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Title: Poems

Author: Marianne Moore

Release date: August 3, 2020 [eBook #62833]

Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Paul Marshall, Tim Lindell and the Online

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

POEMS

BY MARIANNE MOORE

LONDON

THE EGOIST PRESS

2 Robert Street, Adelphi, W.C.

1921

Several of these poems appeared in THE EGOIST;

others in THE DIAL, OTHERS and CONTACT.

CONTENTS

PEDANTIC LITERALIST

5

TO A STEAM ROLLER

6

DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT

6

THOSE VARIOUS SCALPELS

7

FEED ME, ALSO, RIVER GOD,

8

TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ON TAGORE

8

HE MADE THIS SCREEN

9

TALISMAN

9

BLACK EARTH

10

“HE WROTE THE HISTORY BOOK,” IT SAID

12

YOU ARE LIKE THE REALISTIC PRODUCT OF AN IDEALISTIC

SEARCH FOR GOLD AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW

12

REINFORCEMENTS

13

ROSES ONLY

13

IN THIS AGE OF HARD TRYING NONCHALANCE IS GOOD, AND

14

THE FISH

14

MY APISH COUSINS

16

WHEN I BUY PICTURES

17

PICKING AND CHOOSING

18

ENGLAND

19

DOCK RATS

20

RADICAL

21

POETRY

22

IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR

23

IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH?

24

POEMS

BY MARIANNE MOORE

PEDANTIC LITERALIST

Prince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost,

white torch—“with pow’r to say unkind

things with kindness, and the most

irritating things in the midst of love and

tears,” you invite destruction.

You are like the meditative man

with the perfunctory heart; its

carved cordiality ran

to and fro at first, like an inlaid and roy’l

immutable production;

then afterward “neglected to be

painful” and “deluded him with

loitering formality,

doing its duty as if it did it not,”

presenting an obstruction

to the motive that it served. What stood

erect in you, has withered. A

little “palm-tree of turned wood”

informs your once spontaneous core in its

immutable reduction.

TO A STEAM ROLLER

The illustration

is nothing to you without the application.

You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down

into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

Sparkling chips of rock

are crushed down to the level of the parent block.

Were not “impersonal judgment in æsthetic

matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you

might fairly achieve

it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive

of one’s attending upon you, but to question

the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS

PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT

With an elephant to ride upon—“with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,”

she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes.

Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose

in the shape of an elephant, she clambered up and chose

to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows

that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows

of æsthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those

tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose

them ephemera, and have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows,

which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios.

THOSE VARIOUS SCALPELS

Those

various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled

echoes

struck from thin glass successively at random—the

inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two

fighting-cocks head to head in stone—like sculptured

scimitars re-

peating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes,

flowers of ice

and

snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled

ships: your raised hand

an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes

of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux, with

regard to which guides are so affirmative:

your other hand

a

bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from

Persia

and the fractional magnificence of Florentine

goldwork—a collection of half a dozen little objects

made fine

with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue: a lemon, a

pear

and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a

magnificent square

cathedral of uniform

and at the same time, diverse appearance—a species of

vertical vineyard rustling in the storm

of conventional opinion. Are they weapons or scalpels?

Whetted

to

brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which

is su-

perior to opportunity, these things are rich

instruments with which to experiment but surgery is

not tentative: why dissect destiny with instruments

which

are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny

itself?

FEED ME, ALSO, RIVER GOD,

lest by diminished vitality and abated

vigilance, I become food for crocodiles—for that quicksand

of gluttony which is legion. It is there—close at hand—

on either side

of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride

and stoutness of heart: “The bricks are fallen down, we will

build with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down, we will change to

cedars”? I am not ambitious to dress stones, to renew

forts, nor to match

my value in action, against their ability to catch

up with arrested prosperity. I am not like

them, indefatigable, but if you are a god you will

not discriminate against me. Yet—if you may fulfil

none but prayers dressed

as gifts in return for your gifts—disregard the request.

TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ON TAGORE

It is made clear by the phrase,

even the mood—by virtue of which he says

the thing he thinks—that it pays,

to cut gems even in these conscience-less days;

but the jewel that always

outshines ordinary jewels, is your praise.

HE MADE THIS SCREEN

not of silver nor of coral,

but of weatherbeaten laurel.

Here, he introduced a sea

uniform like tapestry;

here, a fig-tree; there, a face;

there, a dragon circling space—

designating here, a bower;

there, a pointed passion-flower.

TALISMAN

Under a splintered mast,

torn from ship and cast

near her hull,

a stumbling shepherd found

embedded in the ground,

a sea-gull

of lapis lazuli,

a scarab of the sea,

with wings spread—

curling its coral feet,

parting its beak to greet

men long dead.

BLACK EARTH

Openly, yes,

with the naturalness

of the hippopotamus or the alligator

when it climbs out on the bank to experience the

sun, I do these

things which I do, which please

no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-

merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

in view was a

renaissance; shall I say

the contrary? The sediment of the river which

encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used

to it, it may

remain there; do away

with it and I am myself done away with, for the

patina of circumstance can but enrich what was

there to begin

with. This elephant skin

which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of

the coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light

can filter—cut

into checkers by rut

upon rut of unpreventable experience—

it is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the

hairy toed. Black

but beautiful, my back

is full of the history of power. Of power? What

is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never

be cut into

by a wooden spear; through-

out childhood to the present time, the unity of

life and death has been expressed by the circumference

described by my

trunk; nevertheless, I

perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after

all; and I am on my guard; external poise, it

has its centre

well nurtured—we know

where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where?

My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of

the wind. I see

and I hear, unlike the

wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made

to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear;

that tree trunk without

roots, accustomed to shout

its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact

by who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that

spiritual

brother to the coral

plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light

becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to

the I of each,

a kind of fretful speech

which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?

Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that

phenomenon

the above formation,

translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely—

that on which darts cannot strike decisively the first

time, a substance

needful as an instance

of the indestructibility of matter; it

has looked at the electricity and at the earth-

quake and is still

here; the name means thick. Will

depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no

beautiful element of unreason under it?

“HE WROTE THE HISTORY BOOK,” IT SAID

There! You shed a ray

of whimsicality on a mask of profundity so

terrific that I have been dumbfounded by

it oftener than I care to say.

The book? Titles are chaff.

Authentically

brief and full of energy, you contribute to your father’s

legibility and are sufficiently

synthetic. Thank you for showing me

your father’s autograph.

YOU ARE LIKE THE REALISTIC PRODUCT

OF AN IDEALISTIC SEARCH FOR GOLD

AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW

Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape vine,

twine

your anatomy

round the pruned and polished stem,

chameleon.

Fire laid upon

an emerald as long as

the Dark King’s massy

one,

could not snap the spectrum up for food as you have done.

REINFORCEMENTS

The vestibule to experience is not to

be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are going

to their work with this idea, advancing like a school of fish through

still water—waiting to change the course or dismiss

the idea of movement, till forced to. The words of the Greeks

ring in our ears, but they are vain in comparison with a sight like this.

The pulse of intention does not move so that one

can see it, and moral machinery is not labelled, but

the future of time is determined by the power of volition.

ROSES ONLY

You do not seem to realise that beauty is a liability rather than

an asset—that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in

supposing

that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp,

conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking for everything

self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilisation might produce: for you, unaided to attempt through sheer

reserve, to confute presumptions resulting from observation, is idle. You

cannot make us

think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it

is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence.

You would look, minus

thorns—like a what-is-this, a mere

peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew

but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without

co-ordination? Guarding the

infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to

the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too

violently,

your thorns are the best part of you.

IN THIS AGE OF HARD TRYING

NONCHALANCE IS GOOD, AND

really, it is not the

business of the gods to bake clay pots. They did not

do it in this instance. A few

revolved upon the axes of their worth

as if excessive popularity might be a pot;

they did not venture the

profession of humility. The polished wedge

that might have split the firmament

was dumb. At last it threw itself away

and falling down, conferred on some poor fool, a privilege.

Taller by the length of

a conversation of five hundred years than all

the others, there was one, whose tales

of what could never have been actual—

were better than the haggish, uncompanionable drawl

of certitude; his by-

play was more terrible in its effectiveness

than the fiercest frontal attack.

The staff, the bag, the feigned inconsequence

of manner, best bespeak that weapon, self protectiveness.

THE FISH

wade

through black jade.

Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one

keeps

adjusting the ash heaps;

opening and shutting itself like

an

injured fan.

The barnacles which encrust the

side

of the wave, cannot hide

there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,

split like spun

glass, move themselves with spotlike swift-

ness

into the crevices—

in and out, illuminating

the

turquoise sea

of bodies. The water drives a

wedge

of iron through the iron edge

of the cliff, whereupon the stars,

pink

rice grains, ink

bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like

green

lilies and submarine

toadstools, slide each on the other.

All

external

marks of abuse are present on

this

defiant edifice—

all the physical features of

ac-

cident—lack

of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns

and

hatchet strokes, these things stand

out on it; the chasm side is

dead.

Repeated

evidence has proved that it can

live

on what cannot revive

its youth. The sea grows old in it.

MY APISH COUSINS

winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras, supreme in

their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin

and strictly practical appendages

were there, the small cats and the parrakeet—

trivial and humdrum on examination, destroying

bark and portions of the food it could not eat.

I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent

than it is dim. It is difficult to recall the ornament,

speech, and precise manner of what one might

call the minor acquaintances twenty

years back; but I shall never forget—that Gilgamesh among

the hairy carnivora—that cat with the

wedge-shaped, slate-gray marks on its forelegs and the resolute tail,

astringently remarking: “They have imposed on us with their pale,

half fledged protestations, trembling about

in inarticulate frenzy, saying

it is not for all of us to understand art, finding it

all so difficult, examining the thing

as if it were something inconceivably arcanic, as

symmetrically frigid as something carved out of chrysopras

or marble—strict with tension, malignant

in its power over us and deeper

than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp,

rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber and fur.”

WHEN I BUY PICTURES

or what is closer to the truth, when I look at

that of which I may regard myself as the

imaginary possessor, I fix upon that which would

give me pleasure in my average moments: the satire upon curiosity,

in which no more is discernible than the intensity of the mood;

or quite the opposite—the old thing, the medi-

æval decorated hat box, in which there

are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass

and deer, both white and brown, and birds and seated people; it may be no

more than a square

of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps—in letters stand-

ing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;

or that which is better without words, which means

just as much or just as little as it is understood to

mean by the observer—the grave of Adam, prefigured by himself; a bed of

beans

or artichokes in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hiero—

glyphic in three parts; it may be anything. Too

stern an intellectual emphasis, i-

ronic or other—upon this quality or that, detracts

from one’s enjoyment; it must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the

approved tri-

umph easily be honoured—that which is great because something else

is small.

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is, it

must make known the fact that it has been displayed

to acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it;

and it must admit that it is the work of X, if X produced it; of Y, if made

by Y. It must be a voluntary gift with the name written on it.

PICKING AND CHOOSING

Literature is a phase of life: if

one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if

one approaches it familiarly,

what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive

when they are true; the opaque allusion—the simulated flight

upward—accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact

that Shaw is selfconscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re-

warding? that James is all that has been

said of him but is not profound? It is not Hardy

the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man

“interpreting life through the medium of the

emotions.” If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the

critic should know what he likes. Gordon

Craig with his “this is I” and “this is mine,” with his three

wise men, his “sad French greens” and his Chinese cherries—Gordon Craig, so

inclinational and unashamed—has carried

the precept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And Burke is a

psychologist—of acute, raccoon-

like curiosity. Summa diligentia;

to the humbug, whose name is so amusing—very young and ve-

ry rushed, Cæsar crossed the Alps on the “top of a

diligence.” We are not daft about the meaning but this familiarity

with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming-

bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.

Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying

that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;

only the most rudimentary sort of behaviour is necessary

to put us on the scent; a “right good

salvo of barks,” a few “strong wrinkles” puckering the

skin between the ears, are all we ask.

ENGLAND

with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral;

with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the

criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal

shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been

extracted; and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions:

and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly” in

whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally

one’s

object—substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional

shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,

all of museum quality: and America where there

is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the

street in the north; where there are no proof readers, no silkworms,

no digressions;

the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country—in which

letters are written

not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand

but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter “a” in psalm

and calm when

pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very noticeable but

why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the

fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools

which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of mettlesomeness

which may be

mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no con-

clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to have confessed

that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom

of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed

in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able

to say, “I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fish than

I do,”—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi-

ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine

that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.

DOCK RATS

There are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily

as we do—who seem to feel that it is a good place to come

home to. On what a river; wide—twinkling like a chopped sea under some

of the finest shipping in the

world: the square-rigged four-master, the liner, the battleship, like the two-

thirds submerged section of an iceberg; the tug—strong moving thing,

dipping and pushing, the bell striking as it comes; the steam yacht, lying

like a new made arrow on the

stream; the ferry-boat—a head assigned, one to each compartment, making

a row of chessmen set for play. When the wind is from the east,

the smell is of apples; of hay, the aroma increased and decreased

suddenly as the wind changes;

of rope; of mountain leaves for florists. When it is from the west, it is

an elixir. There is occasionally a parrakeet

arrived from Brazil, clasping and clawing; or a monkey—tail and feet

in readiness for an over-

ture. All palms and tail; how delightful! There is the sea, moving the bulk-

head with its horse strength; and the multiplicity of rudders

and propellers; the signals, shrill, questioning, peremptory, diverse;

the wharf cats and the barge dogs—it

is easy to overestimate the value of such things. One does

not live in such a place from motives of expediency

but because to one who has been accustomed to it, shipping is the

most congenial thing in the world.

RADICAL

Tapering

to a point, conserving everything,

this carrot is predefined to be thick.

The world is

but a circumstance, a mis-

erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition,

imagination, outgrowth,

nutriment,

with everything crammed belligerent-

ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon-

opoly—

a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the

secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat

to the color of the set-

ting sun and

stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand-

ing still and turning to look back at it—

as much as

to say my happiest moment has

been funereal in comparison with this, the con-

ditions of life pre-

determined

slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For

it? Dismiss

agrarian lore; it tells him this:

that which it is impossible to force, it is

impossible to hinder.

POETRY

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there

is in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the

same thing may be said for all of us—that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand. The bat,

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea,

the base-

ball fan, the statistician—case after case

could be cited did

one wish it; nor is it valid

to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not

poetry,

nor till the autocrats among us can be

“literalists of

the imagination”—above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion—

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is, on the other hand,

genuine then you are interested in poetry.

IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR

not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam

was alone; when there was no smoke and color was

fine, not with the fineness of

early civilization art but by virtue

of its originality, with nothing to modify it but the

mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia-

tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and

to account for: it is no

longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band

of incandescence that was color, keep its stripe: it also is one of

those things into which much that is peculiar can be

read; complexity is not a crime but carry

it to the point of murki-

ness and nothing is plain. A complexity

moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting it-

self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a-

bout as if to bewilder with the dismal

fallacy that insistence

is the measure of achievement and that all

truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-

ways has been—at the antipodes from the init-

ial great truths. “Part of it was crawling, part of it

was about to crawl, the rest

was torpid in its lair.” In the short legged, fit-

ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiæ—we have the classic

multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo

Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.

Know that it will be there when it says:

“I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”

IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH?

Why so desolate?

And why multiply

in phantasmagoria about fishes,

what disgusts you? Could

not all personal upheaval in

the name of freedom, be tabood?

Is it Nineveh

and are you Jonah

in the sweltering east wind of your wishes?

I, myself have stood

there by the aquarium, looking

at the Statue of Liberty.

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

Transcriber’s Notes:

Typographical errors have been silently corrected.

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Table of Contents

POEMS

PEDANTIC LITERALIST

TO A STEAM ROLLER

DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT

THOSE VARIOUS SCALPELS

FEED ME, ALSO, RIVER GOD,

TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ON TAGORE

HE MADE THIS SCREEN

TALISMAN

BLACK EARTH

“HE WROTE THE HISTORY BOOK,” IT SAID

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

REINFORCEMENTS

ROSES ONLY

IN THIS AGE OF HARD TRYING NONCHALANCE IS GOOD, AND

THE FISH

MY APISH COUSINS

WHEN I BUY PICTURES

PICKING AND CHOOSING

ENGLAND

DOCK RATS

RADICAL

POETRY

IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR

IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH?

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE