182 PA RT T W O
A riot of metamorphosis, “The Fish” takes after Shakespeare ’s song from
The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.And her marvel, her sea change, turns metaphor-making into a naturalist ’s revel.
Moore ’s last three stanzas go beyond human limits, beyond even the sun’s
illumining reach. No fish remain, no spun glass or turquoise sea but a “defiant
edifice,” that sea-buffeted cliff. Stanza form, the poem’s hold on order, per-
sists perfectly, as its rhyming skews: oblique rhymes on unaccented syllables
—“All / external,” “this /... edifice,” “dead. / Repeated”—and a key word
hyphen-cracked, “ac- /cident—lack.” For all her love of exactitude, Moore
verges on chaos: abuse, accident, chasm, death. Somehow dynamite, burns,
hatchets have ravaged the ocean cliffs of their cornice or architectural crown.
The “chasm-side” fronting the sea is dead—chasm, perhaps, as from geologic
time, when earth and waters split. Solid land is dead yet “can live / on,” living
on the sea that batters it.
At bottom, these stanzas forge a human struggle with raw nature, playing on
color, shape, texture, motion, and naming to expose a wild system in the natural
world. Like all metaphors, this grand one gets doubled energy, thrift at work.
Was Marianne Moore an environmentalist? It takes all kinds to make a (better)
world. She can’t boast the outdoors immersion of Frost, Jeffers, May Swenson,
John Haines, Maxine Kumin, and others, but always bends her curiosity on the
natural world, like Emily Dickinson whose “Japanesely fantastic reverence for
tree, insect, and toadstool” Moore admired. The house she grew up in, “The
Wren’s Nest,” housed birds and cats, and she had a pet alligator. Her first ambi-
tion, to be a visual artist, had her sketching plants and animals throughout her
life. “I took pictures of nearly everything,” Moore writes from the mountains,
“logs sunk in the earth and two out of five fringed gilled newts that I caught in
a spring.... I saw a falling star which looked like a sheet of paper on fire and a
bat so close that I could see light through its wings—a kind of amber.”
She relished natural history from libraries, museums, films, and lectures, and
her poems make up a bestiary of common, rare, and mythical animals: basilisk,
bear, buffalo, bug, chameleon, crow, dragon, dragonfly, elephant, ermine, fish,
fox, frog, giraffe, jellyfish, jerboa, lion, mongoose, monkey, mouse, nautilus,
octopus, ostrich, pangolin, peacock, reindeer, snail, snake, swan, tiger, unicorn,
whale, wood-weasel. These critters don’t challenge her, as in D. H. Lawrence ’s