MARIANNE MOORE’S FANTASTIC REVERENCE 183“Snake” or her friend Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Galway Kinnell’s “The
Bear,” Ted Hughes’s “Pike.” Instead they snap us to attention. “A live snake
is worth feeling,” she says, like “a fine gold mesh bag with nothing in it and is
silky like a poppy petal—dry and warm.”
Moore couldn’t stop linking nature and art: at night the stars “glittered like
cut silver.” Along with bat wings, snakeskin, gilled newts, and stars themselves,
Moore ’s touch for amber, gold mesh, and cut silver, her jade sea and spun glass
sun, do what art does best, what brushwork does for Audubon’s osprey, Con-
stable ’s clouds, what focus and contrast do for the redwoods of Ansel Adams.
When Miss Moore came upon a curious fact about the Estridge (ostrich) in a
sixteenth-century account, she looked into the natural and folkloric history of
this creature and composed her witty, gaudy, motley, fact-studded poem “He
‘Digesteth Harde Yron’,” because to her astonishment he does. For Stevens
this pinpoints Moore: “she has the faculty of digesting the ‘harde yron’ of ap-
pearance,” she can “confront fact in its total bleakness” with art that gains “a
revelation of reality.”
Williams saw a “porcelain garden” in Moore ’s poetry, meaning pleasure in
cleanness, color, precision, design. She saw natural things through the lens of
art and culture. (And vice-versa. When Ford invited her to name new auto-
mobile models, she suggested Mongoose, Civique, and Utopian Turtletop—
much catchier than the Edsel they decided on.) “A sea gull / / Of lapis lazuli”
delighted her, decades before Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” saw waterfalls in a carved
stone ’s “accidental crack.” Yet her love of artifice fed an acute respect and
awareness for things, from ocean cliffs to a mussel’s motions.
Moore liked to cite Thoreau, “A true account of the actual is the rarest po-
etry,” where “true,” for her, means precisely imagined. In “Poetry,” her syl-
lables seek
the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it mustwhen confronted with wildness:
the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree.We shall “have it,” she says, “the genuine,” when “the poets among us can be ‘liter-
alists of the imagination’,” creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”