Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)
Modernist American poet and writer.
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
He's not out
seeing a sight but the rock
crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco
brimming with inner light — that
covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
as the hero.
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.
You are not male nor female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.
So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear
but never caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ...
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.
We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained
in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic:
Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic,
None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.
What of it? We call them brave
perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come
when no one will fight for anything
and there's nothing of worth to save.
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
A symbol from the first, of mastery,
experiments such as Hippocrates made
and substituted for vague
speculation stayed
the ravages of plague.
War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe.
Staff and effigy of the animal
which by shedding its skin
is a sign of renewal —
the symbol of medicine.
O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!
Some speak of things we know, as new;
And you, of things unknown as things forgot.
Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.
that which is impossible to force, it is impossible
to hinder.
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn,
One can but say, "Farewell, good sense."