Books: Poems for the Eye

COLLECTED POEMS (180 pp.)—Marianne Moore—Macmillan ($3).

Marianne Moore is a spinster who has lived on the same quiet Brooklyn street for more than 20 years. Strolling through nearby Ft. Greene Park, she might easily be mistaken for somebody’s grandma. But as she goes about her calm daily routine, her mind is often busy arranging words with the grace with which the Japanese arrange flowers: Marianne Moore is just about the most accomplished poetess alive.

At 64, Marianne Moore is offering her small but fervent public a collected view of her poetic garden. Nothing quite like it has ever been seen before. Through its pleasant paths wander such birds and beasts as the jerboa, the Malay dragon, the pangolin and the plumet basilisk. In one poem she presents “the frilled lizard, the kind with no legs, and the three-horned chameleon . . . that take to flight if you do not.” But while the surface of these delicate verses concerns animals, a second look shows that they are about human beings, too—and about such virtues as orderliness, courage and humility.

Where, in Brooklyn, could anyone discover such exotic creatures? In museums, where Marianne Moore loves to peer, and in such dependable sources as the National Geographic and the Illustrated London News. Like all true poets, she is an armchair explorer, her imagination serving as an inner eye. But anyone looking for soulful murk will not find it here. She does not flaunt her secret suffering: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence but restraint.”

She prefers a seemly restraint in natural objects, too:

I don’t like diamonds;

the emerald’s ‘grass-lamp glow’ is better;

and unobtrusiveness is dazzling,

upon occasion.

Some kinds of gratitude are trying.

At her best, Marianne Moore writes poems for the eye as well as the ear. Arranged in exact syllabic patterns, and sprinkled with subtle internal rhymes, they are difficult to read aloud, and often sound a bit prosy. But on the page, as in The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing, her style is as elegant as a minuet. The mind, she writes:

is an enchanted thing

like the glaze on a

katydid-wing

subdivided by sun

till the nettings are legion.

Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;

like the apteryx-awl

as a beak, or the

kiwi’s rain-shawl

of haired feathers, the mind

feeling its way as though blind,

walks along with its eyes on the ground.

a place as kind as it is green,

the greenest place I’ve never seen.

Every name is a tune.

Denunciations do not affect

the culprit; nor blows, but it

is torture to him to not be spoken to. ..

The wonderful Irish, says Marianne Moore:

. . . The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your

joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I’m dissatisfied, I’m Irish.