Modern American Poetry

Moore’s America 455

cultural hegemony or a single-minded critique. The aesthetic order of the
poem does not whitewash moral incoherence, but it shows equanimity in its
attention to details, reordering the site to describe the rich entanglement of
nature and human purposes that has brought us where we are.
The poem that began with an approach to the “pale sand” of Virginia’s
shores closes with a receding view of the “darkening filigree” of the live oak’s
boughs. Naïve claims to dominance give way to this elegant entwining, itself
yielding to the day’s decline. Moore turns visionary at the end of the poem,
but she first locates spirit in the minute particularity of the sparrow’s “ecstatic
burst of joy.” This precisely identified “caraway-seed- / spotted sparrow” that
“wakes up seven minutes sooner than the lark” may offer a hope more
explicable to the religious Moore than it was to Hardy in “The Darkling
Thrush.” The sparrow also reminds us of mortality and heralds the finale:

The live oak’s darkening filigree

of undulating boughs, the etched

solidity of a cypress indivisible

from the now aged English hackberry,

become with lost identity,

part of the ground, as sunset flames increasingly

against the leaf-chiseled

blackening ridge of green; while clouds, expanding above

the town’s assertiveness, dwarf it, dwarf arrogance

that can misunderstand

importance; and

are to the child an intimation of what glory is.

This “indivisible” is not yet the achievement of liberty and justice for all, or
a Wordsworthian memory of celestial glory. Throughout the poem Moore
has presented Virginia as a hodgepodge, an “inconsistent flower bed,”
despite the passion for monoculture of those who thought they held
“dominion” over it. The natural cypress and the hackberry, like the historical
Indian and the colonist, and indeed nature and man together, become
“indivisible” because intertwined in a continual struggle for dominance and
survival. And as mutability and mortality rule all living orders and entities,
they “become with lost identity, / part of the ground.” The imagery of this
poem has been structured on a principle of incongruity and intermixture.
The “etched solidity” of historical memory and even of nature becomes a
fading outline. Here all colors darken, and all proportions are dwarfed. John
Slatin is undoubtedly correct to hear Wordsworth in these lines, and thus an