Moore’s America 429discuss Moore’s sense of the frame as it arises in her refusal to yield to the
lure of the shallow image, the illusion that America is a toad-free,
prelapsarian garden.
In acknowledging the frame Moore shows humility about the
imaginative appropriation of the object, and indicates a world that language
cannot capture. She reveals anxiety about her own and her culture’s tendency
to become absorbed in the shorthand substitutes for experience, the
reductions, simulations, and facile myths, the quick “takes” that convert
experience to commodity and distract us from the rigors of reality. The war
against the facile constructions of reality must be fought on both sides, of
course, since the artist traffics in illusions. The way to salvation for this
devout poet is through instruments arising from the fall. In “The Jerboa”
(CP, 10–15), for instance, Moore’s Depression-era poem of “too much” and
the revelation of “abundance” in adversity, we see this ambivalence played
out. The poem begins by enumerating the vain luxuries of ancient culture,
then moves to praise a simple desert rat who thrives in poverty. What appears
at first to be a nature/culture binary turns into something more complex than
the praise of animal abstemiousness over human wastefulness. Western
civilization presents a contrast: Roman and Egyptian mimicry and distortion,
on the one hand, and Hebrew redemption of illusion in the service of divine
purpose, on the other. Moore portrays a flawed imperialism that would
vainly fix its image on the world with a resourceful mimicry that would draw
the landscape into a higher purpose than itself. Pharaoh is ultimately at the
mercy of the flooding landscape, over which he ostensibly stands master,
whereas exiled Jacob, in the inhospitable desert, makes a pillow of the stones.
The colossal imitation of a pine-cone in front of the Vatican may be
“contrived,” distorting the scale of nature, but Jacob’s theft of Esau’s
birthright, through a trick of illusion (“cudgel staff / in claw-hand”) is in line
with nature’s own work of camouflage. The jerboa “honors the sand by
assuming its color.” And so the poet’s images must serve creation’s grace
rather than plunder it. Similarly, in surveying the American landscape and
culture, Moore will try to sort out “serviceable” illusions, pierced with inner
light, from those that skim reality for easy gratification and gain. As we will
see in later poems, Moore’s meditation on modes of inhabiting landscape
entails a reflection as well on racial history. In this poem it enters through the
landscape of the African desert, arising as an aside, but establishing the
connection between race and place.
Moore’s America is a place of constant change and accelerating speed,
and she seems just as ambivalent about that quality as she is about the uses of
illusion. On the one hand, she enjoys the entrepreneurial energy of American