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n England,” she said in 1943 when the
war’s outcome stood in doubt, “One pays a fine for throwing away a used bus
ticket that could have been preserved as waste paper, and the grocer is not ex-
pected to furnish a bag with what he sells but to put it into the basket or shopping
bag brought by the purchaser.” It ’s surprising, this indignation, coming from
Marianne Moore (1887–1972), our idiosyncratic poet of tapestry oceans and
lapis lazuli seagulls and Brooklyn Dodgers. But there she is railing at “slum-
bering civic indifference,” decades early. “One of the most eloquent phases of
savage resourcefulness is thrift,” she said, “involving as it does responsibility
to nature.” Moore was moved back then by Native American economies (some
of which have since been questioned): “After removing a plant, the Indian was
careful to drop a seed in the hole.”
Thrift, in fact, marks Moore ’s every move. “To a Snail”:
If ‘compression is the first grace of style ’,
you have it
Why is a snail like Athenian rhetoric? Her few syllables graft human language
onto animal nature, recycle available wisdom, identify a primitive creature,
and give it respect with intimacy. Relishing “the curious phenomenon of your
occipital horn,” she gets threefold use from “curious”: exotic, intricate, exciting
curiosity. When Marianne Moore reached American readers—first a knowing
“submerged shafts of the / / sun, / split like spun / glass”
Marianne Moore’s Fantastic Reverence
“
I