Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

MARIANNE MOORE’S FANTASTIC REVERENCE 181

defiant edifice—

all the physical features of

ac-

cident—lack

of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and

hatchet strokes, these things stand

out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.

Repeated

evidence has proved that it can live

on what can not revive

its youth. The sea grows old in it.

What are we to make of her whimsical wading fish, barnacles encrusting a wave,
spun glass sunbeams, water’s iron wedge? Much anthologized, these lines still
guard their dreamlike eccentricities.
The poem’s barely begun when its fish have vanished, giving way to menac-
ing changes: an ash-heaped mussel shell, an injured fan, a wave ’s “side” whose
barnacles can’t “hide / there.” Uncanny vision penetrates the dark deep along
a swish of s-sounds passing along wavelike indents:

the submerged shafts of the

sun,

split like spun

glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness

into the crevices—

in and out...

Precise imagination fuses nature with art, “sun, / split like spun / glass.”
Once we buy that fusion, Moore ’s verbal leaps present enigmas—fish in jade,
a mussel fan, glasslike sun, illuminating yet vaguely ominous spectacles. This
oceanscape can turn turquoise to iron. And while “the iron edge / of the cliff ”
seems graspable, how (except through rhyme) does water drive “a wedge / of
iron” into it? Before our eyes the starfish and

pink

rice-grains, ink-

bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green

lilies, and submarine

toadstools, slide each on the other.

So do Moore ’s slabs of sound, like her friend Alexander Calder’s mobiles. It ’s
as if her verbal fantasia, in 1918, foresaw today’s surreal color films of under-
water life.