Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 51The theme of the lightning that flashes at the base of the glacier is varied in the unicorn
poem (in a reference to “the dogs / which are dismayed by the chain lightning / playing at
them from its horn”). And it is varied also in a poem on the elephant (still to be discussed) that
has looked at the electricity and at the earth-
quake and is still
here; ...- In the earlier volume there is an epigram-like poem, “To a Steam Roller,” that I
have always thought very entertaining. It excoriates this sorry, ungainly mechanism as a
bungling kind of fellow that, when confronting such discriminations as are the vital
purpose of Miss Moore’s lines, would “crush all the particles down / into close conformity,
and then walk back and forth / on them.” We also read there:
As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of one’s attending upon you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.Heretofore I had been content to think of this reference to a butterfly simply as a device
for suggesting weight by a contrasting image of lightness. But the role of butterfly as elf
conversant to nymph might also suggest the presence of such overtones as contrasting
types of masculinity. (This would give us a perfect instance of what Coleridge meant by
fancy, which occurs when we discern behind the contrast an element that the contrasted
images share in common.)
As for the later poem, where the theme of the butterfly is fully developed, I might
now try to make more clearly the point I had in mind with reference to the two moments
of stasis. In the opening words (“half deity half worm” and “We all, infant and adult, have
/ stopped to watch the butterfly”) the poem clearly suggests the possibility that it will
figure two levels of motivation, a deity being in a different realm of motives than a worm,
and the child’s quality of perception being critically distinct from the adult’s. Examining
the two moments of stasis, we find here too the indications of an important difference
between them. At the first stasis, elf and nymph confront each other, while “all’s a-quiver
with significance.” But at the final stasis, the conversity is between butterfly and west wind,
a directer colloquy (its greater inwardness linking it, in my opinion, with the motive-
behind-motive figuration in the theme of clocks-for-clocks). At this second stage, the
butterfly is called “historic metamorphoser / and saintly animal”; hence we may take it that
the “deity” level of motive prevails at this second stage. The quality of the image in the
closing line (“their talk was as strange as my grandmother’s muff”) would suggest that the
deified level is equated with the quality of perception as a child. (The grandmother theme
also appears in “Spenser’s Ireland,” where we are told that “Hindered characters ... in Irish
stories ... all have grandmothers.” Another reason for believing that the second stage of the
butterfly poem is also the “motives-behind-motives” stage is offered tenuously by this tie-
up with the word “hindered,” since the final poem in the book, as we shall know when we
come to it, does well by this word in proclaiming a morality of art.)
Another poem, “Virginia Britannia” (What Are Years), that seems on the surface almost
exclusively descriptive (though there is passing reference to a “fritillary” that “zig-zags”) is
found to be progressing through scenic details to a similar transcendence. At the last,