Modern American Poetry

Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 43

chasm through which the water has driven a wedge—and injury is here too,
since

All

external

marks of abuse are present on this

defiant edifice.—

And finally

Repeated

evidence has proved that it can live

on what cannot revive

its youth. The sea grows old in it.

A chasm in the sea, then, becomes rather the sea in a chasm. And this notable
reversal, that takes place in the areas of the “submerged,” would also seem to
be an aspect of “years.” Which would mean that “years” subsume the
synecdochic possibilities whereby those elements that cluster together can
represent one another: here the active can become passive, the environed can
become the environment, the container can be interchangeable with the
contained. In possessing such attributes, “years” are poetry.
We may at this point recall our beginning—the citation concerning
visible and invisible. In “The Plumet Basilisk” (Selected Poems) we read of this
particular lizard that, “king with king,”

He leaps and meets his

likeness in the stream.

He is (in the poem it is a quotation)

‘the ruler of Rivers, Lakes, and Seas,

invisible or visible’—

and as scene appropriate to the agent, this basilisk is said to live in a
basilica. (Another lizard, in the same poem, is said to be “conferring wings
on what it grasps, as the airplant does”; and in “The Jerboa,” we are told of
“this small desert rat” that it “honours the sand by assuming its colour.”)
Likewise