700
PARTISAN REVIEW
I should, I confess,
like to have a talk with one of them about excess,
and armour's undermining modesty
instead of innocent depravity.
A mirror-of-steel uninsistence should countenance
co.ntinence,
objectified and not by chance,
there in its frame of circumstance
of innocence and altitude
in an unhackneyed .rolitude.
There
is
the tarnish; and there, the imperishable wish.
One doesn't need to say that this is one of Miss Moore's best poems.
Some of the others are, I think, "The Pangolin"; "Propriety" (if ever
a poem was perfect "Propriety" is; how
could
a poem end better?);
"The Mind is an Enchanting Thing"; "Melancthon"; "Elephants"; the
first half of "The Jerboa," that poem called "Too Much"; "Spenser's
Ireland"; "Bird-Witted"; "Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle"; "In Dis–
trust of Merits"; "What Are Years"; "The Steeple-Jack"; "The Hero";
"Those Various Scalpels"; "Marriage"; "His Shield"; and "New York."
"Virginia Britannica" is a beautiful poem that some of the time gets lost
in
the maze of itself; "Nevertheless" and "No Swan So Fine" are two
of the most beautiful of the slighter poems; "Camellia Sabina" is–
but I must stop.
Miss Moore's
Collected Poems
is a neat little book, with all its
verse tucked into a hundred and thirty-eight pages; a reader could,
with
a reference to size, rather easily put her into her minor place, and say–
as I heard a good or even great critic say-that it is easy to see the
difference between a poet like this and a major poet. It is; is so easy
that Miss Moore's real readers, who share with her some of her "love
of doing hard things," won't want to do it-not for a century or two, at
least, and then only with an indifferent, "I suppose so." There is so much
of a life concentrated into, objectified on, these hard, tender, serious
pages, there is such wit and truth and moral imagination inhabiting this
small space, that we are surprised at possibility, and marvel allover
again at the conditions of human making and being. What Miss Moore's
best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it "comes into and steadies
the soul," so that the reader feels himself "a life prisoner, but reconciled."
