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In Honor and Memory of Fr. Pierre Demers (談德義神父 1921 - 2002)
Concepts
She belonged to no school of philosophy but her mind was naturally religious and for her, as for T.S. Eliot, there was no satisfactory explanation of the world without transcendence. The world and all the creatures in it are a wonder, though often desecrated by man, and the very wonder leads the mind upwards towards eternal values. She would say:“The power of the visible is the invisible.”She belonged to the tradition of Blake for whom imagination was the faculty that could perceive the invisible beyond the visible. But for Blake the invisible to other men was a blinding light to him; to Marianne Moore it is only a hint, a suggestion. Her poems give all their most attractive lines to the visible, and find in the close observation of details indications of a reality behind them.“Rigorists”brings details on the reindeer, even the number of miles it can run in an hour, but it ends up with innuendoes that for the Alaskan Eskimos the reindeer is a more fitting symbol of the Savior than the lamb of God. In the very shape of the pangolin she sees suggestion of a Gothic Cathedral and by implication, the world of faith, hope and charity.
What the poet thus sees with his imagination is objectively real. She was a literalist of the imagination; looking at the details of the world, at toads her imagination could see them as part of the eternal garden in which they had their place, their meaning, and thus their beauty. Each one is a color of the prism reflecting original light.
Let the reader who wishes follow her in all her visions; if he doesn’t there’s enough of nature and beauty in her poems to satisfy him. Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams for whom the invisible was nonsense, were great admirers of her. So was T.S. Eliot for whom transcendance was all.
Diction
Her concepts were nothing new; her technique was. Her contribution to modern poetry is her use of words. Her diction shifts with ease from everyday words and turns of phrase to sudden scientific terms and classical expressions. In“Rigorists”she ways that the reindeer has“a neck like edelweiss or lion’s foot,－leontopodium more exactly.”In“The Pangolin”this near artichoke is Leonardo’s, da Vinci’s replica. She delighted not only in her own words, but in the words of others she had read or heard, and she quoted freely, careful in inserting her quotations between inverted commas, giving the exact references in notes at the end of her poems.“I’ve always felt that if a thing had been said in the very best way, how can you say it better.”For her words, her own or others’, had the power of unifying the most disparate experience－what one had read, seen, heard, felt, or thought.
Rhyme
The early poems use rhymes quite frequently; the later ones only occasionally and for special effect, like giving a solid core to a stanza. When her rhymes were frequent, Marianne Moore deliberately alternated unstressed, unimportant words with stressed, important ones. In an early poem called“The Fish”she writes:
Opening and shutting itself like
an
Injured fan.
Where“an”rhyming with“fan” is slurred over as a grammatical connection rather than a word carrying meaning. Sometimes she would rhyme a stressed syllable with an unstressed one, as in“An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle…”:
the fish
Whose scales turn aside the sun’s sword with their
polish.
More remarkably, and to the annoyance of many of her critics, she would split a word at the end of the line in order to form rhyme with an inside syllable of a word.“In the Days of Prismatic Colour”abounds in such tricks:
that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it always has been－
or,
－at the antipodes from the initial great truths.“Part of it was crawling, part of it was about to crawl….”
Instead of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables as in traditional meter, Marianne Moore rather uses stressed and unstressed rhymes.
Mind and Craft
The selection of Marianne Moore’s poetry offered in this Study Guide covers her life’s work.“Poetry”is one of her early poems which appeared in Poems of 1921.“An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle . . .”belongs to Observations (1924);“In the Days of Prismatic Colour,”“No Swan So Fine,”and“The Frigate Pelican”to Selected Poems (1935);“The Pangolin”to The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936);“Rigorists”was written in 1940, and“In Distrust of Merits”in 1944.
The selections are arranged according to topics.“Poetry”and“In the Days of Prismatic Colour”deal with the art of poetry;“An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle”and“No Swan So Fine”with good and bad art;“The Frigate Pelican,”“The Pangolin,”and“Rigorists”with animals;“In Distrust of Merits”deals directly with man’s guilt in war. It is her most popular poem and she was asked to read it in all her public readings.
Tone
The effect of all these innovations, combining the ordinary word with the learned, the unstressed rhyme with the strongly stressed, the syllable count, is to create a tone of careful, fastidious conversation of a lady who has seen much, heard much, read much, thought much, and wishes to be as precise, as accurate as possible, in communicating her experience. Whether Marianne Moore’s poetry is durable or not, only future generations will decide. But surely there is enough freshness and originality in it to give pleasure to many generations to come.
Verse
Her first collections contain free verse and traditional verse, but the most remarkable poems were those which did away with the old way of writing verse. She used the syllabic count instead of meter (iamb, trochee, anapest . . .). For instance,“An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle . . .”follows the traditional iambic rhythm with regular stanzas well divided one from the other.“In the Days of Prismatic Colour”the traditional rhythm has gone and is replaced by the number of syllables instead of feet. The annotations of this Study Guide gives as exact a count of syllables as can be worked out from the text, showing a repetition of the same number of syllables in corresponding lines from stanza to stanza in the early poems, but becoming more irregular as Marianne Moore became more adept with this technique.
In her mind the stanza was the rhythmic unit, not the line, and in later poems she writes run-on stanzas as traditional poets used to write run-on lines. The effect of this use of verse is a conversational tone that tries to capture the rhythms and accents of ordinary speech.
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