Modern American Poetry

(^48) Kenneth Burke
jeopardy in “Bird-Witted” (What Are Years), reciting the incident of the
“three large fledgling mocking-birds,” awaiting “their no longer larger
mother,” while there approaches
the
intellectual cautious-
ly creep ing cat.
If her animals are selected for their “fastidiousness,” their
fastidiousness itself is an aspect of contractility, of jeopardy. “The Pangolin”
(What Are Years), a poem which takes us through odd nocturnal journeys to
the joyous saluting of the dawn, begins: “Another armoured animal”—and of
a sudden you realize that Miss Moore’s recondite menagerie is almost a
thesaurus of protectivenesses. Thus also, the poem in which occur the lines
anent visible and invisible, has as its conclusion:
unsolicitude having swallowed up
all giant birds but an
alert gargantuan
little-winged, magnificently
speedy running-bird. This one
remaining rebel
is the sparrow-camel.
The tentativeness also manifests itself at times in a cult of rarity, a
collector’s or antiquarian interest in the present, a kind of stylistic tourism.
And it may lead to a sheer word play, of graduated sort (a Laforguian delight
in showing how the pedantries can be reclaimed for poetry):
The lemur-student can see
that the aye-aye is not
an angwan-tíbo, potto, or loris.
Yet mention of the “aepyornis” may suggest the answer we might have given,
were we up on such matters, to one who, pencil in hand and with the
newspaper folded to make it firmer, had asked, “What’s a gigantic bird, found
fossil in Madagascar in nine letters?” As for her invention, “invisible,” I can’t
see it.
Tonally, the “contractility” reveals itself in the great agility, even