Prose (46 page)

As We Like It
Miss Moore and the Delight of Imitation

As far as I know, Miss Marianne Moore is The World's Greatest Living Observer. The English language is fortunate in occasionally falling heir to such feats of description, say, as this, of lightning:

Flashes lacing two clouds above or the cloud and the earth started upon the eyes in live veins of rincing or riddling liquid white, inched and jagged as if it were the shivering of a bright riband string which had once been kept bound round a blade and danced back into its pleatings.

Or this:

Drops of rain hanging on nails etc. seen with only the lower rim lighted like nails (of fingers).

But they are prose and by Hopkins, and he is dead. Of course Hopkins occasionally did introduce instances of equally startling accuracy into his poetry with such lines as,

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple

Bloom lights the orchard apple …

Or, to quote something approaching nearer Miss Moore's special provinces, the

Star-eyed strawberry breasted

Throstle …

and the famous

rose-moles all in stipple upon trout …

But Miss Moore has bettered these over and over again, and keeps right on doing it.

    The firs stand in a procession, each with an

emerald turkey-foot at the top …

                                    the blades of the oars

moving together like the feet of water-spiders …

                                                 The East with its

                           snails, its emotional

                           shorthand …

Peter, her immortal cat, with his

                       small tufts of fronds

or katydid legs above each eye.

and

the shadbones regularly set about his mouth, to droop or rise in unison like the porcupine's quills …

The swan

with flamingo-colored, maple

leaflike feet.

and the lizard,

                                         stiff,

and somewhat heavy, like fresh putty on the hand.

These things make even our greatest poet, when he attempts something like them, appear full of preconceived notions and over-sentimental. A wounded deer has been abandoned by his “velvet friends.” And Shakespeare is supposed to have been familiar with deer.

The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round tears

Cours'd one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase …

As You Like It

I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous. Even the best
trompe-l'oeil
paintings lack it, but I have experienced it in listening to the noise made by a four year old child who could imitate exactly the sound of the water running out of his bath. Long, fine, thorough passages of descriptive prose fail to produce it, but sometimes animal or bird masks at the Museums of Natural History give one (as the dances that once went with them might have been able to do) the same immediacy of identification one feels on reading about Miss Moore's

Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying that you have a badger

or the butterfly that

                                              flies off

diminishing like wreckage on the sea,

    rising and falling easily.

Does it come simply from her gift of being able to give herself up entirely to the object under contemplation, to feel in all sincerity how it is to be
it
? From whatever this pleasure may be derived, it is certainly one of the greatest the work of Miss Moore gives us.

Sometimes in her poetry such instances “go on” so that there seems almost to be a compulsion to this kind of imitation. The poems seem to say, “These things exist to be loved and honored and we
must,
” and perhaps the sense of duty shows through a little plainly.

Did he not moralize this spectacle?

O yes, into a thousand similes.

As You Like It

And although the tone is frequently light or ironic the total effect is of such a ritualistic solemnity that I feel in reading her one should constantly bear in mind the secondary and frequently sombre meaning of the title of her first book:
Observations.

Miss Moore and Edgar Allan Poe

In the poem “Elephants,” after five stanzas of beautiful description of the elephant and his mahout, Miss Moore suddenly breaks off and remarks in rhetorical disgust,

As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at

much unease

thereby giving dramatic expression to one of the problems of descriptive poetry, although actually she has only used “as if” once, so far. It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things, even though there seems to be no help for it. But it may be noticed that although full of similes, and such brilliant ones that she should never feel the necessity of complaining, she uses metaphor rather sparingly and obliquely. In Poe's “Philosophy of Composition” he points out that it is not until the last two stanzas of “The Raven” that he permits himself the use of any metaphorical expression:

Take thy beak from out
my heart,
and take thy form from off my door!

and

And my soul
from out that shadow
that lies floating on the floor.

and then says that such expressions “dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated.” He has already stressed the importance of avoiding “the excess of the suggested meaning,” and said that metaphor is a device that must be very carefully employed. Miss Moore does employ it carefully and it is one of the qualities that gives her poetry its steady aura of both reserve and having possibly more meanings, in reserve. Another result is that the metaphor, when used, carries a long way, reverberating like her “pulsation of lighthouse and noise of bell-buoys.…”

Miss Moore has said in conversation that she has been influenced by Poe's prose, and although it should not be pushed too far, an interesting study could be made of several points of comparison. Miss Moore and Poe are our two most original writers and one feels that Miss Moore would cheerfully subscribe to Poe's remark on Originality: “The extent to which this has been neglected in versification is one of the most unaccountable things in the world,” and his painful edict that “In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation,” and also that it is greatly assisted by “an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.”

In fact, although it might have surprised him, one might almost say that in some respects Miss Moore is Poe's Ideal Poet, the one he was unable to be himself.

Poe in his prose and Miss Moore in her verse strike a tone of complete truth-telling that is compelling and rare,—Miss Moore's being so strong as to lend veracity to her slightest comment, inducing such confidence that for years I even believed her when she said,

Dürer would have seen a reason for living

    in a town like this, with eight stranded whales

to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house.

I can imagine her writing Poe's “Chessplayer” in verse, and I can imagine Poe writing parts of “The Hero,” with its melancholy, repeated
o
's, and

Where the ground is sour; where there are

weeds of beanstalk height,

snakes' hypodermic teeth, or

the wind brings the “scarebabe voice”

from the neglected yew set with

the semi-precious cat's eyes of the owl.

They both take delight in their wide reading and in sharing it, and both are capable of making something unexpected and amusing out of the footnote, that usually unsmiling paragraph.

And both are virtuosi, Miss Moore, of course, to a much higher degree. I do not want to go into problems of versification and shall simply say that the more one reads Miss Moore the more one is inclined to give up such problems and merely exclaim, “How does she do it!” She is able to develop some completely “natural” idea with so many graces and effects of hesitation and changes of mood and pace that one is reminded of what little one knows of the peculiarities of Oriental music. This constant high level of technical skill must cost her incredible effort, although one is rarely aware of it; but what may be an effort for her would for most poets be an impossibility.

Sometimes I have thought that her individual verse forms, or “mannerisms” as they might be called, may have developed as much from a sense of modesty as from the demands of artistic expression; that actually she may be somewhat embarrassed by her own precocity and sensibilities and that her varied verse forms and rhyme schemes and syllabic logarithms are all a form of apology, are saying, “It really isn't as easy for me as I'm afraid you may think it is.” The precocious child is often embarrassed by his own understanding and is capable of going to great lengths to act his part as a child properly; one feels that Miss Moore sometimes has to make things difficult for herself as a sort of
noblesse oblige,
or self-imposed taxation to keep everything “fair” in the world of poetry.

Miss Moore and Zoography

This same willingness to do things in such a way as not to show off, not to be superior, is shown in Miss Moore's amazingly uncondescending feeling for animals. A great deal has been said in the last twenty years about how authors should not condescend to their working class or peasant characters, and the difficulties standing in the way of honesty in such a relationship have been explained and explained. Surely it is also very hard to write about animals without “pastoralizing” them, as William Empson might say, or drawing false analogies.

Come, shall we go and kill us venison?

And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,

Being native burghers of this desert city,

Should, in their own confines, with forked heads

Have their round haunches gor'd.

As You Like It

It was perhaps consoling and popular to think that the animals were just like the citizenry, but how untrue, and one feels Miss Moore would feel, how selfish. There are morals a'plenty in animal life, but they have to be studied out by devotedly and minutely observing the animal, not by regarding the deer as a man imprisoned in a “leathern coat.”

Her unromantic, life-like, somehow
democratic,
presentations of animals come close to their treatment in Chinese art, and I believe she feels that the Chinese have understood animals better than any other people.

Such are Miss Moore's gifts of portraying animal physiology and psychology that her unicorn is as real as their dragons:

this animal of that one horn

throwing itself upon which head foremost from a cliff

it walks away unharmed,

proficient in this feat, which like Herodotus,

I have not seen except in pictures.

With all its inseparable combinations of the formally fabulous with the factual, and the artificial with the perfectly natural, her animal poetry seduces one to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true
lingua unicornis.

1948

Annie Allen
by Gwendolyn Brooks

Like Miss Brooks' first book of verse, this explores the life of the Northern urban Negro. The material is the same, the scene has not changed; but here Miss Brooks has turned from her earlier poetic realism to a strain of lyric emotion. She has turned, too, to elaboration and experimentation in language which, although not always successful, shows her desire not only to break out of set patterns but to make the tone of her work as variegated as possible. The story of Annie Allen becomes a kind of kaleidoscopic dream; and the wildly colored images and symbols shake into a design both stirring and moving, as the lyrics of which it is composed draw to their end. The poet's feeling for form is basic and remarkable. If her sonnets are dramatically projected, they are also classically firm. This underlying firmness, this sense of form, holds the book together despite its moments of extravagance.

1950

XAIPE: 71 Poems
by E. E. Cummings

The famous man of little-letters, e. e. cummings, presents here his first book of poems since 1 × 1 appeared in 1944. It is appropriate that the book should appear in the spring, since spring is Mr. Cummings' favorite season, speaking to him of flowers, rain, new moons, love and joy. Most of the seventy-one poems take up these themes, but there is the usual scattering of involuted and sometimes rather unpleasant epigrams, and this time a few sympathetic and touching portraits as well. Often Mr. Cummings' approach to poetry reminds one of a smart-alec Greenwich Village child saying to his friends: “Look! I've just made up a new game. Let's all write poems. There! I've won!” And in front of the wood-and-coal man's basement shop, on the wall of the Chinese laundry, along the curbs of the dingy but flourishing park, appear poems and ideograph-poems in hyacinth-colored chalks. The obscene and epigrammatic ones have most of this happy hoodlum quality; in the others he is still playing his game and winning it, but it has been refined into a game resembling a one-man Japanese poetry competition, using the same symbols over and over again, formally, but delicately, freshly and firmly, as no one else can.