THOUGHTS ABOUT MARIANNE MOORE
699
that in them morality
is
simpler and more beautiful than it is in life,
and we feel our attachment to it strengthened.
"Spine-swine (the edgehog misnamed hedgehog) ," echidna, echino–
derm, rhino, the spine pig or porcupine--"everything is battle-dressed";
so the late poem named "His Shield" begins. But by then Miss Moore
has learned to put no trust in armour, says, "Pig-fur won't do, I'll wrap/
myself in salamander-skin like Presbyter John," the "inextinguishable
salamander" who "revealed/ a formula safer than/ an armourer's: the
power of relinquishing/ what one would keep," and whose "shield was his
humility." And "What
Are
Years" begins "All are naked, none are safe,"
and speaks of overcoming our circumstances by accepting them; just as
"Nevertheless" talks not about armour, not about weapons, but about
what is behind or above them both: "The weak overcomes its/ menace,
the strong over-/ comes itself. What is there/ like fortitude? What sap/
went through that little thread / to make the cherry red!" All this is a
wonderfully appealing, a disarming triumph; yet not so appealing, so
disarming, so amused and imaginative and doubtful and tender, as her
last look at armour, the last poem of her
Collected Poems.
It is called
"Armour's Undermining Modesty"; I don't entirely understand it, but
what I understand I love, and what I don't understand I love almost
better. I will quote most of the last part of it:
No wonder we hate poetry,
and stars and harps and the new moon. If tributes cannot
be implicit,
give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine,
the cork oak acorn grown in Spain;
the pale-ale-eyed impersonal look
which the sales-placard gives the bock beer buck.
What
is
more precise than precision? Illusion.
Knights we've kncn»n,
like those familiar
now unfamiliar knights who sought the Grail
...
. . .
did not let self bar
their usefulness to others who were
different. Though Mars is excessive
in being preventive,
heroes need not write an ordinall of attributes to enumerate
what they hate.
