698
PARTISAN REVIEW
most nearly invisible most nearly protecting. One is often conscious
while reading the poetry, the earlier poetry especially, of a contained
removed tone; of the cool precise untouchedness, untouchableness,
of fastidious rectitude; of innate merits and their obligations, the ob–
ligations of ability and intelligence and aristocracy-for if aristocracy
has always worn armour, it has also always lived dangerously: the as–
sociation of aristocracy and danger and obligation is as congenial to
Miss Moore as is the rest of the "flower and fruit of all that noted
superiority." Some of her poems have the manners, or manner of la–
dies who learned a little before birth not to mention money, who
neither
point
nor touch, and who scrupulously abstain from the mixed,
live vulgarity of life. "You sit still if, whenever you move, something
jingles," Pound quotes an officer of the old school as saying. There is
the same aristocratic abstention behind the restraint, the sitting still as
long as it can, of this poetry. "The passion for setting people right is in
itself an afflictive disease./ Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best,"
she says in an early poem; and says, broadly and fretfully for her,
"We
are sick of the earth,/ sick of the pig-sty, wild geese and wild men."
At such moments she is a little disquieting (she speaks for everybody,
in the best of the later poems, in a way in which she once could not);
one feels like quoting against her her own, "As if a death-mask could
replace/ Life's faulty excellence," and blurting that life-masks have
their disadvantages too. We are uncomfortable-or else too comfort–
able--in a world in which feeling, affection, charity, are so entirely
divorced from sexuality and power, the bonds of the flesh. In this world
of the poems there are many thoughts, things, animals, sentiments, moral
insights; but money and passion and power, the brute fact that
works,
whether or not correctly, whether or not precisely-the whole Medusa–
face of the world: these are gone. In the poem called "Marriage"
marriage, with sex, children, and elementary economic existence missing,
is
an absurd unlikely affair, one that wouldn't fool a child; and, of
course, children don't get married. But this reminds me how un-childish,
un-young, Miss Moore's poems always are; she is like one of those earlier
ages that dressed children as adults, and sent them off to college at
the age of eleven-though the poems dress their children in animal-skins,
and send them out into the wilderness to live happily ever after. Few
poets have as much moral insight as Miss Moore; yet in her poems
morality usually
is
simplified into self-abnegation, and Gauguin always
seems to stay home with his family-which is right, but wrong in a way,
too. Poems which celebrate morality choose more between good and
evil, and less between lesser evils and greater goods, than life does, so
