Moore’s America 443widened. Exhausted from her editorship, and from attending to her mother’s
weakening health, perhaps also retreating from the frenzy of Manhattan
brought on by the stock market crash, Moore decided at the end of 1929 to
seek a quieter existence in what was at that time still a suburban milieu.
Brooklyn had only been annexed to New York City for thirty years when
Moore moved there, and it retained an outsider identity. Here Moore
returned to the writing of poetry, making significant changes in her style.
The poems became more musical, the syntax more relaxed, the pleasures
more accommodating. Rhyme enters the work more conspicuously than
before, knitting the voice into pleasant sonic patterns. Moore’s own language
supplants quotation, and its tone is more ingratiating. Had she dropped her
vigilance against the temptations of the glossy phrase or the gilded image?
Had she succumbed to parochial pieties and surface harmonies? How, Moore
asks, might one be “at home” in such a place, open to its genuine
satisfactions, without mistaking it for the world? This home differs from the
one in the poem “Dock Rats,” which she wrote upon moving to Manhattan
in 1918; that was a site of transitions, of comings and goings, this, of
complacencies and moral slumber. But Moore’s poem reminds us that we are
“not native” in Arcadia.
Particularly at issue, for this artist who liked elegance “of which the
source is not bravado,” was how to reconcile aesthetic coherence and moral
incoherence. From the beginning of “The Steeple Jack” (CP, 5) she does this
by emphasizing artifice, by drawing attention to the frame:
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.Moore conceived a composite place, part Maine resort (she had
summered on Monhegan Island) and part residential borough (the steeple
jack she names—C.J. Poole—actually worked in Brooklyn, and some of the
images, like the stranded whales, are taken from local newspaper accounts).
The constructed scene displays the abundance and variety of nature, with all
its extremes, refined into pattern and harmony—what the classical writers
called discordia concors.Pastoral is a form of still life, concealing history and
temporality and engaging in illusions of timelessness. The seagulls flying
back and forth over the town clock erase time in their shuttle. The “etched”