Poems

Several of these poems appeared in The Egoist;
others in The Dial, Others and Contact.

CONTENTS

POEMS

BY MARIANNE MOORE

PEDANTIC LITERALIST

Prince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost, white torch—“with pow’r to say unkind things with kindness, and the most irritating things in the midst of love and tears,” you invite destruction.

You are like the meditative man with the perfunctory heart; its carved cordiality ran to and fro at first, like an inlaid and roy’l immutable production;

then afterward “neglected to be painful” and “deluded him with loitering formality, doing its duty as if it did it not,” presenting an obstruction

to the motive that it served. What stood erect in you, has withered. A little “palm-tree of turned wood” informs your once spontaneous core in its immutable reduction.

TO A STEAM ROLLER

The illustration is nothing to you without the application. You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

Sparkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block. Were not “impersonal judgment in æsthetic matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you

might fairly achieve it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS
PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT

With an elephant to ride upon—“with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,” she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes. Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose in the shape of an elephant, she clambered up and chose to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows of æsthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose them ephemera, and have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows, which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios.

THOSE VARIOUS SCALPELS

Those various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes struck from thin glass successively at random—the inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two fighting-cocks head to head in stone—like sculptured scimitars re- peating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes, flowers of ice

and snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships: your raised hand an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux, with regard to which guides are so affirmative: your other hand

a bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from Persia and the fractional magnificence of Florentine goldwork—a collection of half a dozen little objects made fine with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue: a lemon, a

pear and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a magnificent square cathedral of uniform and at the same time, diverse appearance—a species of vertical vineyard rustling in the storm of conventional opinion. Are they weapons or scalpels? Whetted

to brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is su- perior to opportunity, these things are rich instruments with which to experiment but surgery is not tentative: why dissect destiny with instruments which are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny itself?

FEED ME, ALSO, RIVER GOD,

lest by diminished vitality and abated vigilance, I become food for crocodiles—for that quicksand of gluttony which is legion. It is there—close at hand— on either side of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride

and stoutness of heart: “The bricks are fallen down, we will build with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down, we will change to cedars”? I am not ambitious to dress stones, to renew forts, nor to match my value in action, against their ability to catch

up with arrested prosperity. I am not like them, indefatigable, but if you are a god you will not discriminate against me. Yet—if you may fulfil none but prayers dressed as gifts in return for your gifts—disregard the request.

TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ON TAGORE

It is made clear by the phrase, even the mood—by virtue of which he says

the thing he thinks—that it pays, to cut gems even in these conscience-less days;

but the jewel that always outshines ordinary jewels, is your praise.

HE MADE THIS SCREEN

not of silver nor of coral, but of weatherbeaten laurel.

Here, he introduced a sea uniform like tapestry;

here, a fig-tree; there, a face; there, a dragon circling space—

designating here, a bower; there, a pointed passion-flower.