THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE
or as elevated as the Old Testament:
Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast
each with a splendour
which man in all his vileness can1!JOt
set aside; each with an excellence!
...
693
or as morally and rhetorically magnificent as St. Paul, when she says
about man, at the end of the best of all her poems, "The Pangolin":
Un-
ignorant,
modest an,d unemotional, and all emotion,
he has everlasting vigour,
power to grow,
though there are few creatures who can make one
breathe faster and make one erecter.
Not afraid of anything is he,
and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an
obstacle
at every step. Consistent with the
formula-warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and
a few hairs-that
is a mammal; there he sits in his own habitat,
serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always
curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk,
work partly done,
says to the alternating blaze,
"Again the sun!
anew each day,· and new and new and new,
that comes into and steadies my soul."
The reader may feel, "You're certainly quoting a lot." But I have
only begun to quote-or wish that I had; these are just a few of the
things I can't bear not to quote, I haven't yet corne to the things I want
to quote-I may never get to them. But how can I resist telling you
"that one must not borrow a long white beard and tie it on/ and
threaten with the scythe of time the casually curious"? Or say nothing
about the "swan, with swart blind look askance/ and gondoliering legs"
(the "swart blind look askance" makes us not only see, but
also
feel
ourselves into, the swan); or about the jerboa that "stops its gleaning/
