Complete Poems Marianne Moore

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.Discreet behavior is not now the sumof statesmanlike good sense.Thoughit were the incarnation of dead grace?As if a death mask ever could replacelife’s faulty excellence!Slowto remark the steep, too strict proportionof your throne, you’ll see the wrenched distortionof suicidal dreamsgostaggering toward itself and with its billattack its own identity, untilfoe seems friend and friend seemsfoe.POETRYI, too, dislike it.Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discoversinit, after all, a place for the genuine.PEDANTIC LITERALISTPrince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost,white torch—“with power to say unkindthings with kindness, and the mostirritating things in the midst of love andtears,” you invite destruction.You are like the meditative manwith the perfunctory heart; itscarved cordiality ranto and fro at first like an inlaid and royalimmutable production;then afterward “neglected to bepainful, deluding him withloitering formality,”“doing its duty as if it did it not,”presenting an obstructionto the motive that it served.What stooderect in you has withered.Alittle “palm-tree of turned wood”informs your once spontaneous core in itsimmutable production.CRITICS AND CONNOISSEURSThere is a great amount of poetry in unconsciousfastidiousness.Certain Mingproducts, imperial floor-coverings of coach-wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seensomethingthat I like better—amere childish attempt to make an imperfectly ballastedanimal stand up,similar determination to make a pupeat his meat from the plate.I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford,with flamingo-colored, mapleleaflikefeet.It reconnoitered like a battle-ship.Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness wereingredients in itsdisinclination to move.Finally its hardihood wasnot proof against itsproclivity to more fully appraise such bitsof food as the streambore counter to it; it made away with what I gave itto eat.I have seen this swan andI have seen you; I have seen ambition withoutunderstanding in a variety of forms.Happening to standby an ant-hill, I haveseen a fastidious ant carrying a stick north, south,east, west, till it turned onitself, struck out from the flower-bed into the lawn,and returned to the pointfrom which it had started.Then abandoning the stick asuseless and overtaxing itsjaws with a particle of whitewash—pill-like butheavy, it again went through the same course of procedure.What isthere in being ableto say that one has dominated the stream in an attitudeof self-defense;in proving that one has had the experienceof carrying a stick?THE MONKEYSwinked too much and were afraid of snakes.The zebras,supreme intheir abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skinand strictly practical appendageswere there, the small cats; and the parakeet—trivial and humdrum on examination, destroyingbark and portions of the food it could not eat.I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificentthan it is dim.It is difficult to recall the ornament,speech, and precise manner of what one mightcall the minor acquaintances twentyyears back; but I shall not forget him—that Gilgameshamongthe hairy carnivora—that cat with thewedge-shaped, slate-gray marks on its forelegs and the resolutetail,astringently remarking, “They have imposed on us with their palehalf-fledged protestations, trembling aboutin inarticulate frenzy, sayingit is not for us to understand art; finding itall so difficult, examining the thingas if it were inconceivably arcanic, as symmetricallyfrigid as if it had been carved out of chrysopraseor marble—strict with tension, malignantin its power over us and deeperthan the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange forhemp,rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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