Modern American Poetry

Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 39

anticipation of complaint: getting there first, it takes up all the room.)
In “Spenser’s Ireland” (What Are Years), we may glimpse somewhat how
this redemption can take place. Beginning in a mood of appreciation almost
studious, the poem ends

The Irish say your trouble is their

trouble and your

joy their joy? I wish

I could believe it;

I am troubled, I’m dissat-

isfied, I’m Irish.

Since it is towards this end that the poem is directed, we may assume that

from this end it derives the logic of its progression.

Note the general tenor of the other observations: on family, on

marriage, on independence and yielding, on the freedom of those “made

captive by supreme belief.” There is talk of enchantments, of

transformations, of a coat “like Venus’ mantle lined with stars ... the sleeves

new from disuse,” of such discriminations as we get

when large dainty

fingers tremblingly divide the wings

of the fly.

And there are lines naming birds, and having a verbal music most lovely in
its flutter of internal rhymes:

the guillemot

so neat and the hen

of the heath and the

linnet spinet-sweet.

All these details could be thought of as contextual to the poem’s ending

(for, if you single out one moment of a poem, all the other moments

automatically become its context). If, then, we think of the final assertion as the

act, we may think of the preceding contextual material as the scene, or

background, of this act (a background that somehow contains the same quality

as the act, saying implicitly what the act of the final assertion says explicitly).

Viewed thus we see, as the underlying structure of this “description,” a poem

that, if treated as a lyric, would have somewhat the following argument: