GLENWAY WESCOTT
405
desire reminded of limitations-who can really transcend them?
And of mortality-how can one escape it?
In
"What Are Years?" there is a still more profound bird,
species unspecified, with a moral at the beginning of the stanza,
and religion at the end:
... he who strongly feels
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up.
Though he is captive
his mighty singing
says satisfaction is a low
thing, how pure a thing
IS
JOY
This is mortality,
this is eternity.
It
is the main formula of our Western mysticism: morality and
eternity identical.
As poets go, as poets of the past went, Miss Moore had never
been unrestrainedly poetical.
It
is a part of our frame of reference
when we think of her as epitomizing modernness in the art. But
despite restraints , I note that she had a great gift for rhapsody–
more than anyone since, let us say, Rilke. She was entitled to use,
and she did use, the o ld tempting interjection "0" - "0" capi–
talized , "0" without the "h" - as in the first of her poems about
the jerboa:
A small desert rat,
and not famous, that
lives without water, has
happy-ness. Abroad seeking food
or at home
in its burrow, the Sahara field–
mouse
has a shining silver house
of sand. 0 rest and
joy, the boundless sand...
" 0 rest and joy, the boundless sand." Ravishing combina–
tion of seven words, eight syllables.
It
is not a line but a line and
a half; it is not an entire sentence; it is not the end of the poem.
