The mind is an enchanting thing by marianne moore

Critical Reading -

MARIANNE MOORE 1887–1972

Marianne Moore was a radically inventive modernist, greatly admired by other poets of her generation, and a powerful influence on such later writers as Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Richard Wilbur. Like her forerunner Emily Dickinson, she made of the traditional and constraining “woman’s place” a protected space to do her own work, but unlike Emily Dickinson, she was a deliberate professional, publishing her poems regularly, in touch with the movements and artists of her time. She was famous for the statement that poetry, though departing from the real world, re-created that world within its forms: poems were “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Her earlier work is distinguished by great precision of observation and language, ornate diction, and complex stanza and prosodic patterns. Her later work is much less ornate; and in revising her poetry, she tended to simplify and shorten.

She was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. In her childhood, the family was abandoned by her father; they moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where—in a pattern common among both men and women writers of this period—her mother supported them by teaching school. She went to Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1909; traveled with her mother in England and France in 1911; and returned to Carlisle to teach at the U.S. Indian School between 1911 and 1915. Having begun to write poetry in college, she was first published in 1915 and 1916 in such little magazines as the Egoist (an English magazine with which Ezra Pound was associated), Poetry, and Others (a journal for experimental writing with which William Carlos Williams was associated, founded by Alfred Kreymbourg, a New York poet and playwright). Through these magazines she entered the avant-garde and modernist world. She never married; in 1916 she and her mother merged their household with that of Moore’s brother, a Presbyterian minister, and they moved with him to a parish in Brooklyn, New York. There Moore was close to literary circles and Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers, then a Brooklyn baseball team, had their home stadium. Moore was a lifelong fan.

While holding jobs in schools and libraries, Moore worked at her poetry. A volume called simply Poems was brought out in London in 1921 without her knowledge through the efforts of two women friends who were writers, H.D. (whom she had met at Bryn Mawr) and Bryher. Another book, Observations, appeared in 1924 and won the Dial Award. In 1925 she began to work as editor of the Dial, continuing in this influential position until the magazine was disbanded in 1929. Her reviews and editorial judgments were greatly respected, although her preference for elegance and decorum over sexual frankness was not shared by some of the writers—Hart Crane and James Joyce among them—whose work she rejected or published only after they revised it.

As a critic of poetry Moore wrote numerous essays—her collected prose makes a larger book than her collected poetry. She believed that poets usually undervalued prose; “precision, economy of statement, logic” were features of good prose that could “liberate” the imagination, she wrote. In writing about animals she was able to take advantage of two different prose modes that attracted her—scientific and historical description. Her poems were an amalgam of her own observation and her readings, which she acknowledged by quotation marks and often by footnotes as well. In Moore’s writings, the reader almost never finds the conventional poetic allusions that invoke a great tradition and assert the present poet’s place in it. Moore’s poems typically juxtapose disparate areas of human knowledge and combine the elevated with the ordinary. Her notebooks suggest, for example, that the image of the kiwi bird in “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing” emerged from a sketch Moore made of a shoe-polish tin; she praises the human mind both for its capacity to be mesmerized by the small facets of its ordinary environment and for its changeful, self-undoing freedom.

Against the exactitude and “unbearable accuracy” (as she put it) of her language, Moore counterpointed a complex texture of stanza form and versification. Pound worked with the clause, Williams with the line, H.D. with the image, Stevens and Stein with the word; Moore, unlike these modernist contemporaries, used the entire stanza as the unit of her poetry. Her stanza is composed of regular lines counted by syllables, instead of by stress, which are connected in an elaborate verse pattern, and in which rhymes often occur at unaccented syllables and even in the middle of a word. The effects she achieves are complex and subtle; she was often called the “poet’s poet” of her day because the reader needed expert technical understanding to recognize what she was doing.

Nevertheless, her poetry also had a thematic, declarative edge which the outbreak of World War II led her to expand. In “The Paper Nautilus,” she drew on her characteristic vein of natural observation in order to will that a threatened civilization be protected by love. At the same time, Moore was keenly aware of her distance, as a civilian and a woman, from direct experience of combat; “In Distrust of Merits,” her most famous poem of the war, reflects Moore’s struggle (like Emily Dickinson’s during the Civil War) to adopt an ethically responsible relationship toward the fighting she could know only through newsreels and photographs.

Moore received the Bollingen, National Book, and Pulitzer awards for Collected Poems in 1951. Throughout her lifetime she continued to revise, expand, cut, and select, so that from volume to volume a poem with the same name may be a very different work. Her Complete Poems of 1967 represented her poetry as she wanted it remembered, but a full understanding of Moore calls for reading all of the versions of her changing work.

Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

discovers in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

they are

useful. When they become so derivative as to become

unintelligible,

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand: the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

that feels a flea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician--

nor is it valid

to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make

a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

result is not poetry,

nor till the poets among us can be

“literalists of

the imagination”--above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"

shall we have

it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand

genuine, you are interested in poetry.

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.

What Are Years?
What is our innocence,

what is our guilt? All are

naked, none is safe. And whence

is courage: the unanswered question,

the resolute doubt,—

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that

in misfortune, even death,

encourages others

and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He

sees deep and is glad, who

accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment rises

upon himself as

the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

in its surrendering

finds its continuing.

So 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 lowly

thing, how pure a thing is joy.

This is mortality,

this is eternity.

The Paper Nautilus
For authorities whose hopes

are shaped by mercenaries?

Writers entrapped by

teatime fame and by

commuters’ comforts? Not for these

the paper nautilus

constructs her thin glass shell.

Giving her perishable

souvenir of hope, a dull

white outside and smooth

edged inner surface

glossy as the sea, the watchful

maker of it guards it

day and night; she scarcely

eats until the eggs are hatched.

Buried eight-fold in her eight

arms, for she is in

a sense a devil

fish, her glass ram’shorn-cradled freight

is hid but is not crushed;

as Hercules, bitten

by a crab loyal to the hydra,

was hindered to succeed,

the intensively

watched eggs coming from

the shell free it when they are freed,—

leaving its wasp-nest flaws

of white on white, and close

laid Ionic chiton-folds

like the lines in the mane of

a Parthenon horse,

round which the arms had

wound themselves as if they knew love

is the only fortress

strong enough to trust to.

The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing
is an enchanted thing

like the glaze on a

katydid-wing

subdivided by sun

till the nettings are legion.

Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;

like the apteryx awl

as a beak, or the

kiwi’s rain-shawl

of haired feathers, the mind

feeling its way as though blind,

walks along with its eyes on the ground.

It has memory’s ear

that can hear without

having to hear.

Like the gyroscope’s fall,

truly unequivocal

because trued by regnant certainty,

it is a power of

strong enchantment. It

is like the dove

neck animated by

sun; it is memory’s eye;

it’s conscientious inconsistency.

It tears off the veil; tears

the temptation, the

mist the heart wears,

from its eye—if the heart

has a face; it takes apart

dejection. It’s fire in the dove-neck’s

iridescence; in the

inconsistencies

of Scarlatti.

Unconfusion submits

its confusion to proof; it’s

not a Herod’s oath that cannot change.

In Distrust of Merits
Strengthened to live, strengthened to die for

medals and positioned victories?

They’re fighting, fighting, fighting the blind

man who thinks he sees,—

who cannot see that the enslaver is

enslaved; the hater, harmed. O shining O

firm star, O tumultuous

ocean lashed till small things go

as they will, the mountainous

wave makes us who look, know

depth. Lost at sea before they fought! O

star of David, star of Bethlehem,

O black imperial lion

of the Lord—emblem

of a risen world—be joined at last, be

joined. There is hate’s crown beneath which all is

death; there’s love’s without which none

is king; the blessed deeds bless

the halo. As contagion

of sickness makes sickness,

contagion of trust can make trust. They’re

fighting in deserts and caves, one by

one, in battalions and squadrons;

they’re fighting that I

may yet recover from the disease, My

Self; some have it lightly; some will die. “Man’s

wolf to man” and we devour

ourselves. The enemy could not

have made a greater breach in our

defenses. One pilot-

ing a blind man can escape him, but

Job disheartened by false comfort knew

that nothing can be so defeating

as a blind man who

can see. O alive who are dead, who are

proud not to see, O small dust of the earth

that walks so arrogantly

trust begets power and faith is

an affectionate thing. We

vow, we make this promise

to the fighting—it’s a promise—“We’ll

never hate black, white, red, yellow, Jew,

Gentile, Untouchable.” We are

not competent to

make our vows. With set jaw they are fighting,

fighting, fighting,—some we love whom we know,

some we love but know not—that

hearts may feel and not be numb.

It cures me; or am I what

I can’t believe in? Some

in snow, some on crags, some in quicksands,

little by little, much by much, they

are fighting fighting fighting that where

there was death there may

be life. “When a man is prey to anger,

he is moved by outside things; when he holds

his ground in patience patience

patience, that is action or

beauty,” the soldier’s defense

and hardest armor for

the fight. The world’s an orphans’ home. Shall

we never have peace without sorrow?

without pleas of the dying for

help that won’t come? O

quiet form upon the dust, I cannot

look and yet I must. If these great patient

dyings—all these agonies

and wound bearings and bloodshed—

can teach us how to live, these

dyings were not wasted.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron,

iron is iron till it is rust.

There never was a war that was

not inward; I must

fight till I have conquered in myself what

causes war, but I would not believe it.

I inwardly did nothing.

O Iscariot-like crime!

Beauty is everlasting

and dust is for a time.