Modern American Poetry

Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 37

find that its corresponding object had qualities to be featured and appraised
for themselves. And he might pay so much attention to such appraisal that
the treatment of the object would in effect “transcend” the motive behind its
original singling-out.
Thus, the poem “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks” (in What Are Years)
begins:

There are four vibrators, the world’s exactest clocks;

and these quartz time-pieces that tell

time intervals to other clocks,

these worksless clocks work well;

and all four, independently the

same, are there in the cool Bell

Laboratory time

vault. Checked by a comparator with Arlington

they punctualize ... (Etc.)

I think there would be no use in looking for “symbolist” or “imagist”
motives behind the reference to the fact that precisely fourclocks are
mentioned here. It is an “objectivist” observation. We read of four, not
because the number corresponds, for instance, to the Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, but simply because there actually are four of them in the time
vault. Similarly, “cool Bell Laboratory time vault” might have outlying
suggestions of something like the coolness of a tomb—but primarily one
feels that the description is there for purposes of objective statement; and had
the nature of the scene itself dictated it, we should be reading of a “hot Bell
Laboratory time tower.” Though not journalism, it is reporting.
Yet any reader of Miss Moore’s verse will quickly acknowledge that this
theme, which provides an “objective” opportunity for the insertion of
transitions between such words as “exactest,” “punctualize,” “careful
timing,” “clear ice,” “instruments of truth,” and “accuracy,” is quite
representative of her (and thus “symbolic” in the proportions of imagism).
And the secondary level of the theme (its quality as being not the theme of
clocks that tell the time, but of clocks that tell the time to clocks that tell the
time)—I should consider thoroughly symbolic, as signalizing a concern not
merely for the withinness of motives, but for the withinness-of-withinness of
motives, the motives behind motives.^1
We can call Miss Moore “objectivist,” then, only by taking away the
epithet in part. For though many details in her work seem to get there purely
out of her attempt to report and judge of a thing’s intrinsic qualities, to make