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are told; and there is as much brute credulity needed to work up her
states into drama as there is, in Hume, to put impressions together into
the precarious collocations we pretend are things.) In Miss Moore's
poems even the animals' processes are habits, norms, and thus get the
stability and finality of things. All her zoos are Egyptian.
How often Miss Moore writes about things (hers are aesthetic–
moral, not commercial-utilitarian-they persist and reassure) ; or plants
(how can anything bad happen to a plant?); or animals with holes, a
heavy defensive armament, or a massive and herbivorous passivity su–
perior to either the dangers or temptation of aggression (masks, in Yeats'
sense, of Miss Moore). The way of the little jerboa on the sands-at
once True, Beautiful, and Good- she understands; but the little shrew
or weasel, that kills, if it can, two or three dozen animals in a night?
the little larvae feeding on the still-living caterpillar their mother has
paralyzed for them? We are surprised to find Nature, in Miss Moore's
poll of it, so strongly in favor of Morality; but all the results are implicit
in, the sampling-like the
Literary Digest,
she sent postcards to only the
nicer animals. In her poems the lion never eats Androcles-or anything
else except a paste made of rotten apples. The virtuous individual is pre–
cariously, but necessarily and finally, safe; Miss Moore's poetry is one
long set of variations on Socrates'
Nothing can happen to the good man.
Why do her animals never die? Because of the pre-established harmony
in Adam Smith. Both her economic practice and moral theory repeat
wistfully,
Laissez-faire, laissez-alter.
Poor private-spirited citizen, wander–
ing timidly but obliviously among the monoliths of a deadlier age, will
they never let you alone? To us, as we look skyward to the bombers,
this urban Frost, the frequenter of zoos, calls
Culture and morals and
Nature still have truth, seek shelter there;
and this is true; but we forget
it beside the cultured, moral and natural corpse ... At Maidanek the
mice had holes, but a million and a half people had none.
Miss Moore's war poem,
In Distrust of Merits,
has been called the
best war poem so often that it should be treated in detail.
The title is humility, not understanding-she distrusts her own
merits, but trusts, accepts almost as if she were afraid to question, those
of the heroic soldiers of her poem. She does not understand that they
are heroes in the sense that the chimney-sweeps, the factory-children in
the blue books, were heroes: routine loss in the routine business of the
world. She sees them (the recurring triplet is the major theme of the
poem)
fighting fighting fighting;
she does not remember that most of the
people in a war never fight for even a minute-though they
be~
for
years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer,
only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.
Miss Moore thinks of the war in blindingly moral terms. We are
fighting "that where there was death there may be life." This is true, in
