THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE
697
uncut, but places them in an unimaginably complicated and difficult
setting, to sparkle under the Northern Lights of her continual irony.
Nobody has ever been better at throwing away a line than this Miss
Facing-Both-Ways, this La Rochefoucauld who has at last rid himself of
La Rochefoucauld, and can disabusedly say about man: "he loves
him–
self so much,/ he can permit himself/no rival in that love ... " and
about woman: "one is not rich but poor/ when one can always seem
so right ... " and about both: "What can one do for them-/ these
savages/ condemned to disaffect/ all those who are not visionaries/ alert
to undertake the silly task/of making people noble?" All this is from
"Marriage," the most ironic poem, surely, written by man or woman;
and one reads it with additional pleasure because it was written by the
woman who was later to say, so tenderly and magically: "What is more
precise than precision? Illusion."
Along with precision she loved difficulty. She said about James
and others: "It is the love of doing hard things/ that rebuffed and wore
them out-a public out of sympathy with neatness./ Neatness of finish!
Neatness of finish!" Miss Moore almost despairs of us in one poem,
until she comes across some evidence which shows that, in spite of
everything, "we are precisionists"; and Santa Claus's reindeer, in spite
of cutwork ornaments and fur like eidelweiss, are still "rigorists," so
she names the poem that for them. How much she cares for useless
pains, difficulties undertaken for their own sake! Difficulty is the chief
technical principle of her poetry, almost. (For sureness of ex:ecution,
for originality of technical accomplishment, her poetry is unsurpassed
in our time; Auden says almost that and the author of
'~Under
Sirius"
ought to know. Some of her rhymes and rhythms and phrases look
quite undiscoverable.) Such unnecessary pains, such fantastic difficulties!
Yet with manners, arts, sports, hobbies, they are always there-so per–
haps they are necessary after all.
But some of her earlier poems do seem "averted into perfection."
You can't put the sea into a bottle unless you leave it open at the end,
and sometimes hers is closed at both ends, closed into one of those crys–
tal spheres in which snowflakes are falling onto a tiny house, the house
where the poet lives-or says that she lives. Sometimes Miss Moore
writes about armour and wears it, the most delicately chased, live–
seeming scale-armour anybody ever put together: armour hammered
out of fern seed, woven from the silk of invisible cloaks-for it is al–
most, though not quite, as invisible as it pretends to be, and is when
