head, though different, are not entirely separate.
The remaining six poems in the volume are occasional pieces, some commissioned by editors for holiday issues of magazines, others celebrating or inspired by an experience. “The Staff of Aesculapius” appeared first in What's New, a publication of the Abbott Laboratories. It celebrates the medical researcher for his persistence, his abandonment of “vague speculation,” and his willingness to adopt temporary measures while working diligently for permanent ones. Lines 2, 3, and 4 of the fourth stanza incorporate an expression from a prose report (“Selective injury to cancer / cells without injury to / normal ones …”) at the cost of a slight sag in the rhythm, but they preserve the exactness in both tone and statement of the original with a clarity superior to the somewhat artificially poetic syntax used in the fifth stanza to present substance that is equally factual. Yet this stanza serves its purpose as climax, for in Moore's deliberately offhand way it incorporates the remark that as a result of the new surgical technique “what / was inert becomes living.” This technique and the scientific medicine it represents are, so the last stanza's question implies, like the marvelous rod of Aesculapius. The rod with its entwined snake is a symbol of the renewal medicine gives to man. The poem, by exploring exact details of medical activity, has found an exemplification of the persistence Moore valued.
Chance sight of an impressive tree probably gave rise to “The Sycamore,” a poem remarking that there is “grace” in the small as well as in the large. The sycamore, apparently seen in late autumn, appeared an “albino giraffe” that might arouse the envy of either the varicolored or the pure white. The creatures mentioned as perhaps being stirred to envy are much smaller than a tree, and the contrast of their smallness with its grandeur brings on the observation that “there's more than just one kind of grace.” There is, for instance, the grace of such small things as flowers and that of the miniature paintings produced by camel-hair brushes. Worthy of preservation by a noted miniaturist, the poem concludes, was “a little dry / thing from the grass”—probably an insect—seen in a field near the great tree; it seemed to feel humble as a mouse before a palace. Seeing grace in both the large and the little, Moore seems in this poem to honor the small and humble.
Another of several Christmas poems by Moore is “Rosemary,” which honors Christ's birth by exploring legendary symbolisms of the rosemary plant. Beauty and her son—Venus and Love, “to speak plainly,” we are told—braid a festive garland of rosemary at Christmas. Though the poem alludes to Greek mythology, its theme is Christian, a point indicated by the etymological comment that the plant was “not always rosemary.” (The English name comes from the Latin Ros marinus, “dew of the sea”; in classic times rosemary was associated with Venus as a fellow child of the ocean, and thus with Venus's son Love. Ros marinus at first was anglicized to rosemarine, and was altered to its present form under the influence of the words “rose” and “Mary.”)
This etymology, and the facts that the Virgin Mary is often referred to by such terms as Star of the Sea and is frequently symbolized by a rose, all have significance. Before the plant's association with the Holy Family, it was something other than rosemary, the poem suggests; the stanza reports the Spanish legend, explained in the notes, that the rosemary originally had a white flower but, as the herb of memory, has remained blue since Mary spread her robe on a clump of it during the flight into Egypt. Yet, the poem cautions, we are to remember this is an actual flower, “not too legendary” to be real in its “pungency.” The poem closes with a final remark on the storied and real attributes of the rosemary, both helping to make it “in reality / a kind of Christmas-tree.” The plant's “reality,” like that of the porcupine in “Apparition of Splendor,” is not that of the realist who values only appearances: it is rather a combination of the spiritual and the sensory.
If the whole of reality includes both the natural and an extranatural, it follows that a means of expressing this must itself succeed in yoking the physical and the spiritual, perhaps in expressing the one through the other. This idea is advanced in “Style,” a poem that seems a commentary not only on art but upon all behavior. In choosing presentation of and commentary on Spanish and Basque performers as a device for expressing this idea, Moore seemed to imply need for passion within discipline.
The poem opens with the assertion that style “revives”—apparently it is all too frequently somnolent—in the dancing of Vicente Escudero, whose control and precision extend even to placement of his hat. We in the United States had our own careful performer in Dick Button, the skating champion; but to suggest that we are related to the performers of southwestern Europe, Moore's speaker also remarks on Etchebaster, the Basque athlete who won an American tennis championship. Mention of Etchebaster prompts remarks upon Soledad, the Spanish woman dancer who performed in the United States in 1950 and 1951. A pun on her name—“aloneness”—reinforces the declaration that Soledad's black garb does not indicate sadness; a series of similes then indicates half a dozen ways one might attempt to describe the precise figures she performed. So admirable, indeed, are her competencies that she may be forgiven her former career as a bullfighter—a concession one realizes Moore would not easily make. The fourth stanza quickly cites an individual characteristic or two for Etchebaster, Vicente Escudero, and Rosario Escudero. Each of these men had his own mode of behavior or favorite hallmark; in each case it was an inseparable part of his style, of the fitting way of expression he had found for himself.
Having explored the possibilities of a variety of comparisons that might enable one to explain the essence of style, the poet now pretends to surrender: the effort ends in defeat, for “There is no suitable simile.” At least, however, we gather that style, a manner of expression that is perfectly suited to substance, will join two or more apparently distinct entities. Fitting expression, the poem concludes, is like a conjoinment of the “arcs of seeds” in a banana by a musician; or it may be said to be like a painter's depiction of the face of a musician. The poem ends not with a bit of syllogistic logic but with an exclamatory repetition of the names of the four performers who are its principal characters. This exclamation seems to imply that better than attempting to describe the indescribable is a simple citation of examples.
The paradox that a large-scale opera could appear on an ordinary television screen is explored with some of Moore's humor but with her usual seriousness of purpose in “Logic and ‘The Magic Flute,’” written after seeing a color telecast in 1956 of the opera named in the title. Several remarks and puns refer to seashells, which are sometimes associated with Venus, the goddess of love who was born from the ocean; allusions are also made to the wentletrap, an elegant shell once much valued by collectors because of its spiral shape. This shape bears some resemblance to a spiral staircase, a fact indicated in the etymology of its name, and one important enough to cause Moore to include an illustration of the shell in her notes to the poem.
The opera, we are told, seems to carry her “Up winding stair” as though she were lost in a strange theater. The action appeared on a small screen near a magazine rack in the “abalonean gloom” of a darkened living room, and it was accompanied by the “intrusive hum” of the television set's workings; these impressions seemed to fill the room. But the scene then carried the viewers abruptly out of doors, where it seemed that “a demon” roared the question whether one might ever find love. That the “demon” cried “down” stairs of marble perhaps indicates that he had pressed on ahead in a search that also engaged the speaker of the poem; that the stairs were marble suggests an appropriate coldness, and perhaps also is an indirect allusion to the seashell motif. At any rate, the answer to the query is “simple.” We need only “Banish sloth,” the tyrant that pretends to fetter us, to keep us from active recognition and acceptance of the “Trapper Love” that, itself a “magic sleuth,” will surely find us if we are open to its discovery. “Illogically” but surely, love has by means of the music woven the realization that “logic can't unweave,” the understanding that to have love we need not compete, need not fight.
From love the concern moves to beatitude in “Blessed Is the Man,” a poem of interest not only for its presentation of certain of Moore's own principles but also for its differences from the ideas and techniques of the Beat movement then (1956) in vogue. True beatitude, Moore held, comes from practice of traditional but far from universally honored values; one arrives at it not by defiance nor by a process of becoming a martyr within his society, but by holding himself aloof. The opening stanza puts together a biblical allusion, a phrase from an attack on President Eisenhower, and a book reviewer's quotation from Lincoln to declare that the man is blessed who does not criticize, who is not given to intemperance and alibis, and who stands firmly for what he thinks is right.
The second stanza alludes to a self-portrait by Giorgione; the fact that his work is usually unsigned serves to caution the reader that the blessed man, though firm in principle, is not a victim of “egomania.” Diversity with tolerance makes a “fort,” a bulwark that will “armor” the blessed man as he makes decisions on the basis of aptness to a situation, to a principle, and to public interest. This man, a Ulysses in leadership, will find that his fellows of this age “are now political”—as in the La Fontaine tale quoted in stanzas 4 and 5, they have become brutes. Examples are “Brazen authors” who coat the conscience to resist questions raised by “character.” In such circumstances, the true nonconformist is blessed; he is the man who, without being “supercilious,” will not give in to demands of the crowd. Blessed, finally, is the man whose faith is not “possessiveness,” who does not depend on material or psychological advantages for the self, and who is not limited to the evidence of the senses. He is the man who knows that spiritual victory awaits him. This man, whose eyes are “illumined” by spirit, has seen the light of what Moore regarded as religious truth.
The blessed man is the “hero” of her early poems, coveting nothing that he has let go. He is now, however, a man whose behavior is ethical not only in its conformity to traditional standards but also in specifically religious ways. He accepts the faith expressed in the Bible (Hebrews 11:3) that “the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” As it differs with the principles of the Beats, so the poem differed with fashions in literary criticism. Indeed, Moore says in her lecture “Idiosyncrasy” that the poem was written to combat the “denigration,” the smart cynicism that she detected whenever a critic commented upon the presence in a piece of writing of the “gusto” that she thought vital to literary art.
O TO BE A DRAGON
The fifteen poems brought together in 1959 under the title O to Be a Dragon continue the themes of the previous volume. The title poem expresses the wish to have, like the dragon of Chinese legendry, the “power of Heaven”—the ability to infuse the world with moral and spiritual strength without having to give up one's own being. Moore's wish typically was for the ability to adopt such guises as may be necessary for defense of the self and for expression of it.
The remaining fourteen poems discover one or another of her values in such diverse subjects as a chameleon, holidays, and baseball games. Assurance is evident in “I May, I Might, I Must,” a short declaration of confidence that first appeared in the Bryn Mawr literary magazine Tipyn O'Bob in 1909 under the title “Progress.” Moore did not reprint this in any volume before O to Be a Dragon; that she could revive it after fifty years proves not that there had been no change in her thinking, but rather that in maturity she could safely express the confidence that from a less securely established writer might seem banal. The air of hesitancy, of one talking to herself, conveys the idea of an expression that is being given only after thoughtful consideration.
Another poem from her early years is “To a Chameleon.” In a typography suggestive of the way the chameleon might “twine” himself round a grapevine, the poem first addresses the creature and then declares that even firelight reflected by an emerald as “massy” as that of the Dark King (Prester John) could not “snap the spectrum up for food” as the chameleon has done—could not incorporate the varied colors the chameleon is capable of assuming. The emerald is an appropriate jewel for comparison to the greenery in which the chameleon is imagined to be hiding, and the chameleon himself is another in the series of well-defended creatures Moore hailed throughout her career. In his symmetry with nature he represents perfection of being.
Yet another defensive guise is saluted in “A Jellyfish,” which describes briefly the “fluctuating charm” of the creature and then reports that, when one approaches it, its motion is that of quivering and so one will refrain. The poem is in its first lines a simple report of a circumstance; but “quivers” and “abandon” in the last two lines give it a degree of emotional impact. At no point does the poet allude to the notion of the jellyfish as the weak, “spineless,” or cowardly creature popular symbolism makes of it. That she could successfully flaunt so fixed a conception proves the rigor of her skill.
“Values in Use” is a deft satire on those who recommend specific language but fail to employ it themselves. The piece begins with a seemingly offhand, conversational remark that itself illustrates the point by specifying what the poet liked in the setting of a literary colloquium. The second, third, and fourth stanzas quote and paraphrase recommendations of a speaker urging his listeners to live by values in their daily lives and to write concretely of them. The poet's question at the end of the fourth stanza—“Am I still abstruse?”—implies, of course, that the speaker she is reporting on has failed to exercise his own recommendation. The closing two stanzas cite the comment of a student who remarked that he understood two of the “big” words used, and they conclude quickly that “Certainly the means must not defeat the end.” This ending is itself an abstraction, a generalization; but the reader should note the skill with which the poet leads up to it and, for that matter, the deliberately trite wording of it. Moore avoids the effect of a tacked on moral by so shaping her poem that the ending grows out of the body of the work not as a logical conclusion nor as a piece of cleverness but as an inevitably just remark in a meditative dialogue.
Few careers are shorter than that of a major league baseball player; and changes in the geographical distribution of teams in the 1950s took the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. The reader of “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese” must therefore be a fan of some standing if he is to remember all the names and teams and incidents that the poem incorporates. Yet, topical though it is, the poem is invigorating. The direction that it is to have the tune of a popular song that mentioned a mockingbird and a brass ring sets the tone of lively if faintly ironic humor. In view of the disappearance of the Dodgers from Brooklyn, there now is a heavier irony; the loss of the tradition-laden team for monetary reasons left a taste of brass in the mouths of the community's ardent fans.
But the main import of the poem was celebration and exhortation. It appeared in a New York newspaper on 3 October 1956 during the World Series, and it is essentially a gently humorous appeal to the Dodgers to “Come on,” expressing the heady local patriotism of the fans and incorporating allusions to games of the 1955 and 1956 series and to various players and associated personages, as well as snatches of quotations from newspaper articles. Use of specific names and reference to particular incidents give the poem its air of reality; it is a celebration by one who, so to speak, was there. After citing a noted pitcher's remark that “Everything's getting better and better,” the poem further illustrates hometown zest by referring to a humorous salute a Dodger band had ready for visiting tax collectors. The emotional ups and downs of the hopeful fan are reported in a series of stanzas alluding to actual incidents and occasionally slipping into the first person in order to identify poet and reader with the fan; the rhythms, with abrupt shifts in pace and direction, seem to parallel the quick changes in mood of one who follows a lively game closely. Mentions of the superstition of many sports followers, the competence of favorite players, and the “color” and affection of a baseball man who got the club to give the proceeds from a game to a charity, all help build the tribute to the hometown team.
The last two stanzas become slightly more serious, urging the team to overmaster its reputation as a somewhat ridiculous grouping and citing its resources in manpower, tradition, and public support. The poem finds Moore applying the optimism and enthusiasm that she valued to a particular instance, and in turn illustrates the presence of these values in her thinking. If too topical for one not an informed fan, it is spirited fun for such a fan and for the reader who is willing to work carefully through the notes and reread them often enough to become at home with the allusions.
The remark that one player “almost dehorned” the opposition, and the playful direction to the Dodgers to “Take off the goat-horns,” properly indicate that the conflict is after all not a very “serious” one. One effect of the poem was to make Moore a widely known poet of the city. Whether they understood it, or even read it, many New Yorkers who had ignored poets all their lives were pleased (as was the Dodgers' front office) with the fact that an artist had paid tribute to the supposed national pastime as carried out in Brooklyn.
A more serious production is “Enough: Jamestown, 1607-1957,” a poem inspired by observation of the 350th anniversary of the settlement at Jamestown. In honor of the settlers' ships the Godspeed, Susan Constant, and Discovery, three United States Air Force jet planes were given the same names and flown nonstop across the Atlantic to Virginia on 13 May 1957. Moore's speaker alludes only briefly to these circumstances, but she explores in detail the difficulties, setbacks, and achievements of the settlers to see whether their accomplishment was, taken in the balance, “enough” to initiate the kind of culture she honors. Carefully naming the ships—partly because she enjoys the quaint moralism of their titles—she remarks on how the confident adventurers found their anticipated paradise “too earthly”—a land then of “pests and pestilence.” Eight stanzas detail the colonists' difficulties and cite an incident illustrative of relations with Indians: Princess Pocahontas found that in marriage to a white she surrendered her high status, yet that her situation was “not too tame.” The implication seems to be that a judgment on their relations would find good and bad mixed.
Three stanzas then specify some of the flowers representative of the careful beauties of present-day Virginia, a passage reminiscent of “Virginia Britannia.” But the scene is again changed; there was no time in early Virginia, we are reminded, for the “French effect,” for gardening and rhyming. Remarks upon the paradox that “Marriage, tobacco, and slavery” brought a form of liberty—economic stability and security—conclude, fittingly, that no one knows for sure “what is good.”
The conclusion is that what the settlers did was indeed “enough”: it was a genuine accomplishment because what material gain was achieved was accomplished by “faith.” If “proof” of men's material and ideational expectations for the new country was at the time only “partial,” the “present faith” made their settlement nevertheless of significance for us, especially if our faith will “mend” the inadequacies of the heritage the settlers left us. One may note especially the absence of sentimentality: the Jamestown settlers are seen to be greedy enough yet not villainous. The mixture of selfishness and faith that motivated them is acknowledged without debunking or prettifying. As in “The Jerboa,” greed is recognized; but humor, specificity, and restraint convey a tolerance enabling the poet to communicate her belief that the moral system indicated by the very names of the ships was wrong insofar as it incorporated greed, but was right insofar as it led to decency of behavior. The 1981 printing drops three stanzas and makes several lesser alterations. The changes speed the pace, but eliminate the observation that the settlers' ships—that is, by implication, something of their hopes—live on in “namesake” jets.
Faith is also the topic of “Melchior Vulpius,” a poem celebrating the composer whose works include an anthem in praise of “conquering faith” in God. The power of such an artist is, we are told, something we must “trust,” for it cannot be finally understood though it can be acquired and directed. Such art, at least on the level of ingenuity, is also instanced by construction of automatons with lungs of mouse-skin, here imagined as saying “Hallelujah.” We assume that the composer is thought to have received his power of expression from on high; man's abilities to parallel the activities of God—and the enormous difference in respective powers—are indicated by the lines on the automaton: the device is to be respected, yet obviously is far inferior in capacity to the creations of God. Manlike, the composer built from “miniature thunder”; yet, godlike, what he built up were “crescendos antidoting death.” If this is a paradox, it is, if not explained, at least celebrated by the declaration that it amounts to “love's signature cementing faith,” a love of the artist for the spirit firming the faith of all who hear him.
The restorative power of a work of art is honored in “No Better than ‘a withered daffodil,’” originally published in Art News. For purposes of the poem, Ben Jonson is imagined as having written in “Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount” that he was in the state indicated by Moore's title. (In Jonson's poem it is “nature's pride” that is said to be a withered daffodil; this pride, however, may be a quality in the speaker of the poem.) At any rate, Moore's first stanza quotes the fine lines in which Jonson compares the feeling of his speaker to the dripping of melting snow. We would expect Moore to reject such a feeling, for she does not, at least in verse, give way to expressions of despair. Here she does say “I too,” but immediately relates how the sight of a green French brocade revived her spirits. She does not communicate this story in the direct fashion of a sermon writer; instead, she gives comparisons that will make the point to our senses—the brocade reminds her of “some lizard in the shade,” then of a miniature picture on ivory showing Sir Philip Sidney. These remarks give her strength back to her: “I too,” she now remarks, seem to be as “insouciant” as Sidney and “no daffodil,” no drooping, melancholy spirit.
Art in its public function and in its individuality are considered in “In the Public Garden,” read at an Arts Festival in Boston in June 1958 (earlier titles were first “A Festival,” then “Boston”). The situation of the poet as participant in a public salute to the arts calls up the reflections. The first stanza introduces duality, speaking of a festival “for all” taking place near the Harvard campus that has “made education individual.” This leads to mention of “fine” individuals in the conversation of an “almost scriptural” Boston taxi driver—one who conforms to the newspaper columnists' portrait of cabmen as sages. The environment's beauties are specified in Moore's usual exact detail: a weathervane, iris, snowdrops. The movement in the passage is backward, from summer to spring and finally winter, an ordering perhaps intended to force the reader's attention upon the details by slightly disrupting his expectation.
After these appreciative mentions of individuals and nature, the theme of gratitude enters in the sixth stanza with a quotation from a hymn heard in King's Chapel. A chapel, we are then told, is like a festival in that it involves an exchange—we deduce the exchange of gratitude for grace in a chapel, of attention or pay for inspiration in a festival; but the poem goes on to cite not such expected reciprocations but rarities, the most “unusual” being “silence.” This gift may come, we surmise, in a chapel or in a work of art. At any rate, it is said to be as “unattainable” as freedom, and this leads to yet another statement of Moore's belief that freedom and self-discipline are related. This statement she conveys by quoting President Eisenhower and by citing the determination of inmates of a “transshipment camp” to earn passage to freedom by selling medicinal herbs, a strategy they could not succeed in if they allowed themselves to become ill. Man is, as the hymn said, child to God; but he will live up to this role only if he disciplines the self.
“Well?” the poet pretends to interrupt. Some, she says, will talk on and on without saying why they have come. Having just praised “silence” and self-discipline, she feels an obligation to be brief. What she is giving us, she says, is neither a madrigal nor a gradual—it is not to be formal, elaborately artistic, but “grateful.” The gratitude is aroused by the experience of seeing the assemblage “wish poetry well.” Modestly speaking of herself as lacking the “radiance” romantic tradition assumed poets to have and as commenting quite unofficially, she says that she can nevertheless be glad that the arts have “a home and swans”—both a welcoming physical environment and an aesthetically receptive spirit.
She is “happy,” finally, that Art—now capitalized—though admired “in general” on such occasions as the festival, remains “actually personal,” the product of the artist. The artist needs, and here retains, it would seem, “freedom” to express himself, a freedom consisting in part of a “silence,” an absence of demands from the public. Art has its public function, but this is not to result in pressures upon the artist; Boston, Harvard, and the arts festival thus are gracefully praised for affording opportunity for a hearing without imposing demands. The poem does make use of the conventional formula for an invited artist's address to a crowd, disclaiming any thought that the honor is for oneself and expressing gratitude rather for the honor given to the art. But the conventional here is carefully explored.
Playful delight in the friendliness, peacefulness, and intelligence of the musk ox in “The Arctic Ox (or Goat)” shows Moore's admiration for these qualities. The poem celebrates the animal of the title by detailing his qualities as set down in a magazine article Moore cited as her source. She followed the article closely, even to such humorous directions as “Bury your nose in one when [he is] wet” (said to one who persists in believing the animal to have a musk-like odor). The article expresses the wish that man make use of the animals by adjusting his economy to his environment in areas where conventional agricultural practices are destructive or futile. But Moore omitted this wish for social betterment; she preferred to indicate through her celebration of the animal her admiration for the qualities it represents. The ninth stanza calls to mind her poem “Rigorists,” which remarks upon the salvation of an Eskimo community by the importation of reindeer.
The musk ox embodies many of the qualities that Moore admired and that she believed result from inner spirit. The kind of spiritual inspiration she would have liked is defined in “Saint Nicholas,” a poem written for a Christmas edition of the New Yorker magazine. The poem approaches its goal playfully, but purposefully; the first stanza suggests that a welcome Christmas gift would be a chameleon, thus establishing at once the attitude of moderation in desire that we expect of a poet who values restraint, “silence,” and self-discipline. The description of the animal is based on a Life magazine photograph of a chameleon which, being behind the bars of a cage in the sunshine, appeared to be striped. Each detail is accurate, including the tightly coiled tail and the slight doubt as to whether one should count six or seven stripes. Another desirable gift, the poem continues, would be a garment of musk-ox fibre and a fancy shirt. Such wishes are, if hardly routine, at least within reasonable expectation. To reinforce the point that her desires are not extreme, Moore's speaker in the third stanza declares that she would not want “a trip to Greenland” or to the moon. Let the moon come here and perhaps enable her to garb herself in moonlight—that would be acceptable.
Thought of the moon introduced a note of greater possibility, and the poem moves on to suggest a “yet more rare” desire. Describing Hans von Marées's painting of St. Hubert, the speaker mentions the figure's bowed head and erect form, “tense with restraint.” The stance is one she honors. Now she repeats, generalizing slightly, her description of the scene; we are to recall that the St. Hubert of legend was so fond of hunting that he neglected his religious duties until one day he met in the forest a stag who bore in his horns a miraculous crucifix that warned him to reform. Hubert, the story goes, thereafter became a noted churchman. The speaker's overt request is quite in line with the imaginative but modest desires she has thus far expressed. But in the last four lines of the poem she suggests deeper desire. She maintains the restraint: she does not tell Saint Nicholas what she would like, only that he “must have divined” what it would be. We may deduce that she, like the latter-day Hubert, would desire a vision of Christ. Moore will not state this overtly; her “silence,” her self-discipline are too taut to permit a declaration that might smack of romantic excess. Yet her understatement is, she knows, fully emotive.
“Saint Nicholas” indicated the love for God that is directly the theme of “For February 14th.” The strategy for movement in this work is an address to Saint Valentine, asking him if he would welcome as a gift a poem, a diamond, a plant, or some birds. This, of course, is a witty reversal of the customary Valentine's Day exchange of favors between lovers. The series of suggested gifts ends suddenly with the exclamation that such questioning “is the mark of a pest!” Why, the concluding lines ask, do we think only of “animals,” of material benefits? Why do we not think instead of the fact that “the ark did not sink”—of the love God expresses toward man?
Religious love would develop a unity between God and man, but unity of a different sort is the theme of the last two poems of this volume. “Combat Cultural” honors the lessoning obtained from the sight of two ballet dancers enacting a scene of combat though dressed as twin brothers. The “moral” they point to, the ending says wryly, is the need to unify the elements of any “objective” that represents wisdom and ethical behavior. The work of art, we deduce, should unite whatever diversities it may contain. As often, the poem leads up to its objective with a seeming indirectness, beginning with references to various scenes of active creatures leaping or flying, moving to Russian dances and then to Arctic Russian sack wrestling in which the combatants are blanketed together. From seemingly casual suggestions of physical action the poem moves first to the generalized unity of action in a dance, then to the enforced unity of a sack dance, and finally to the ballet scene that suggests most directly the “moral” the speaker draws.
Unity of all men under Christ is an ideal in “Leonardo da Vinci's,” a poem based on the painter's famous picture of St. Jerome and the lion. Jerome, we are reminded, was “versed in language”; most of the poem concerns the nonlinguistic but effective symbolism of the lion. In the second and third stanzas the old tale is told of how Jerome supposedly dressed the wounded paw of a lion that thereupon remained as his companion, of Jerome's suspicion that the beast had eaten an ass, and of the disgrace that consequently came to the lion until he retrieved the ass from a company of thieves. The result was the forging of a strong bond between Jerome and the lion; it was so strong, indeed, we are told, that they became “twinned” in “lionship.” Leaned but taught by his troubles, Jerome used his talents in language to put together the Vulgate Bible.
The lion, too, left his contributions. In the last two stanzas Moore cites use of him as a sign of the zodiac for early summer and the consequent honoring of him by Egyptians because of his connection with the rise of the Nile. And, the poem remarks, in da Vinci's picture the sun seems to imbue Jerome and the lion; the last stanza appropriately gives the direction “blaze on.” We are reminded that the sun shone especially during the zodiacal season of Leo and that in Christian mythology the lion, like the sun, traditionally has been emblematic of the resurrection of Christ. The closing words—directing Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, to shine on as do picture, saint, and beast—make an ending that is typical for Moore in seeming casual; but it is typical also in having more relevance than may first appear, for Haile Selassie was referred to as the Lion of Judah, a title that, because of the lion symbolism, is now sometimes used for Christ. Haile Selassie represents the afflicted people Moore had already spoken of in such poems as “In Distrust of Merits.” Though the emperor later would be viewed as an anachronistic tyrant, when Moore published the poem (1959) he was still a hero to Americans because of his resistance to Mussolini in the 1930s.
TELL ME, TELL ME
Until her health began to fade in the late 1960s, Moore remained an active poet as well as a New York City celebrity. The serious verse of her later years may be characterized as reaffirmation. It continues insistence on the values of courage, independence, silence, and art, and it reasserts need to recognize the invisible within the visible.
Much of Moore's work now, however, was occasional verse, frequently written at the request of an editor or public figure. Even in her more serious pieces, her imagination in the 1960s seemed less intense, appearing in tributes or comments that use her techniques but lack the depth of inspiration that gave rise to her better work. “Granite and Steel,” for example, has the manner but not the combination of lightness in touch and wisdom in idea that one notes in “The Plumet Basilisk,” “The Jerboa,” and “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing.” When the later pieces are serious, they tend to be heavy-footed, lacking the imaginative “feel” that earlier gave Moore empathy with her subject and by means of this unity made implication expressive. What is missing is the “gusto,” the delight in experience.
Her next collection of poems appeared in 1966 as Tell Me, Tell Me. The 1981 Complete Poems prints all eighteen of these pieces, but does not give four short prose essays that were printed with them. Comparing the 1966 and 1981 printings shows that Moore dropped one line from the early version of “Granite and Steel” and made a few lesser changes, none of them of important effect on significance.
Continuing her recognition of spirit and insistence on moral values, “Granite and Steel” finds the quality of “probity” exemplified in Brooklyn Bridge, which stands only a few blocks from the poet's longtime home in Brooklyn. To the speaker, the bridge, an “enfranchising cable,” and the Statue of Liberty, which stands on shattered chains, dominate the bay. The bridge in its artistry opposes greed, symbolizing mankind's highest capacities and serving in its practicality to overcome the avarice of those who—as a somewhat thorny passage seems to indicate—would put profit ahead of beauty and utility. Stanza 3 celebrates, somewhat in the manner of Hart Crane, the “harmony” of earth and sky, the “radiance” the bridge represents and contributes to. The bridge is, indeed, a “composite span,” a meld of the imagined and the achieved and a representation of mankind's aspirations. It is an example of what Moore wished her poems to be.
“Granite and Steel” typically requires the reader to slow down and, as is frequent, also requires that he bring in a bit of factual knowledge about its subject. It is followed in Tell Me, Tell Me by the two-page prose consideration of the way a poem states its content, “A Burning Desire to Be Explicit.” Reporting two incidents in which her explicitness had been questioned, Moore remarks that though there may be an “element of the riddle” in a poem, most readers may not be “irked by clues to meaning.” This assertion is followed by two examples of painters' brief explanations of elements in their work. Examples from her own writing are meant to show that she does not intend either abstraction or philosophy. One should want, she indicates, to use words with passion and to lift the heart (she quotes Faulkner on the latter point, though primly noting that his writing “might not always have done that”).
“In Lieu of the Lyre” is Moore's only outrightly feminist poem, a deliberately intricate response—“reflections,” the ending styles it—to an invitation in 1965 to send a poem to the Harvard Advocate. The guise of the speaker is as one expressing gratitude for the invitation, yet the overall effect is ironic, even satiric. Though “debarred” from Harvard (which at the time did not admit women), the speaker can feel “with fire” at sight of the college's historic campus and also, one deduces, at the smart from what she takes to be the exclusion of members of her gender. The notes identify a French phrase as a quotation from Madame Boufflers (1711-1786), a writer whose work is discussed in a 1951 article by Dr. Achilles Fang (identified in the notes to “Tom Fool at Jamaica”).
The second stanza continues the excessive intricacy; its content amounts to the remark that the speaker is “a too outspoken outraged refugee from clichés.” Having amusingly punished the Advocate's young editor and readers with these near-impenetrable observations; the speaker turns in the last two stanzas to the sly suggestion that they might prefer some plain axiom: she cites two elementary statements of physics, and the simple fact that Roebling invented the Roebling cable. “In Lieu of the Lyre” indeed! In lieu of a poem Moore writes a send-up of the university. Other pieces of occasional verse include “Dream,” an expression of admiration for Bach; and “Old Amusement Park,” a recollection of the “tame-wild” place, of its bustle, and also of the insouciance of employees who would shut up shop in order to chat.
In contrast to the delight in the mind that is celebrated in “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” is the despair—humorously rueful, rather than tragic—noted in “The Mind, Intractable Thing.” Here the mind is seen as somehow separate from the self, making suggestions that “I” cannot follow. Addressing it as an “imagnifico”—a term Moore apparently compounded from “image” or “imagine” and “magnifico” (which she may have come across in Wallace Stevens's writing), the speaker reflects on two examples of pictures the mind brings to attention—a glen and an Arizona road-runner, both observed in exact detail, and then lists items the mind understands and knows how to deal with, matters that “I” feels she cannot successfully handle. The exclamation “O Zeus and O Destiny!” suggests that the speaker is not seriously disabled by such incompetencies: one may deduce that she is somewhat taken aback by the range of possibilities the mind roams over. Despite even such obstacles as “disparagers, deaths, dejection” the mind continues in its ways; it has made “wordcraft” irresistible to her, is as close to a king over her as any power can be, is, indeed, the possessor of a craft that is intractable because it cannot be controlled and tamed. The mind that is a delight in its operations is also, it seems, fecund and wily in its domination of the self.
A more serious point is raised in “An Expedient—Leonardo da Vinci's—and a Query.” Noting that da Vinci worked with patience and a sure memory, that he had a “height” of artistic character that kept traducers away, and that he followed but did not merely imitate nature, the speaker asks how after painting his Leda he could have been so dejected that he wondered whether he had accomplished “anything / at all” (a question that, according to the Kenneth Clark book Moore cites in her notes, Leonardo frequently asked). The poem muses: was Leonardo not in fact able to handle the changes he saw in reality? The lines indirectly assert that the proof of an artist's greatness is in what he creates, not in his theories. The poem “W. W. Landor” is another comment on aesthetics, admiring the English writer who was physically forceful yet so “tender” that when he threw a man through a window he worried about the violets the fellow would land on, an accomplished artist who modestly avoided grand abstractions—a man, that is, after Moore's own heart.
“To a Giraffe” is a reflection on the challenge facing the artist. Her note shows that Moore had in mind The Odyssey, a work that, in her view, one deduces, sets an unmatchable standard of accomplishment. The speaker first asks whether, if the artist is not to be personal or literal, and should be innocent, he or she is required to work always at the highest reach. She finds the idea represented in the giraffe, an animal that pleasures her because it is “unconversational.” This notion causes her to observe that one wrapped up in the self and its problems can be unbearable even though the self had the possibility of being exceptional. From this attempted rejection of the overly personal and the self-engrossed the speaker turns to the thought that consolation for what seem the difficulties of the artist and others can be found in Homer, who shows a world that is flawed and conditional, one where “the journey from sin to redemption” is perpetual, where people are forever imperfect though forever being redeemed. The quotation that ends the poem is from Moore's own summary of a scholar's views on The Odyssey.
To Moore, a spiritual element unites experiences acrobatic, athletic, and artistic, and it unifies seemingly disparate qualities of character. It also enables the moral to triumph over the sinful. “Charity Overcoming Envy” shows the good mastering the evil that is yoked to it by convincing it that its self-pity is misguided. This victory shows that it is not necessary to delay hopes for achievement simply because the ethical may be linked to error by a “Gordian Knot.” The relative standing of the two qualities is indicated by the fact that Charity rides on an elephant—generally an admirable creature in Moore's work—but Envy is mounted on a dog. In Tell Me, Tell Me this poem is followed by “Profit Is a Dead Weight,” a five-page prose urging to moral behavior, an unexpected inhabitant of a book of poems but one showing Moore's traditional values of responsibility, sympathy, and courage, and her opposition to greed and cynicism. The poem concludes that one following such principles will be so popular that she will have no leisure. Moore protested to me, and others, that people often attempted to take her over. Slight in build, and known for rectitude, she appealed, as she recognized, to the sense of solicitude in many readers and in the nonreading fans whose attention the press was bringing her by the 1960s.
Analogy between the artistic and the athletic serves to suggest the importance of spirit. Explaining that the title “Blue Bug” is the name of a polo pony she saw pictured in Sports Illustrated (13 November 1961), the speaker draws attention to a kindship between herself and the pony; the animal recognizes the recognition in her eye. She won't ask how he got his odd name, she says; she comments on the intrusiveness of those who pester one with questions (an idea she also discussed in “Saint Nicholas”). Then, as if interrupting a conversation, she breaks in abruptly with the declaration that “I've guessed” and goes on to describe the pony as resembling an artist's dragonfly in its ability to make quick turns in direction. This description leads to analogy between the pony's abilities and the intricacies of a Chinese melody. She remarks that the tune gives an accurate “version” of the pony's varied movements in polo.
Having found a similarity between herself and the pony and having also asserted a resemblance between him and works of art, the speaker climaxes the analogy by “restating” it. Though polo actually comes from the Tibetan word for the ball used in the game, it looks like a Romance language word, a fact she takes advantage of to obtain a bit of wordsmanship implying a similarity between “polo” (she translates this as “I turn”), “polos” (plural of a Spanish word for the polar axis of a spinning object), and the name of the game. She, the artist, turns on a “pivot” just as do the pony and the Chinese tune, we are told. The implication is that, diverse as all these may be, there is a kinship because all turn on a pivot of spirit. The poem recognizes that the analogy may be “a little elaborate,” but explains, in Moore's usual deftly casual manner, that such a relationship between the idea of revolving and the thought of a “pastime” was suggested by thought of Odilon Redon, a French Postimpressionist painter. The painter's name itself must have pleased Moore by its sounds. And she doubtless approved of his assertions that once an artist has mastered his language, he should be free to deal with subjects drawn not only from direct observation but also from history and poetry. As “Baseball and Writing” found that the artist and the athlete should “bear down” but “enjoy it,” so in “Blue Bug” it is remarked that the art Redon preferred was a “pastime that is work.” One should have the physical control and the alert mentality of a Chinese acrobat; the closing stanza particularizes this.
References to a Chinese tune and to a Chinese acrobat have a general appropriateness in that polo came to the West from the Orient; they also remind the reader of the admiration and attention Moore gives Chinese artistry in “Nine Nectarines” and “O to Be a Dragon.” Whether the performer is from China or from Brooklyn, if he is to be bulwarked for right action by acquiring the powers of the dragon, he must recognize the spiritual element that gives unity not only to experiences but also to seemingly disparate qualities of character. “Arthur Mitchell” is only a verse intended for notes to a dance program, but in celebrating the dancer as one whose jewel-like mobility both reveals and veils, Moore indicates again her own desire to be both explicit and armored.
Like writing, dancing is a public art. Baseball, too, requires an infusion of spirit. The relationships are explored in “Baseball and Writing,” a poem in which one theme is the nature of beauty. The verse makes use of humorous rhymes (“pedagogy”—“prodigy”), abrupt shifts in rhythm, and citation of the names of living people to establish a familiar, conversational tone that reinforces the remark of the last stanza that one—whether baseball player or, we deduce, writer—should “bear down” at his work but “Enjoy it.” The opening stanza says excitement over writing or baseball is not mere “fanaticism,” though it arouses a “fever” in its “victim.”
Bantering about the point, Moore mentions the “Owlman” (her italics) in the pressbox—a reference to the sportswriters and broadcasters assigned to night games and to their role as public wisemen. Several stanzas praise the skills of various baseball players, most of them New York Yankees. Since we have been warned by the title and by the first stanza to watch for analogies with writing, we are likely to read such a remark as “concentrates promote victory” as significant of Moore's aesthetic theory, though as usual the generalization is grounded in the specifics of a seemingly very different area—in this case, a listing of supposed health foods.
The complexity of Moore's attitudes is indicated by her willingness to link baseball with writing; this linking gives a profundity to such lines as “Pitching is a large subject”—a remark conveying a truth in the light of humor. So too the sixth stanza, listing some of the “imponderables”—the hazards the player faces—notes such actual physical dangers as muscle kinks and spike wounds, yet mentions the pains of celebrity with the hardly serious exclamation “Drat it!” and intermixes play on sounds with its remark that “the Stadium is an adastrium.” The stadium—the arena, we assume, of both the athlete and the writer—is the home of “stars,” a designation not only of celebrities but also of personages whose values are admirable. Thought of stars leads to the appropriate closing salute to Orion, the symbol of that strength and skill which create the beauty Moore finds in expert performance whether in the arena or on the page. The techniques in “Baseball and Writing” are much the same as those in “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese.” But Moore was deliberately more topical in the poem written for publication at the height of a World Series fever, and the allusions in it to players now half-forgotten are something of a chore for the reader to master. In “Baseball and Writing,” in contrast, the topical allusions, though sufficient to ground the poem in particulars, hardly matter to the “story.”
In the prose passage “A Burning Desire to Be Explicit” Moore cited her poem “To Victor Hugo of My Crow Pluto” as an example of narrative meant to make a practical observation, rather than to make an abstract point: the crow was a real one, not a symbol or a merely generalized bird. In Tell Me, Tell Me she printed before this poem the two-and-a-half-page prose commentary “My Crow, Pluto—a Fantasy.” The passage tells how Pluto, a crow who lived in a park about a block from Moore's Brooklyn apartment, adopted her, bringing her trophies and eating food she herself liked. Moore defends crows as useful birds, comments amusingly on his feeding, and on his fondness for her desk and typewriter, and reports that she eventually set him free in the Connecticut woods. Though the prose speaks of the poem as a “two-syllable-line, two-line stanza,” Moore in fact has from two to five syllables per line; most readers will see it as a jeu d'esprit. The “fantasy” of the title seems to mean only that keeping the bird about her for some weeks or months was an entertaining but impractical act: he belonged, she observes, in the wilds where she eventually released him.
Though it is as playful as the prose, the poem intimates a theme of salvation as it remarks that the speaker released the bird because it had even when walking the look of one who wears wings. The tone is affectionate; the verse makes use of a short line, includes much alliteration and repetition of such sounds as “tuttuto / vagabondo,” and thymes throughout on u and o sounds. (In the essay Moore says that she addressed the bird alternately as Plato or Pluto, depending on the vowel sounds in preceding words.) All this works together to give comic effect. This effect is heightened by use of “esperanto madinusa,” much of the last two thirds of the poem being in this idiom that, the essay says, she used in talking to the bird; she furnishes with the poem a word list for “those who might not resent” it.
She tells us with mock seriousness for four of the brief stanzas that the crow is a “true Plato” because he meets Victor Hugo's description as a creature that always seems to possess talents superior to those an unimaginative observer of its pigeon-toed walk might see. The poet recognized the bird's ability to speak and, as she remarks in the essay, his competence at petty thievery. These talents presumably made him worth money to her, but she declares that she lives in the belief that profit is a deadweight; she refuses to profit from her avian friend. Thus, though the bird was a jewel to her, she recognized his essential nature as a free spirit and let him go. The poem is another of Moore's expressions of the need to recognize spirit beneath appearances. It is also, unfortunately, one of Moore's infrequent lapses into doggerel.
The title of “Rescue with Yul Brynner” and the note of explanation that the actor was a special consultant to a United Nations commissioner of refugees direct us to see the poem as yet another exploration of the themes of refuge and rescue. As often, Moore begins indirectly, here with praise of the Budapest Symphony and shamefaced remarks on how as “too slow a grower” she did not recognize the difficulties the orchestra worked under when its members were displaced. In the ninth line the poem jumps abruptly to direct comments upon the number of refugees adrift after World War II, the kindness of Canadians who agreed to accept some who were not in good health, and the virtues of Brynner as a visitor to the refugee camps. Allusions to Brynner's guitar and his cloth cap and to his conversations with refugees come from the pictures and text of his book Bring Forth the Children (1960); references to him as regal allude to his starring role in the play The King and I.
Though flying from camp to camp like a bird, Brynner, the poem says, was not “feathering himself” but instead was showing sincere concern with the plight of the war victims. Picturing him as “twin” to a dancer in The King and I and in the moving picture based on it, and thus an enchanter, the poem moves in the last stanza first to a series of staccato notations of his behavior on his inspection trip, then to a contrast between the reality he dealt with in the refugee camps and the glamor of the palace in the drama, and finally to lines praising his deeds as a Christian by punning on the similarity between his first name and the term Yule for the Christmas season. In his actions, he had become now a true king, not just a theatrical one; and he was truly Christian in behavior, not just a man whose name had accidental similarity to a term for the season of Christ's birth. One must add that there is more admiration than poetry in this piece, though it is a heartfelt tribute.
Salvation is also the theme in “Carnegie Hall: Rescued,” a poem exulting in the success of the campaign to save New York's famous concert hall from the wrecking crews. This poem draws on a New Yorker magazine account of efforts by Isaac Stern, the renowned violinist, to save the hall; but the material, including some of that in quotation marks, is Moore's own. The poem honors Stern in various ways. Since his name in German means “star,” she hails him as “Mr. Star.” She also refers to him as Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who supposedly went about with a lantern hunting amongst his fellow citizens for one honest man. She makes the appellation “Saint Diogenes,” the “Saint” of course being an honorific. The second stanza, in remarking that the hall “became (becomes)” a “stronghold” for music, seems to be referring to the fact that that hall had long served that function and now will do so again. Perhaps it also suggests the secondary meaning of “becomes”—the hall, though graceless enough, has by long use come to be almost a shrine, and thus a becoming partner to the artistry it houses. The poem's instruction to stress the “ne” in “Carnegie” is properly playful, and wittily parallels the emphasis on music. Also appropriately informal, as a song of exultant triumph may well be, are allusions to the founder as “Andrew C.” and to one of the men who helped save the hall, Frederick W. Richmond, as “Mr. R.” Their work, we are told, has staved off the menace of realestate developers who are left cowering like newborn infants.
Stanzas 6 and 7 comment that those who demolish worthwhile architectural “glory” are as wrong as the Venetian who did not obey his city's instructions to garb himself decorously in order to present a proper pattern for children to follow. Mentioning a French writer's statement that in youth he dreamed of glory, the poem asks if we must put references to this quality in the past tense; does not that dream find expression in the “glittering” triumph of the campaign to save Carnegie Hall? That musicians have continued to use the hall demonstrates the need for it. This brings up the thought of the praises that “dog” the performer, introducing once again the idea of Diogenes (who is said to have once remarked sarcastically that his title was “dog”). The poem ends with praise of the “glittering” violinist as one who came to the rescue “as if you'd heard yourself performing”—a remark meant not as an implication that the violinist is egotistic, but as an assertion that Stern devoted his full energies to the campaign, as might a man who had strong self-interest.
Salvation takes various guises. How the poet who believes in need for self-discipline and restraint may avoid self-centeredness that would lead her to violate unity of expression is the problem of “Tell Me, Tell Me.” Excessive individualism may lead one to “obliterate continuity,” to “set / flatness on some cindery pinnacle.” Thought of a pinnacle leads to the memory of a diamond rosette that appeared, because of its geometric workmanship, to be the product of a “passion for the particular” suited to a Henry James or to a Beatrix Potter. In such a passion, we discover, lies the “refuge” from egocentricity. We may recall that egocentricity means not only ordinary self-centeredness but also the belief that things exist only in the mind, a belief from which particularism will save one. Faith in the existence of a realm of spirit does not for Moore deny existence of a realm of “objects.”
Joint allusion to James and to Miss Potter is a playful but not merely antic conjunction. The third stanza quotes from James's autobiography about what he termed the “wholesome” avoidance of excessively “literal” elements in his education. Moore uses his phrases in lines describing the mice of Miss Potter's story of the tailor of Gloucester. The tailor, charged with the duty of cutting a coat for the mayor, despite weariness, cut the pieces for a masterpiece (of cerise, we are reminded—a color reminiscent of the diamond rosette). He was unable to complete the work because he fell ill, but the mice he had saved from his cat finished it for him. The tailor thus was “rescued” from poverty and despair, and we recall the cry for refuge that opened the poem as Moore announces in the fourth stanza that she is going “to flee.”
She will do this by “engineering strategy”; but ironic reference to such strategy as “the viper's traffic-knot” seems to imply that, like the viper in Aesop's tale who injured himself by his own bite, traffic engineers have only helped knot up the flow of vehicles. What she would flee to are “metaphysical” delights. The way to this refuge, it appears, lies not only in clinging to particulars of experience; it also lies in that silence Moore admires. Might one tell himself, she asks, to hush up? At first she suggests this request might be in French, and playfully puns on R.S.V.P.; but she then turns serious to remark that courtesy hardly makes sense to one who seriously needs to escape from “verbal ferocity.” This latter phrase is an apt summation of the faults she suggested in the first stanza; but she avoids letting it serve as climax by attaching with a semicolon the remark that she is “perplexed.”
The puzzlement, we deduce, is over how to remain free from egocentricity; the proper strategy, she now recognizes, is “deference”—a word she first quotes to show its status as an ideal and then uses without quotation marks to indicate acceptance of it as a practical tactic. Useful deference, one that defends, requires respect for the particulars of experience and a willingness to present one's response to these particulars—a poem—without the “verbal ferocity” aroused by “egocentricity.”
Playfully conceding that there may be difficulty in following her shifts of thought, Moore presents the final stanza in the guise of an appended précis. It is in actuality a conclusion growing directly out of the materials. Because she is in a plight somewhat analogous to that of Miss Potter's tailor, the poem in making use of his experience is biographical. The tale of the tailor “ended captivity,” she tells us, in “two senses.” As an event, it released the tailor from despair; as a story, it by its example “rescued” one reader—the poet herself—from “being driven mad by a scold.” The tailor was concerned not so much about his own health as about his commission. Reading of him caused her to focus on her work and thus saved her from herself—from the faults of egocentricity.
“Saint Valentine,” another of the less-than-wholly-serious poems of Moore's late career, suggests that tokens distributed as valentines should have names beginning with V. After giving possible examples, it concludes that verse would indeed be appropriate. Yet, it adds, a merely written valentine is only as the vintage to the vine: as the vine is the origin of the grape and its wine, so love is the motive for the valentine. Valentine verse, then, might “confuse itself with fate,” might, as a sign of love, be a declaration of one's destiny. In Tell Me, Tell Me the poem is followed by the three-page prose statement “Subject, Predicate, Object.” This passage gives certain of Moore's preferences in style and technique and some of her attitudes toward verse-writing. The remarks make it obvious that one of her fundamental drives—perhaps the fundamental one—was great delight in use of words.
The concluding poem in Tell Me, Tell Me is “Sun,” a piece that first appeared in 1916 as “Fear Is Hope”; reprinting of it indicates that Moore still agreed with its point—and suggests caution in attempts to divide her work into neat periods. The theme in “Sun” is spiritual resurrection. Quoting John Skelton's “Upon a Dead Man's Head,” that no one may hide from death, the poem says that this “truth” is not adequate for “us”—for us of freer faith, perhaps, but also for all who want death to bring with it a purification. The poem then turns to address the sun, recalling its function as an emblem of Christ's resurrection and hailing it as a splendor from the Orient, a “fiery topaz” that shone through the hand of one who tried to quench it. It is here to stay, we are told, and the second stanza declares in a vivid figure that “holiday” (derived from “holy day,” we recall) and “day of wrath” shall be one because together
… wound in a device
of Moorish gorgeousness, round glasses spun
to flame as hemispheres of one
great hour-glass dwindling to a stem. …
All time, and all times, that is, will be mystically one under the knowledge of the meaning of resurrection. The poem ends with an appeal to the sun to blaze against disbelief, to conquer the “insurgent” who do not as yet accept belief. Moore's typical poem has wit and intensity presented as thoughtful meditation, often as a carefully worked out progression-by-juxtaposition. But in “Sun” her stance is appropriately lyrical.
LAST POEMS
The 1981 Complete Poems ends with nine poems under the heading “Hitherto Uncollected,” and five of the translations from La Fontaine. The nine “uncollected” poems are chosen from the sixteen that Craig S. Abbott's Bibliography lists as appearing from 1960 through 1970. The first of the nine, “Avec Ardeur,” salutes “gusto”—here given the French designation “ardeur” (that Moore valued the expression “Sentir avec ardeur” [to feel with ardor] appears in both “In Lieu of the Lyre” and “Tom Fool at Jamaica”). The poem was first printed in 1962 as “Occasionem cognosce” (an opportunity for learning), later as “I've Been Thinking,” and finally with its present title and an added dedication to Ezra Pound (who had translated the French poem from which Moore borrows the expression “Avec Ardeur” and who had of course supported her throughout her career).1 The speaker remarks playfully on certain word choices and combinations that Moore would avoid; she concedes ruefully, however, that she is still trapped by such “word diseases.” A second set of remarks is on the matter of quantity in verse. The speaker concludes that such comments are “not verse” but that she is at least sure of one principle: that nothing mundane is divine and nothing divine is mundane. Moore, it appears, was reaffirming the principle that real toads must inhabit imaginary gardens.
“Love in America—” declares that the passion for love should be engulfing the country, and should be sustained not as the Minotaur was—the monster of Greek legendry was fed a maiden every year—but by “tenderness.” This quality comes from the person who is noble in action and neither too proud nor too self-effacing. These rather flat remarks conclude with a line that repeats the word “Yes” four times, the last time in italics—an attempt at giving a bit of ardeur to a statement that is essentially prosaic.
“Tippoo's Tiger” tells of a sultan in eighteenth-century India whose luxuries were (as Elizabeth Phillips has observed) as grossly resplendent as those of the aristocrats in “The Jerboa.”2 Among his possessions was a “curious automaton,” a device showing a man killed by a tiger as miniature organ pipes give off inhuman groans. The automaton and the rest of the ruler's possessions were taken by the conquering British. Understanding of this incident's significance awaits “a tiger-hearted bard,” the poem's ending observes. The speaker, however, will give one conclusion, the morally triumphant assertion that the great losses Tippoo imposed on the British cannot make up for the loss of his own life in the struggle. Phillips applies the moral to U. S. conduct in the Vietnam war. There is no need to make so specific an application: Tippoo may represent any authority figure who rides the tiger of greed until it turns on and devours him.
Moore's prominence and the public perception of her as a nature poet because of her fondness for animals led her to a leading role in the effort to preserve the tree saluted in “The Camperdown Elm.” The tree, planted in Prospect Park in Brooklyn in 1872, draws the speaker's praise as one that causes her to think of poets and painters of the past and of the trees of Paris. (The verse appeal had one unusual recognition: the New York City Department of Parks published it as a leaflet in 1968). “Mercifully” is intended as a graceful salute to the power of music to make the speaker forget disgust at the pretentious and the impercipient; the ending lines, however, are a bit thorny, avoiding danger of relaxation into too easy a rhythm but becoming awkward.
“Reminiscent of a Wave at the Curl” reminds us that Moore preferred direct assertion of the observable to the large abstraction, citing possible grand comments on the playful warfare between two kittens and then noting that the “expert” would say only “Rather hard on the fur.” As she would avoid the pretentious and the abstract, so Moore would avoid controversy and the choleric: in “Enough” her speaker avers that to stand for truth is “enough,” is all one is obliged to do. There is no requirement, it appears, that we argue with, or go out of our way to tolerate, bad taste and pestering. One who stands for truth will exercise discretion, the quality Moore's speaker finds illustrated in the painting by Magritte that is discussed in the poem “The Magician's Retreat.” The painting shows a small house or hut at night with a “yellow glow” showing through a shutter and a blue glow from a lamp over the front door; the scene is complete in itself, is “consummately plain”—an example of the unpretentious reality, the “silence,” that Moore favored. But this, of course, is not quite enough: the painting also shows rising behind the hut a “black tree mass” that, though larger than the street scene and done with “definiteness,” is “above all” (a pun here) discreet. The tree mass gives a necessary suggestion that there is more in experience than the works of mankind, but this element is nevertheless not to overwhelm. Discretion suggests, it appears, a balancing of elements.
“Prevalent at One Time,” separately published in the fall of 1970, was the last of Moore's verse to appear during her lifetime. Perhaps because it comes at the end of Complete Poems it is tempting to read into it strong significance. And it does, in fact, support a reading that sees it as a declaration of the “insouciance” Moore admired. The speaker declares that she has always desired a gig, a light horse-drawn carriage for one person, and also a tiger-skin rug for her dog—“the whole thing,” meaning both gig and rug, one assumes, to be “glossy black”—perhaps the expected color for a gig but certainly not for such a rug. She, the speaker concludes, is “no hypochondriac.” One gathers that Moore's speaker has in mind the approach of death, symbolized by blackness, and is declaring that she does not fear it.
Notes
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Willis, Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse, 88-89.
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Elizabeth Phillips, Marianne Moore (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), 221.
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Nonchalances of the Mind
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