A Place for the Genuine

I read The Paper Nautilus first. The title caught my eye because nautili fascinate me and I am rather fond of Jules Verne. This poem has nothing to do with the main portion of my blog post, since it was not assigned in the syllabus. I mention it only to illustrate that Marianne Moore, for me, inspires a broader exploration of her poetry than is required by the class assignments. Her poetry is just what she says it ought to be:

“the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand

genuine,”

and as she concludes, I am interested. Moore’s poetry examines the “phenomena” of life, such as mortality and the human mind, in a manner both skillful and intelligible that helps the contemptuous reader see “beyond all this fiddle” and into the heart of what is genuine.

In What Are Years?, Moore ponders the topic of mortality. She questions the nature of guilt and innocence, and the place courage occupies in humanity.

“He sees deep and is glad,
Who accedes to mortality,”

she decides, but this is not a morbid fixation on the inevitability of death. In the next line, the thought continues:

“and in his imprisonment rises

upon himself as

the sea in a chasm…

So he who strongly feels,

behaves.”

Moore is advocating the acceptance of death as an earthly boundary, in contrast to the denial of death, or to an attitude of despondency. Death will come, the bars of the cage exist, and the sea cannot escape the chasm. However, the existence of these boundaries does not negate the responsibility of birds, oceans, and mankind to act in the way they were designed to act.

We, as humans, cannot truly live if we attempt to deny death, or if we allow death to stand as a conqueror over us. The bars of the cage, the presence of death, cannot truthfully be described as satisfying, but joy is just as real as death, and can be found in the midst of death. We must acknowledge death and its limited power without despairing. Our own “mighty singing” in the face of death is an affirmation of life, of the existence of both mortality and eternity.

Moore reflects on the human mind in The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing. In the course of the 36-line poem, she compares the mind to, among other things, an insect’s wing, a falling gyroscope, and the compositions of Domenico Scarlatti (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iw46wMNhWo). The comparisons Moore makes address the swiftly moving functions of the brain—flickers of thought like inconsistencies in sonatas and the brief “fire in the dove-neck’s iridescence.” The mind is also compared to an awl, a sharp tool often used for boring holes in leather, and as an agent that tears mist and veil from the heart. So to Moore, not only does the mind flicker quickly from thing to thing, it also has the ability to penetrate and stir the heart.

Moore claims that the mind exists in order and “unconfusion,” despite its rapid and confused function. The order of the mind comes from its pattern of interconnection like the katydid’s wing and from its own “conscientious inconsistency.” Thus, even in the seemingly disorganized working of the human mind, Moore emphasizes the form that exists, in the mind’s consistency of changefulness.

Marianne Moore wrote for understanding, of

“hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must,”

of common “phenomena,” baseball, kiwi birds, and things that unite humanity. She wrote openly of death and difficult questions. Her poetry displays both complex patterns of rhyme and of life that, while not always obvious, are well worth discovering.

As one English student to another, the rest of Moore's poems in the anthology are more than worth the time it takes to read them.