Modern American Poetry

Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 47

esthetic credo, or commenting on literary doctrines and methods, there is
one, “To a Snail,” beginning:

If ‘compression is the first grace of style,’

you have it. Contractility is a virtue

as modesty is a virtue.

And this equating of an esthetic value with a moral one is summed up by
locating the principle of style “in the curious phenomenon of your occipital
horn.”
In her poem on the butterfly (What Are Years,p. 17), the mood of
tentativeness that had been compressed within the term “contractility”
reveals its significant narrative equivalents. As befits the tentative, or
contractile, it is a poem of jeopardy, tracing a tenuous relationship between
a butterfly (“half deity half worm,” “last of the elves”) and a nymph (“dressed
in Wedgewood blue”), with light winds (even a “zephyr”) to figure the
motives of passion. Were not the course of a butterfly so intrinsically akin to
the “inconsequential ease” and “drover-like tenacity” of Miss Moore’s own
versa-tilities, one might not have much hope for a poem built about this
theme (reminiscent of many musical Papillons—perhaps more than a theme,
perhaps a set idiom, almost a form). Here, with the minute accuracy of
sheerly “objectivist” description, there is a subtle dialectic of giving and
receiving, of fascinations and releases—an interchange of delicately shaded
attitudes. In this realm, things reached for will evade, but will follow the
hand as it recedes.
Through the tracery of flight, there are two striking moments of stasis,
each the termination of a course: one when “the butterfly’s tobacco-brown
unglazed / china eyes and furry countenance confront / the nymph’s large
eyes”—and the second when, having broken contact with the nymph’s
“controlled agitated glance,” the “fiery tiger-horse” (at rest, but poised
against the wind, “chest arching / bravely out”) is motivated purely by
relation to the zephyr alone. The poem concludes by observing that this
“talk” between the animal and the zephyr “was as strange as my
grandmother’s muff.”
I have called it a poem of jeopardy. (When butterfly and nymph
confront each other, “It is Goya’s scene of the tame magpie faced / by
crouching cats.”) It is also a poem of coquetry (perhaps our last poem of
coquetry, quite as this butterfly was the last of the elves—coquetry now
usually being understood as something that comes down like a ton of brick).^3
The tentativeness, contractility, acquires more purely the theme of