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PARTISAN REVIEW
Marianne Moore is a poet who neatly illustrates many of Auden's
generalizations. Nobody could be more of a virtuoso, yet all her poems,
in that finicky Agag-walking syllabic meter of hers, do have, as wholes,
their touchingly home-made air: like Victorian screens pasted over
with colored cut-out scraps. Miss Moore's poetic objects have primarily
a homely magic for her; gross communication is not her prime purpose.
At a first reading, indeed, of
Like a Bulwark,
one turns helplessly to
the notes: a magpie-nest of phrases from Goldsmith, eighteenth-century
French songs, scraps from the sporting pages, pictures of shells and
children's drawings of jockeys, resounding moral sentences both from
learned books and from campaign speeches. What the devil does it all
add up to? Does anything unify this bric-a-brac apart from its all, dis–
parately, having caught Miss Moore's eye? Then one sees that it is an
elegance in the shell, a tenderness in the child's drawing (a jockey
pulling up his mount to avoid treading on a snail) , an innocent fantasy
in the Goldsmith phrase ("a blue fairy with a train eleven yards long,
supported by porcupines" ) that have attracted her: this is a magpie
with a sense of values. She likes the large, simple, noble statement, too
("poetry . . . must . . . take the risk of a decision") . And, as worked
into the poem, the odd bits and pieces make in fact for Miss Moore's
special kind of precision. The loved thing dies, but the work of art
inspired by it lives forever; that, surely, is the oldest and tiredest of poetic
commonplaces, but Miss Moore freshens it up as:
We don' t like flo wers that do
not wilt; they must die, and nme
she-camel-hairs aid memory.
A living Persian miniaturist, lmami, uses, we learn from the notes, "nine
hairs from a new born she camel and a pencil sharpened to a needle's
point." Miss Moore uses similar tools to present her "real toads in
imaginary gardens" : a sycamore tree-
Against a gun-metal sky
I saw an albino giraffe. Without
leaves to modify,
chamois-white as
said, though partly pied near the base,
it towered where a chain of
stepping-stones lay in a stream nearby
What is such poetry "about," however? (A maxim for the young critic:
never be afraid to ask the crude, obvious, and tactless question!) Has
