Modern American Poetry

Moore’s America 445

to want to make you feel at home. Nature is close but does not consume us;
technology is close but does not control us.

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.

Easy passage here between the human and natural worlds characterizes the
pastoral. Moore goes on to note the hospitable character of the climate
(again, in contrast to the forbidding Mt. Rainier), which favors a rich variety
of flowers, the fog enhancing, rather than obstructing, their lush growth. But
the mention of the fog serves as well to remind us that appearances are
unreliable—the unsaid is as important as the said in Moore’s method of
understatement. Moore has put us on alert. And soon enough, a storm
encroaches on the placid scene.

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.

This is written off as more charming Americana, nothing to get ruffled
about, but its “fife and drum” may also recall a revolutionary struggle and
sacrifice that we forget at our peril. Pastoral is the forgetting of time, but our
well-being was achieved in history and can be undone by history. Moore
harbors a special fondness for “the student / named Ambrose [...] / with his
not native books and hat” who appears in stanza 8, because he is not
complacently parochial, does not take this partial world for a whole world.
Ambrose is not the shepherd-insider of the pastoral world, through whom
we imagine a life of harmony. That is, he knows not to mistake this retreat