Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 41... who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment, rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm ...Who does this, we are told, “sees deep and is glad.” Years are also, by the
nature of the case, steps from something to something. And to indicate a
curve of development from the earlier volume, we might recall this same
theme (of the rising water) as it was treated previously. I refer to a poem,
“Sojourn in the Whale,” which, beginning on the theme, “Trying to open
locked doors with a sword,” had likewise talked of Ireland. It is addressed to
“you,” a “you” who has heard men say: “she will become wise and will be
forced to give / in. Compelled by experience, she / will turn back; water seeks
its own level.” Whereat... you
have smiled. ‘Water in motion is far
from level.’ You have seen it, when obstacles happened to bar
the path, rise automatically.In the earlier poem, the figure was used defensively, even
oppositionally. It is a tactic not common in Miss Moore’s verse; as against the
dialectician’s morality of eristic, she shows a more feminine preference for
the sheer ostracizing of the enemy, refuting by silence—disagreement
implying the respect of intimacy, as in her poem on “Marriage,” wittily
appraising the “fight to be affectionate,” she quotes, “No truth can be fully
known until it has been tried by the tooth of disputation.”
(When Miss Moore was editor of The Dial,her ideal number, as
regards the reviews and articles of criticism, would I think have been one
in which all good books got long favorable reviews, all middling books
got short favorable reviews, and all books deserving of attack were
allowed to go without mention. One can imagine how such a norm could
be reached either charitably, through stress upon appreciation as motive,
or not so charitably, by way of punishment, as when Miss Moore observes
in “Spenser’s Ireland”: “Denunciations do not affect the culprit: nor
blows, but it / is torture to him not to be spoken to.” We need not decide
between these motives in all cases, since they can comfortably work in
unison.)
In contrast with the “oppositional” context qualifying the figure of the