MARIANNE MOORE’S FANTASTIC REVERENCE 179Her title wades into the body of the poem. No longer half-hidden like mussels,
the rhymes—“wade... jade,” “keeps... heaps”—stud five-line stanzas with
staggered margins and syllables, one, three, nine, six, eight. Instead of squared
quatrains, wavelines keep making move after move, stanzas go on exposing
rhyme after crisp rhyme.
Moore wants us “galvanized against inertia,” each phrase creating an “un-
bearable accuracy,” a fresh perception contrary to fact. The fish “wade”—but
no, it ’s humans who struggle through water. As they wade through jade, that
quick rhyme deludes us, for seawater is anything but hard gemstone, and any-
way jade comes in green, not black. But crows come in black. We enter some
dark element as “crow-blue” color drags a land bird undersea, a raucous preda-
tor lending submarine sheen to sluggish shells.
One of them keeps “adjusting... ash-heaps,” which bring on a mortal mood
though ash stands for slow-stirring sea bottom. This shell then pauses at a
stanza break, “opening and shutting itself like / /.. .” We ’re left hanging on
this simile-in-the-making until “like / / an / injured fan” adds unlikely injury
and unbalanced rhyme to an oddly genteel image. All this contrariness makes
Marianne Moore (third from right), Mount Rainier, 1922.
The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Moore XII 28.06.