MARIANNE MOORE’S FANTASTIC REVERENCE 177few during the 1920s and 1930s, eventually a wide public—her oddness struck
first: cockeyed but consistent stanzas and rhyming, an oblique specific take on
any animal, artifact, and idea under the sun, and a habit of sowing poems with
authoritative citations. About quotation Moore pled simple economy: “I’ve
always felt that if a thing has been said in the very best way, how can you say it
better?” Though sensible enough, this doesn’t do justice to her novelty.
We ’re not dealing here with T. S. Eliot ’s quotations in The Waste Land, those
notorious fragments—“This music crept by me upon the waters”—meant to
shore up our paltry present with past richness. Moore ’s quotes blend into the
poem, as we hear when she reads aloud. Whimsical, like her own phrases, they
can also seem finicky. And that she was, prizing exactitude (plus concision,
clarity, surprise), preferring attentiveness to vague sentiment.
These qualities served Moore when she went climbing on Washington’s
Mount Rainier. John Muir had found it “so fine and so beautiful it might well
fire the dullest observer to desperate enthusiasm.” A generation later our keenest
observer made a long poem on that “Octopus / of ice” with tentacle glaciers.
Borrowing with “relentless accuracy” from a National Parks pamphlet, she de-
scribes rock “‘stained transversely by iron where the water drips down.’” After
all, poetry should be no less “genuine,” she said, than science. She describes
“the hard mountain ‘planed by ice and polished by the wind ’,” fancying the
pamphlet ’s well-turned phrase for nature ’s artisanry on Rainier’s upper slopes.
Sometimes poets must “set down an unbearable accuracy.” She means the
shock of metaphor, impossible yet true perception. When Gerard Manley Hop-
kins notes lambs frolicking in a field “as though it was the ground that tossed
them,” Moore marvels how “precision is a thing of the imagination.” Her knack
was conscientious exactness.
Moore ’s best-liked poem began this way when Eliot published it in 1918:
The Fish
Wade through black jade.
Of the crow blue mussel-shells, one
Keeps adjusting the ash-heaps;
Opening and shutting itself like
Each quatrain had the same syllable count. A year later she changed everything
but the words themselves.
The Fish
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like