Modern American Poetry

(^454) Bonnie Costello
emergence of civilized life in Virginia. Moore relishes the image of the black
pansy “overpowering” the lesser flora. And in their later resistance blacks are
indeed “inadvertent ally and best enemy of tyranny” in a society still, in the
thirties, far from righteous. The color of the mockingbird, we are told three
times, is “gray,” and as “terse Virginian” he is emblem of the confederacy, the
assertion of an old South still resentful of the Emancipation that requires it
to pay wages to the Negro it employs for gain. (In an earlier version Moore
referred to these sharecropper landlords ironically as “the bothered by wages
new savages,” again checking the presumption of civil community where
behavior is in fact barbaric.) We are invited to “observe” the mockingbird,
standing blind on a pillar of cupidity. But the mocking bird is also a reminder,
as John Slatin has pointed out (208–252), that America is about mimicry
more than originality. The primary “native” trait is “endless imitation.” The
“terse Virginian” adopts the call “of whippoorwill or lark or katydid” in his
pursuit of their nests and eggs. He is a figure for a culture “that did not see”
the world beyond its own interests, but at the same time absorbed the traits
of that world, becoming something else.
As in “England,” language is an important feature of dynamic national
identity, and language impresses itself especially on geography. Language in
this poem develops as nature does, absorbing local and imported words to
establish a diverse sense of place. Language is integral to historical process
and leaves its mark on the “narrow tongue of land that Jamestown was,” not
only in the linguistic mix of place names, but in a legacy of contending
doctrines. The rival mottoes of colonizers—vincere est vivere—and
colonials—“don’t tread on me” (spoken, Moore reminds us, by a snake)—
lead to the wisdom through suffering of the “black idiom” which sees us
“advancin’ backward in a circle,” repeating ourselves through time rather
than progressing. “Colonizing” is a way of saying “taking what we please.”
And in removing the euphemism, Moore subverts dominion.
Moore’s own language works against “dominion” through a stanza
pattern that overrides syntax and creates a contrapuntal rhythm through
heavily hyphenated adjectives. These absorb rather than enhance assertion.
The dense imagery, the propulsion of the list, the quick juxtapositions,
submerge hierarchies and preferences in the aesthetic pleasure of sensory
overload and the overall sense of discordia concors.Moore does not “cradle”
“priorities” as the colonists did. She can afford more equanimity. The
intricate rhyme scheme (a twelve-line stanza including a triple rhyme in the
middle, a couplet in the penultimate lines, and a rhyme between lines 3 and
12) gives the poem “an elegance of which the source is not bravado.” The art
of the poem is to draw our attention to an aesthetic order rather than a