the poems of marianne moore
No Swan So Fine
"No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." No swan, with swart blind look askance and gondoliering legs, so fine as the chintz china one with fawnbrown eyes and toothed gold collar on to show whose bird it was. Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth candelabrum-tree of cockscombtinted buttons, dahlias, sea-urchins, and everlastings, it perches on the branching foam of polished sculptured flowers--at ease and tall. The king is dead.
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 spotlight swiftness 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, inkbespattered 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 accidentlack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it; the chasm-side is dead. Repeated evidence has proved that it can live on what can not revive its youth. The sea grows old in it. 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 byplay 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.
Critics and Connoisseurs There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. Certain Ming products, imperial floor coverings of coach wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something that I like bettera mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly ballasted animal stand up similar determination to make a pup eat his meat from the plate. I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford, with flamingo-colored, maple leaflike feet. It reconnoitered like a battle
ship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were ingredients in its disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood was not proof against its proclivity to more fully appraise such bits of food as the stream bore counter to it; made away with what I gave it to eat. I have seen this swan and I have seen you; I have seen ambition without understanding in a variety of forms. Happening to stand by an ant-hill, I have seen a fastidious ant carrying a stick north, south, east, west, till it turned on itself, struck out from the flower bed into the lawn, and returned to the point from which it had started. Then abandoning the stick as useless and overtaxing its jaws with a particle of whitewash pill-like but heavy, it again went through the same course of procedure. What is there in being able to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of self-defense, in proving that one has had the experience of carrying a stick?
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 variation 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 ftripe: 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 itself to be the pestilence that it is, moves all about 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 initial 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 minutiuae 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."
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 produces, 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 conclusions 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 superiority--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.
