Modern American Poetry

(^444) Bonnie Costello
water will not flow. No work goes on in this eclogue, though there are
“fishnets arranged to dry.” Virgil would have seen a reason for living in a
town like this. But Moore’s scene is inscribed with et in arcadia ego—“I too
am in arcadia,” says the real toad in the imaginary garden. Our sins wash up
like Leviathan on the beach. As Susan Stewart has suggested in On Longing,
in the modern system of objects, the gigantic is often a metaphor for the
abstract authority of the state and the collective public life. If the notion
applies here, the stranded whales provide a troubling allegory. Yet this is not
a bleak poem, nor is its assertion that “it could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this” entirely insincere. It celebrates the perennial abundance
of nature and delight in sensory orders, and the pleasure of things “ambition
cannot buy or take away.” In another sense hope is affirmed—a hero is
present, a student, an artist—and their ideals survive their human habitation.
“About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters. How well
they understood / Its human position,” wrote W.H. Auden in “Musée des
Beaux Arts” (Selected Poems, 79). He was looking at some paintings by
Breughel, particularly “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” in which one can
barely perceive, in an otherwise placid agrarian scene, the fallen Icarus
sinking into the sea. Auden admired Moore’s poetry (adopting her syllabics)
and knew her “Steeple Jack” well, so perhaps he took some inspiration from
this poem as he struggled with the tension between aesthetic pleasure and
moral vigilance. Moore places her perspective close to that of another Old
Master, Dürer (she had written about him for The Dial,mentioning his travel
to see a stranded whale). Her view is thus one of a perceptive outsider. To be
“not native” to the pastoral myth of place can give one a privileged view, a
heightened sensitivity to both its pleasures and its faults. Like Dürer, she is
attracted to the extraordinary (eight stranded whales, a twenty-five-pound
lobster), and like him, she creates a painstaking but understated formal
(etched) order. (The gulls flying over the clock in ones and twos and threes
almost image the carefully counted syllables in these matching, sonorous,
unaccented stanzas.) But also like Dürer, Moore brings a moral (and
religious) sensibility to this scene. To look at eight stranded whales with a
feeling for suffering is to go beyond the thrill of spectacle or merely aesthetic
response. Surely the “sweet air” is tainted by the moral, not to mention the
physical, odor of their displacement, though we tend to hold our noses.
From the outset, then, Moore creates a tension between the delight in
designing picturesque surfaces and the moral compunction to expose a
corruption beneath them, a tension between pastoral and parable.
Whereas “An Octopus” was aimed at getting you lost (the poem
disorients you immediately: “an octopus / of ice”), “The Steeple Jack” seems