Silence -- Marianne Moore

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul

(Poem #1828) Silence My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellow's grave nor the glass flowers at Harvard. Self reliant like the cat -- that takes its prey to privacy, the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth -- they sometimes enjoy solitude, and can be robbed of speech by speech which has delighted them. The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint." Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn." Inns are not residences. -- Marianne Moore

Such a wonderfully exact poem this. I love that it expresses so precisely
the attitude one has (or would like to have) towards guests, but manages, in
a brief 14 lines, to be both profound ("The deepest feeling always shows
itself in silence / not in silence, but restraint" [1]) and so brilliantly
visual ("the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth"). To
read Moore is to have the sense of language being carefully polished, of the
importance of ideas as subject matter for poetry. This poem, with its quiet,
balanced tone, captures that so perfectly.

Aseem

[1] I am reminded of Ezekiel (Poem # 1736): "The slow movement seems,
somehow, to say much more".

No Swan So Fine -- Marianne Moore

Guest poem submitted by Michelle Whitehead:

(Poem #1492) 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 fawn- brown eyes and toothed gold collar on to show whose bird it was. Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth candelabrum-tree of cockscomb- tinted buttons, dahlias, sea urchins, and everlastings, it perches on the branching foam of polished sculptured flowers - at ease and tall. The king is dead. -- Marianne Moore

The poem sent in by Mac Robb reminded me of my favourite swan-song poem.
I checked the archives, and it's not there. I wonder if I will be the
only one to suggest it!!!

"No Swan So Fine" opens with a quote from an article by Percy Phillip on
the restoration of Versailles. As is typical of Moore's work, she adapts
her found quotes to suit her theme - here, that of nature versus
artifice. The quote suggests that no water can be as still as a dry,
man-made fountain. It also suggests an image of a palace of sparkling
bright light, now still and silent. The poem then goes on to describe a
living swan, at once haughty and ridiculous - so fine when skimming
across the water, but losing its elegance when seen from underneath.
Despite this it has a vitality and life force not present in the china
swan to which it is compared.

I believe the word 'chintz' which describes the china swan was
originally a Hindi/Sanskrit  word meaning multi-coloured, or bright. By
late Victorian times it was associated with inexpensive 'tawdry'
furnishing fabrics. The 'toothed gold collar' reminds me of that worn by
the hind in Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt" which read 'Touch me not, for
Caesar's I am.' In contrast to the living swan's independence, the china
swan is an owned object with no existence of its own - and yet it is
presented as superior. Its frozen painted perfection eclipses the memory
of the natural bird. No wonder the real swan looks askance!

The beginning of the second stanza begins with a description of a
candelabrum owned by the late Lord Balfour, copied by Moore from a 1930s
Christie's sale announcement. She describes the overblown ornamentation
of the object, ending with the china swan perched 'at ease and tall', in
its polished environment. The china swan is beautiful, and has outlasted
generations of real swans, as well as the brilliance of the Versailles'
court where it was made - and yet it is as still as the fountains,
lacking the vitality of the living swan. Its fragile perfection is
contrasted with the living swan's robust self-sufficiency. In both
cases, the implicit focus is on the response of the human observer,
rather than the actual swans. The living swan is sublimely indifferent
to being watched, where the china swan 'lives' only in being admired.

The china swan, the work of art, has replaced the real swan - 'the king'
- and an era that is gone. It remains to provide a sense of timelessness
- perched on the everlastings, it has an existence beyond the
limitations of days and years. It retains the beauty of the living swan,
and is a reminder of the brilliance of the historical court. The living
swan, however, although it cannot approach the artistic perfection of
the china copy, has vital qualities which no artifice can duplicate. It
is part of moving time that passes and becomes history. It, too, conveys
a sense of timelessness - just as every generation of swans contains
unique, unrepeatable individuals, so each human era is unique - the past
gives way to the present and the present to the future. Versailles may
be gone, but it is still inspiring new art forms.

This poem was written for the 20th anniversary edition of Poetry
Magazine. It was rumoured at the time that the magazine would close that
year, suggesting that this may be a swan song for the magazine -
celebrating the brilliance of its era - but also suggesting that the old
must give way to the new.

Michelle Whitehead
(previously Chapman - I was married in March).

Some sites with bibliographies, biographies  & essays on Marianne Moore:

http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap7/moore.html
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/moore.htm
[broken link] http://mam.english.sbc.edu/
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0F02

[Minstrels Links]

Poem #21, Sailing to Byzantium  -- William Butler Yeats
Poem #957, Whoso list to hunt -- Thomas Wyatt

Poetry -- Marianne Moore

Four years and counting!

(Poem #1169) 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 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 twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician-- 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 poets 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 the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry. -- Marianne Moore

I was planning to run Dylan Thomas's "Notes on the Art of Poetry" as a fourth
anniversary poem, but, although I agreed with everything it had to say, it
didn't really *move* me. Moore's "Poetry", on the other hand, did, so here it
is.

So, what is it about the poem that I so liked? I'm not sure - maybe I just
appreciate the exquisite poetry hiding under the matter-of-fact facade (to
say nothing of the rigid form (see the commentary on Poem #1043 for a
description of Moore's syllable counted verse) hidden under an illusion of
free verse), or because I like the penetrating originality of phrases like
'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'.

Oddly enough, I *agree* with Moore a lot less than I do with Thomas - in
particular, "these things are important...because they are useful" made me
twitch. Of course, that raises the question of how seriously to take the
poem (I mean, how seriously *should* one take a poem titled 'poetry' and
beginning "I too dislike it"?). I'm not really sure what Moore is trying to
say, in the end - indeed, at times she appears to be treading a fine line
between poetry and something perilously close to antipoetry.

The case for an assumed voice is all the more compelling in that it looks
like Moore is distinguishing not just between the genuine and the
*artificial* (or more closely, between genuine poetry and poetry that is
what I like to call capital-L Literature), but between the rough and the
finished. If in "Poetry's" distaste for the 'high-sounding interpretation'
it eschews artifice, it also seems to want craft to fall by the wayside -
between the "raw material of poetry" and the "genuine", there seems very
little room for the careful and precise shaping of words that - ironically -
today's poem is an excellent example of.

Contrast (our) Thomas's commentary on Poem #1043:
  Archibald MacLeish famously wrote:
     "A poem should not mean
      But be."
  I can think of no poet who so consistently fulfils MacLeish's dictum as
  Marianne Moore.

  Randall Jarrell talks of "her lack -- her wonderful lack -- of arbitrary
  intensity or violence, of sweep and overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of
  sociological significance". Her poems simply exist; they "cannot be
  suborned to any end but their own" [1]. They are elegant and precise;
  carefully constructed and meticulously detailed; and always, always,
  wonderfully rewarding.

and the paradox falls into clearer focus - today's poem seems to be all
about Meaning, but when you step back and take a look at it, it just Is.
And, as Thomas noted, few people do that better than Moore.

martin

p.s. The poems-from-the-movies theme will be back tomorrow - think of this
as the intermission.

Links:
  There's an extensive set of comments on the poem and its extensive
  revision history here:
    http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/poetry.htm

  Two things I liked were the argument that Moore was distinguishing between
  'poetry' and 'Poetry' (compare my earlier derogatory usage of Literature),
  and the following note:
    Another manifestation of the interrogation of authority in "Poetry"
    developed across Moore's revisions of it over the years. The poem was
    well known and well liked, in all its subversive playfulness. But its
    argument created problems for its poet. For if it was "genuine" on first
    publication, once it became well known, by its own lights it lost some
    of its genuineness. For later publications, Moore revised the poem
    substantially and managed in so doing to disperse some of the
    familiarity. Finally Moore cut the poem to three lines, and printed one
    of the longer versions in the endnotes. The short version reads:

      Poetry
      I, too, dislike it.
          Reading, it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

- And for the discovery of today's poem, I'm indebted to the excellent
  collection of metapoems at http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/index.html

The Steeple-Jack -- Marianne Moore

(Poem #1043) The Steeple-Jack 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 on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish. One by one in two's and three's, the seagulls keep flying back and forth over the town clock, or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings -- rising steadily with a slight quiver of the body -- or flock mewing where a sea the purple of the peacock's neck is paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea gray. You can see a twenty-five- pound lobster; and fish nets arranged to dry. The whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so much confusion. Disguised by what might seem the opposite, the sea- side flowers and trees are favored by the fog so that you have the tropics first hand: the trumpet-vine, fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds, or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine at the back door; cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort, striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies -- yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts -- toad-plant, petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas. The climate is not right for the banyan, frangipani, or jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent life. Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit; but here they've cats, not cobras, to keep down the rats. The diffident little newt with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced- out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that ambition can buy or take away. The college student named Ambrose sits on the hillside with his not-native books and hat and sees boats at sea progress white and rigid as if in a groove. Liking an elegance of which the sourch is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of interlacing slats, and the pitch of the church spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets down a rope as a spider spins a thread; he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a sign says C. J. Poole, Steeple Jack, in black and white; and one in red and white says Danger. The church portico has four fluted columns, each a single piece of stone, made modester by white-wash. Theis would be a fit haven for waifs, children, animals, prisoners, and presidents who have repaid sin-driven senators by not thinking about them. The place has a school-house, a post-office in a store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted schooner on the stocks. The hero, the student, the steeple-jack, each in his way, is at home. It could not be dangerous to be living in a town like this, of simple people, who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church while he is gilding the solid- pointed star, which on a steeple stands for hope. -- Marianne Moore

Archibald MacLeish famously wrote:
   "A poem should not mean
    But be."
I can think of no poet who so consistently fulfils MacLeish's dictum as
Marianne Moore.

Randall Jarrell talks of "her lack -- her wonderful lack -- of arbitrary
intensity or violence, of sweep and overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of
sociological significance". Her poems simply exist; they "cannot be suborned
to any end but their own" [1]. They are elegant and precise; carefully
constructed and meticulously detailed; and always, always, wonderfully
rewarding.

thomas.

[1] Michael Schmidt, in his magisterial study "Lives of the Poets". Schmidt
goes on to say this about Moore's verse: "Her syllabics are straightforward.
Instead of the verse being 'free' or governed by metre or regular stress
patterns, she chooses to build a stanza in which the lines have a
predetermined number of syllables. Indentation underlines the parallels. The
shape of the stanza indicates the syllabic disposition. With the addition of
rhyme, this is one of the most restrictive measures a poet can deploy."

[Biography]

Born near St. Louis, Missouri, on November 15, 1887, Marianne Moore was
raised in the home of her grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor. After her
grandfather's death, in 1894, Moore and her family stayed with other
relatives, and in 1896 they moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She attended
Bryn Mawr College and received her B.A. in 1909. Following graduation, Moore
studied typing at Carlisle Commercial College, and from 1911 to 1915 she was
employed as a school teacher at the Carlisle Indian School. In 1918, Moore
and her mother moved to New York City, and in 1921, she became an assistant
at the New York Public Library. She began to meet other poets, such as
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, and to contribute to the Dial,
a prestigious literary magazine. She served as acting editor of the Dial
from 1925 to 1929. Along with the work of such other members of the Imagist
movement as Ezra Pound, Williams, and H. D., Moore's poems were published in
the Egoist, an English magazine, beginning in 1915. In 1921, H.D. published
Moore's first book, Poems, without her knowledge.

Moore was widely recognized for her work; among her many honors were the
Bollingen prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote
with the freedom characteristic of the other modernist poets, often
incorporating quotes from other sources into the text, yet her use of
language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise, capable of
suggesting a variety of ideas and associations within a single, compact
image. In his 1925 essay "Marianne Moore," William Carlos Williams wrote
about Moore's signature mode, the vastness of the particular: "So that in
looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great
events." She was particularly fond of animals, and much of her imagery is
drawn from the natural world. She was also a great fan of professional
baseball and an admirer of Muhammed Ali, for whom she wrote the liner notes
to his record, I Am the Greatest! Deeply attached to her mother, she lived
with her until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947. Marianne Moore died in New York
City in 1972.

        -- www.poets.org

[Moreover]

Here's an extract from a review (by Frank Kermode) of Moore's "Selected
Letters", in which he talks about her poetic method:

"Moore once remarked that 'prose is a step beyond poetry ... and then there
is another poetry that is a step beyond that': you had to go through prose
to come out the other side purged of that disposable prior poetry, with its
irrelevant inversions and its subjection to conventional rhythms. The
posterior poetry would have built into it the virtues of good prose. In the
syllabic poems, where 'each stanza' is 'a duplicate of every other stanza'
(much as Donne set himself argumentative problems by exactly replicating an
arbitrarily complicated opening stanza), the sentences could, indeed must,
be capable of being written straight out as prose; what is lost in the
process of doing that is precisely the machine-like precision of the
repetitions of line length and covert rhyme. If the effect seems mechanical,
so be it. In 1932, on the brink of celebrity, she remarked that 'a thing so
mechanically perfect as a battleship is always a pleasure to me.'

One can see something of what this means by looking at 'The Steeple-Jack',
the poem which, though not an early work, having been published in 1932,
stands first in both the Collected Poems of 1981 and the Selected Poems of
1941. It was much admired by both Eliot, who arranged the order of the poems
for Moore, putting this one at the head, and by Wallace Stevens, who
analysed it at some length, commending, among other things, the poet's
attachment to truth. The opening six-line stanza sets the arbitrary pattern
of line length and rhyme, and has a full close:

 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
 on a fine day, from water etched
   with waves as formal as the scales
 on a fish

(Dürer because he travelled far and fruitlessly to inspect a beached whale,
but also because of the etched scales; and, more generally, because he is
deeply in the thought of the poem.) The second and third stanzas repeat the
stanza pattern but form a continuous sentence which flows over the scheme
without disturbing it, stopping at the last line of the third stanza. The
fourth stanza strictly observes the pattern and the rhymes, one of which,
'the' and 'sea-', is virtually not there."

        -- [broken link] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20n08/kerm2008.htm

A Grave -- Marianne Moore

Carrying on our guest theme, another poem from David Wright

(Poem #986) A Grave Man looking into the sea, taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself, it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, but you cannot stand in the middle of this; the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey- foot at the top, reserved as their contours, saying nothing; repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. There are others besides you who have worn that look -- whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them for their bones have not lasted: men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave, and row quickly away -- the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death. The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx -- beautiful under networks of foam, and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed; the birds swim throught the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore -- the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them; and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell-buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink -- in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness. -- Marianne Moore

I can't resist an invitation to contribute more poems on this theme, if theme
it is, and I notice that the minstrels haven't had Marianne Moore yet. You'll
find as a heaping helping of commentary on this poem at
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/grave.htm

According to a note by Chris ) on his Marianne
Moore Home Page , "A Grave" was written shortly after the sinking of the
Lusitania and after Moore's brother Warner joined the Navy as a chaplin and
went out to sea. The sea was one of Moore's favorite topics, but she was also
very much aware of the sea as a grave. The sea, for Moore, was both beautiful
and deadly. Once, when she and her mother were standing together admiring the
sea, a man came and stood in from of them, Moore's mother remarked about how
people seem to feel the need to stand in the middle of things instead of
stepping back to get the full picture, and this incident became part of the
poem. (Source: Marianne Moore: A Literary Life by Charles Molesworth)

=====
David Wright        Seattle Public Library

Links:

  [broken link] http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/explore/moore.htm has a biography of Moore and
  some notes on exploring her poetry