Read an Excerpt
Observations
Poems
By Marianne Moore, Linda Leavell Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1925 Marianne Moore
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71361-4
CHAPTER 1
TO AN INTRA-MURAL RAT
You make me think of many men
Once met to be forgot again
Or merely resurrected
In a parenthesis of wit
That found them hastening through it
Too brisk to be inspected.
RETICENCE AND VOLUBILITY
"When I am dead,"
The wizard said,
"I'll look upon the narrow way
And this Dante,
And know that he was right
And he'll delight
In my remorse,
Of course."
"When I am dead,"
The student said,
"I shall have grown so tolerant,
I'll find I can't
Laugh at your sorry plight
Or take delight
In your chagrin,
Merlin."
TO A CHAMELEON
Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape vine,
Twine
Your anatomy
Round the pruned and polished stem,
Chameleon.
Fire laid upon
An emerald as long as
The Dark King's massy
One,
Could not snap the spectrum up for food as you have done.
A TALISMAN
Under a splintered mast,
Torn from the ship and cast
Near her hull,
A stumbling shepherd found
Embedded in the ground,
A seagull
Of lapislazuli,
A scarab of the sea,
With wings spread —
Curling its coral feet,
Parting its beak to greet
Men long dead.
TO A PRIZE BIRD
You suit me well, for you can make me laugh,
Nor are you blinded by the chaff
That every wind sends spinning from the rick.
You know to think, and what you think you speak
With much of Samson's pride and bleak
Finality; and none dare bid you stop.
Pride sits you well, so strut, colossal bird.
No barnyard makes you look absurd;
Your brazen claws are staunch against defeat.
INJUDICIOUS GARDENING
If yellow betokens infidelity,
I am an infidel.
I could not bear a yellow rose ill will
Because books said that yellow boded ill,
White promised well;
However, your particular possession —
The sense of privacy
In what you did — deflects from your estate
Offending eyes, and will not tolerate
Effrontery.
FEAR IS HOPE
"No man may him hyde
From Deth holow eyed."
For us two spirits this shall not suffice,
To whom you are symbolic of a plan
Concealed within the heart of man.
Splendid with splendor hid you come, from your Arab abode,
An incandescence smothered in the hand of an astrologer who rode
Before you, Sun — whom you outran,
Piercing his caravan.
Sun, you shall stay
With us. Holiday
And day of wrath shall be as one, wound in a device
Of Moorish gorgeousness, round glasses spun
To flame as hemispheres of one
Great hourglass dwindling to a stem. Consume hostility;
Employ your weapons in this meeting place of surging enmity.
Insurgent feet shall not outrun
Multiplied flames, O Sun.
TO A STRATEGIST
You brilliant Jew,
You bright particular chameleon, you
Regild a shabby fence.
They understood
Your stripes and particolored mind, who could
Begrudge you prominence
And call you cold!
But when has prejudice been glad to hold
A lizard in its hand —
A subtle thing?
To sense fed on a fine imagining,
Sound sense is contraband.
IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH?
Why so desolate?
in phantasmagoria about fishes,
what disgusts you? Could
not all personal upheaval in
the name of freedom, be tabooed?
Is it Nineveh
and are you Jonah
in the sweltering east wind of your wishes?
I myself, have stood
there by the aquarium, looking
at the Statue of Liberty.
A FOOL, A FOUL THING, A DISTRESSFUL LUNATIC
With webs of cool
Chain mail and his stout heart, is not the gander
Mocked, and ignorantly designated yet,
To play the fool?
"Egyptian vultures clean as cherubim,
All ivory and jet," are they most foul?
And nature's child,
That most precocious water bird, the loon — why
Is he foremost in the madman's alphabet;
Why is he styled
In folly's catalogue, distressful lunatic?
TO MILITARY PROGRESS
You use your mind
Like a millstone to grind
Chaff.
You polish it
And with your warped wit
Laugh
At your torso,
Prostrate where the crow
Falls
On such faint hearts
As its god imparts,
Calls
And claps its wings
Till the tumult brings
More
Black minute-men
To revive again,
War
At little cost.
They cry for the lost
Head
And seek their prize
Till the evening sky's
Red.
AN EGYPTIAN PULLED GLASS BOTTLE IN THE SHAPE OF A FISH
Here we have thirst
And patience from the first,
And art, as in a wave held up for us to see
In its essential perpendicularity;
Not brittle but
Intense — the spectrum, that
Spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
Whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish.
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 aesthetic
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 aesthetic 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.
TO A SNAIL
If "compression is the first grace of style,"
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, "a method of conclusions";
"a knowledge of principles,"
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.
"THE BRICKS ARE FALLEN DOWN, WE WILL BUILD WITH HEWN
STONES. THE SYCAMORES ARE CUT DOWN, WE WILL CHANGE TO
CEDARS."
In what sense shall we be able to
secure to ourselves peace and do as they did —
who, when they were not able to rid
themselves of war, cast out fear?
They did not say: "We shall not be brought
into subjection by the naughtiness of the sea;
though we have 'defeated ourselves with
false balances' and laid weapons in the scale,
glory shall spring from in-glory; hail,
flood, earthquake, and famine shall
not intimidate us nor shake the
foundations of our inalienable energy."
GEORGE MOORE
In speaking of "aspiration,"
From the recesses of a pen more dolorous than blackness itself,
Were you presenting us with one more form of imperturbable French drollery,
Or was it self directed banter?
Habitual ennui
Took from you, your invisible hot helmet of anemia
While you were filling your little glass from the decanter
Of a transparent-murky, would-be-truthful "hobohemia" —
And then facetiously
Went off with it? Your soul's supplanter,
The spirit of good narrative, flatters you, convinced that in reporting briefly
One choice incident, you have known beauty other than that of stys, on
Which to fix your admiration.
"NOTHING WILL CURE THE SICK LION BUT TO EAT AN APE"
Perceiving that in the masked ball
attitude, there is a hollowness
that beauty's light momentum can't redeem,
since disproportionate satisfaction anywhere
lacks a proportionate air,
he let us know without offense
by his hands' denunciatory
upheaval, that he despised the fashion
of curing us with an ape — making it his care
to smother us with fresh air.
TO THE PEACOCK OF FRANCE
In "taking charge of your possessions when you saw them," you became a golden jay.
Scaramouche said you charmed his charm away,
But not his color? Yes, his color when you liked.
Of chiseled setting and black-opalescent dye,
You were the jewelry of sense;
Of sense, not license; you but trod the pace
Of liberty in market-place
And court. Molière,
The huggermugger repertory of your first adventure, is your own affair.
"Anchorites do not dwell in theatres," and peacocks do not flourish in a cell.
Why make distinctions? The results were well
When you were on the boards; nor were your triumphs bought
At horrifying sacrifice of stringency.
You hated sham; you ranted up
And down through the conventions of excess;
Nor did the King love you the less
Nor did the world,
In whose chief interest and for whose spontaneous delight, your broad tail was unfurled.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Observations by Marianne Moore, Linda Leavell. Copyright © 1925 Marianne Moore. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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