‘Making, Knowing, Judging’, Auden’s trinity, ‘an insight of casual genius’ according to Heaney, seems particularly applicable to the work of Marianne Moore. And of these three virtues, with Marianne Moore, the greatest, I think, is knowing. ‘The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing’, one of her most brilliant poems, emblematic of her particular respect for the intellect, ends with the famous ‘it’s/not a Herod’s oath that cannot change.’ She did not, in fact, change her mind about much philosophically. She did, however, like Lowell, constantly refine and redefine her own work. Lines were often erased – silenced. ‘We All Know It’: ‘That silence is best.’ Do we? ‘A strange idea that one must say what one thinks in order to be understood.’
‘Silence’, the title this time, opens with the conversational ‘My father used say,/‘Superior people never make long visits’. A remark made by a visiting professor is juxtaposed with Edmund Burke’s eighteenth-century invitation to someone he’d met in a bookshop: to ‘Make my house your inn.’ Add Moore’s coolly subversive last line and we glimpse the subtle art of being either guest or host. I would visit Miss Moore with some trepidation and would certainly try to curb the intensity with which I speak.
‘To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity’ is possibly the best putdown in poetry. Moore, evidently a brilliant conversationalist, enjoyed the elegant thrust and parry of intellectual debate. The blunt instrument of aggression, however, which aims to put ‘My flesh beneath your feet’, leads to a contemptuous withdrawal. She stood up to – that most difficult act of honour – as well as for her friends. Perhaps this quality was key to the great respect in which she was held by her contemporaries. It’s also, perhaps, a slightly thorny quality. In ‘Roses Only’ the thorn garners exquisite attention – ‘compelling audience to/the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently,/your thorns are the best part of you.’
The clever ‘I Like A Horse but I Have a Fellow Feeling for A Mule’ should be treasured and not only for its title. I would guess that Moore had a stubborn streak. Guessing would no doubt meet with disapproval; she had an admirable respect for facts. Moore expresses her gratitude to the mule in measured, careful beats – like him, never going too far; ‘he skirts the treeless precipice.’ Moore had a ‘fellow feeling’ for most animals and gave each of them their due. Her masterpiece,
‘The Pangolin’, deserves an essay in itself. Alas!
‘Spenser’s Ireland’ cuts to the soul of Auden’s ‘mad Ireland’ and Yeats’s country of the ‘fanatic heart’. She once said, ‘I am of Irish descent – wholly Celt.’ Despite the genetic inheritance – elective to some extent – her poetic restraint is not necessarily in the Irish tradition. Pound believed her poetry to be distinctively American. He’s right, of course. Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, was burned out of his home, Castle Kilcolman, during the insurrection of 1598 and though there is no reference to this event in the poem certain lines have a resonance. ‘The Irish say your trouble is their/trouble and your/joy their joy? I wish/I could believe it. I’m dissatisfied, I’m Irish.’ Enough said!
In ‘We Call Them the Brave’ there are no heroics. It’s not her style. ‘Better not euphemize the grave.’ She knows how death plays out in the ‘fashionable town’. Even now, the warning resounds: what will happen ‘when no one will fight for anything/and there’s nothing of worth to save’?