In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Poetics of the Fall in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa”
  • Benjamin Johnson

Over the past fifteen years, increasing attention has been paid by scholars to the religious character of Marianne Moore's poetry.1 What is not often stated directly, however, is that for someone as religious as Moore, whose letters and notebooks are full of prayers, quotes from sermons, and theological reflections, she makes her readers work relatively hard to recognize the Protestant archetypes, attitudes, and beliefs that fill her poems. She certainly does not announce herself as a religious poet in the manner of Herbert or Hopkins, two poets she deeply admired. More to the point, she is reticent even when compared to poets of her own milieu: next to Four Quartets or "Sunday Morning," for instance, poems like "The Steeple Jack" or "The Pangolin" imply rather than explicate a spiritual sensibility. With her elaborate depictions of animals and art objects, Moore may always have been more Eliotic than Eliot in her stratagems of self-effacement, but this was especially true when her poetry touched upon her religious beliefs. As she herself once wrote at the start of one of her essays, "Feeling at its deepest—as we all have reason to know—tends to be inarticulate" (Prose 396).

And yet, one might ask, if deep feeling "tends to be inarticulate," why write poetry? Particularly when the poetry one writes is so bookish and polysyllabic—so inescapably articulate? Throughout her poems, Moore poses to herself the problem of whether a medium as complicated as poetry can convey "feeling at its deepest." This is certainly an aesthetic question, but for Moore it is a spiritual one as well, and it is an issue that puts her in a conversation with a long tradition of writing emerging from the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, if any one aspect [End Page 61] of Moore's poetry shows her debt to the Protestant writing of seventeenth-century England, it is her tendency to write difficult poems that celebrate the virtues of simple truth. At the beginning of "Jordan (I)," George Herbert asks, "Who says that fictions and false hair / Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?" (1–2). Later in the poem, he further laments the complications of art, asking, "Must all be veiled, while he that reads, divines, / Catching the sense at two removes?" (9–10).2 Moore's version of this sentiment can be seen near the end of her 1919 poem "In the Days of Prismatic Color," where she figures sophistication as a monster lumbering from its lair. She writes, "In the short-legged, fit- / ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae—we have the classic / multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo / Belvedere, no formal thing" (24–27). What is striking about these examples is that the excessive complexity that both poets attack could easily and justly be ascribed to their own poems. Throughout his work, Herbert's dense metaphors require his reader to do precisely the sort of "divining" that he bemoans, and few poets have ever burdened their "multitudes of feet" with so much trivia, reference, and "minutiae" as Moore (though I am less sure we can accuse her of "gurgling").

Moore's poetry repeatedly gives voice to ideals of simplicity or plainness only to acknowledge, and even find joy in, the fact that the necessary artificiality of art eliminates any hope of naturalness, simplicity, or direct unironic expression. She searches, like the Protestant observer that she is, for clarity in the world and in her writing, only to recognize that her lot is to seek rather than understand. In the era of "no ideas but in things," this is certainly a central problem of modernist aesthetics, but in Moore's work it also takes us to the heart of her religious beliefs. Moore's Protestant sensibilities show through most clearly when she describes culture itself as dandified, corrupt, and idolatrous, and dramatizes her doomed attempts to imagine some straightforward and even pre-lapsarian simplicity that could stand in contrast. Like Herbert's poems, her work is filled with a sense of her own complicity in artifice and embeddedness in culture...

pdf

Share