Modernism in Two Poems by Marianne Moore

Introductionâ€Å"The most serious poetry today is still modernist. Modernism in literature is not easily  summarized, but the key elements are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism, and a stress on the cerebral rather than emotive aspects† (Wills 24). To some extent, Marianne Moore's poems The Fish and A Grave really follow the discussed modernist principles, but it is difficult to agree that Moore completely denies emotiveness and replaces it with modernist cerebral attributes. As a result, it is possible to assume that The Fish and A Grave are the two examples of non-traditional modernist writing, in which experimentation, realism, and individualism are combined with unusual writing techniques, complicated poem structure, and extreme emotiveness.To start with, The Fish and A Grave display vivid similarities in the tone of writing, and the use of similar images. â€Å"The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave† in The Fish are evidently similar and are almost parallel to â€Å"the blades of the oars / moving together like the feet of water-spiders† in A Grave: the unpleasant and almost tragic character of water in both poems is critical to understanding the modernist implications of both poetic works. However, in order to completely realize the scope and meaning of Moore's modernist verses, we should analyze each poem separately.â€Å"Repeated / evidence has proved that it can live / on what cannot revive / its youth. The sea grows old in it† (Moore 32). This is where we face the complicatedness and incomprehension of modernist poetry. What did Moore want to say with this passage? Is it that she imagined nature in its full purposefulness which was not characteristic of traditional classical poetry? It is more probable that a thirty-year-old poet was striving to express her sympathies with the nature, which she persistently viewed as deeply abused.The description of nature's violence, its wholeness, the sea as the sou rce of physical injury and actually a threat to a human life – these are the signs of modernism in Moore's writing. Having depicted nature as the threat of violence, Moore risked causing misinterpretation of the literary and sensual implications in The Fish. For many of those who have read The Fish, violence in poetry may initially seem inappropriate and confusing. Yet this is not a reader's mistake: Moore was really trying to show the nature in its power which bordered on violence against human beings. â€Å"The water drives a wedge / of iron through the iron edge / of the cliff†, and the â€Å"external marks of abuse† (Moore 32) is the combination of nature's violence and the violence against nature; it is the combination of the two incompatible elements, which is the distinguishing feature of poetic modernism.The modernism of The Fish is in that Moore was actually trying to combine the incompatible images, allusions, implications, and ideas. The initially inc ompatible conjunction of accidental and purposeful is another distinguishing feature of modernism in Moore's poem. Criticizing Moore's works, Heuving writes that â€Å"it should not be surprising that ‘the chasm side is dead', but if the chasm side is dead, ravaged as it clearly has been by the force of water it contains, how does it live on the barnacles that adhere to its surface? Why does the sea, clearly the most active and powerful force in this scene, grow old within this teeming shelter?† (29)Moore neither answers these questions, nor provides the reader with a single opportunity to find these answers anywhere else within the poem. The reader finds himself in the slow motion of the undersea world, with which he is hardly familiar, and which seems even more threatening and complicated through Moore's descriptions: â€Å"All / external / marks of abuse are present on this / defiant edifice† (Moore 32).Moore writes her poem in a way to create an image of sini ster beauty of the sea she describes. The rhythm of her poetic lines does not break the smooth and threatening movement of the undersea. The eight stanzas of the poem display the evident and easily noticeable repetition of the consonants, as if waves create a cyclic sound pattern. â€Å"Whereupon the stars, /   pink, / rice-grains, ink-/ bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green / lilies and submarine /   toadstools, slide each on the other† (Moore 32).While the sea is the central image in The Fish, A Grave is the expression of Moore's impossibility to see this sea. Some â€Å"man looking into the sea† seems to close â€Å"the view from those who have as much right to it as / you have it to yourself† (Moore 49). A Grave is frequently interpreted as the expression of Moore's feminism: â€Å"Moore calls attention to two difficulties here: the problem of seeking through a man, including a man's viewpoint, and the related problem of establishing herself as a cen tered speaker when she cannot stand ‘in the middle of this' (Wills 110). However, modernism of A Grave is not in its feminist expressions, but rather in the opacity of its meanings and the confusion of various symbolic implications similar to those in The Fish.Modernism in poetry is invariably linked to difficulties of interpretation, and these interpretation difficulties and ambiguities are evident in both The Fish and A Grave. Moore has been extremely individual in her modernist expressions, and the poetic structure of A Grave again suggests that poetic modernism may and probably should exist in the area of extreme emotions. The sense of crisis makes both poems similarly modernist: the description of nature and its scenes are central to both poems, and it is very probable that Moore seeks resolution of her crisis in those natural sceneries.â€Å"The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx – beautiful / under networks of foam, / and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the / seaweed† (Moore 49). The two poems seem to create a single line of nature's threat and power. This â€Å"violent† line of nature is developed in The Fish, where Moore emphasizes the threat of nature towards a man; this line of nature's abuse reaches its climax in A Grave, where Moore asserts that â€Å"the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave† (Moore 49).The rhythm of Moore's A Grave is another display of modernism in her poetry. Moore seems to treat her rhythms and stanzas with almost painful desire to keep the rhyme. The reader is frequently obsessed by an impression that the rhythm of the poem prevails over its meaning. Yet, modernist writings are traditionally characterized by unusual and often difficult rhymes. The combination of complex stanzas with complicated meanings and literary implications makes certain works of modernist writing completely incomprehensible.This is not the case with Marianne Moore. Each l ine makes the rhymes enervated, and creates an unusual combination of the sea's threat and immobility: â€Å"the birds swim through the air at top sped, emitting cat-calls [†¦] and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of / bell-buoys, / advances as usual, looking as if it wee not that ocean in which / dropped things are bound to sink† (Moore 49). The heavy contrast in this passage creates the impression of a deceptive revelation: one might think that the sea and its threats were unreal and were produced by an ill mind.However, it is a surface feeling: a Man and the sea are real. The word â€Å"consciousness† with which Moore concludes her poem, is the ultimate expression of her position against the described Man and against the sea as the grave for humanity. â€Å"Moore reserves her climactic position for the quality of attentiveness to self and to ‘other' which is her highest aesthetic and moral value, while giving her sea the last word, the last hiss† (Martin 63).ConclusionPoetic modernism was traditionally viewed as the combination of several critical attributes: poetic individualism, self-expression, complicatedness of writing, and emotional indifference. Moore has completely denied these approaches: poetic modernism cannot live without emotions. On the contrary, Moore's modernism in itself stems from the climactic emotions the poet wanted to express and to deliver to her reader. Poetic modernism of Marianne Moore is something more than the self-expression and the description of individualistic regressions. In Moore's hands modernism becomes global, challenging, and almost revolutionary. For many of us the sea and its threats will look as the end of everything, A Grave for humanity; yet, in Moore's vision it is only the beginning of everything that is meaningful to a person.Works CitedHeuving, J. Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore. Detroit,Wayne State, 1992.Martin, T. Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.Moore, M. â€Å"A Grave†. In M. Moore, Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, 1994, p. 49.Moore. M. â€Å"The Fish†. In M. Moore, Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, 1994, pp. 32.Wills, P. Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet. National Poetry Foundation, Inc., 1990. Modernism In Two Poems By Marianne Moore Marianne Moore was one of the eminent poetesses of the Modern times. An integral contributor to the modern American literature, Moore’s poetry is considered as a linkage between nature and the human world. She alludes to scientific and historical knowledge and tries to evade literary allusions to prevent her from being casted as a stereo-type. Her poems are full of keen observations and generally hold up the images of birds, butterflies, animals, landscapes of England and New York. She is a â€Å"literalist of the imagination† who can â€Å"present for inspection†¦imaginary gardens with real toads in them.†In A Grave, Moore begins with a meditation on the impossibility of seeing the sea, when a â€Å"Man looking into the sea† takes â€Å"the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself.† Moore calls attention to two difficulties here: the problem of seeing â€Å"through† a man, including a man's viewpoint, and the related problem of establishing herself as a centered speaker when she cannot stand â€Å"in the middle of this.† Moore's depiction of the sea correspondingly emphasizes its opacity over its translucency and its surface activities over its symbolic meanings.While Moore may well have written this poem out of a personal crisis that involved thoughts of suicide, the speaker reminds herself that to seek relief in the sea is not to be mirrored in any improved way or to be freed of her. The speaker works her way out of her crisis by establishing and confronting the actuality or literality of the sea and of death, and her difference from them. The sea interestingly, in Moore's poem is not a reflective object but a grave. Also, it is man’s careful acts, that is, his surface activities that save him and not his self- projections. Men â€Å"lowering nets† unconsciously â€Å"desecrate this grave,† â€Å"as if there were no such thing as death,† the speak er of this poem, conscious of the ultimate meaning of penetrating the depths of the sea, trains her vision to the surface:â€Å"The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx—beautiful under networks of foam  the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, inmotion beneath them;†The end of the poem marks its intensity. Unlike the exposition, the last lines of the lyric compel us to view the surroundings and not just concentrate on the opacity of the sea surface. A forced consciousness of the meditation on the outer scene is emphasized by the poetess. The sound of birds and bell-buoys make â€Å"noises† which break the ambience of a visual representation of the situation. The poem resolves with its initial perspective of assuming something as what it is not and an intrigue picture of the ocean’s opacity in the concluding lines:â€Å"and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouse and noise of  bell buoys,  advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in  which dropped things are bound to sink—  in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor  consciousness.†For Moore, in A Grave, meditation on the sea becomes meditation on the limits of human power and human language, and immersion, literal or figurative, threatens dissolution. â€Å"Death† is the central theme of the poem with an under cutting allusion to Moore's own brother’s death. Many critics have tried to see the poem in the light of Moore’s feminist voice. In the poem, as many critics believe, Moore defines the male dominium and tries to break it with her strong and persuasive words. A grave is a place where dead things are put to rest, but Moore's A Grave is a locus of vital and challenging re-vision.The poems of Marianne Moore have arguments, often difficult to follow but always worth the effort. Distrustful of overt emotion, her poems rely on understatement and reserve to create it, a s in the simple What are Years? or the penetrating A Grave. What Are Years? is a stellar lyric which ends by paradoxically equating a bird's joyful song with both mortality and eternity? Both the poems have a dominating â€Å"sea imagery†. The tone of morality in both the poems is unsurpassable. The genesis of these poems can be owed to the World War II. These two poems are typical of Moore’s. These are not meant for the pleasure of reflection.They refuse to be simpler than the world is and make more sense when read again and again until one understands the perspective for which they are written. Moore exploits imagery and visuals from the nature and embeds them in her poems. The linking of morality with a bird in What are Years? is quite similar to the theme of death and survival in A Grave. The poems deal with the strong imagery of the sea-how in one poem it is â€Å"continuing† and in the other, â€Å"the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. † The imagery of bird or flying is also present in both the poems.This imagery is evident to prove the aspiration of the speaker to be free and boundless. In both the poems, Moore indicates the sea’s power to erode and destroy; strongly alluded in A Grave and subtly done in What are Years. A deep penetration of this concept might find it’s parallel to the society and humanity- the dominium of man over everything and his struggle to free himself. This idea or concept might be traced to the World War aftermath. The vulnerability of the society and the deterioration was enough to evoke the modernist flame inside Moore to conceptualize the social, political and economical conditions into a poetic expression.Many American poets see Moore as one of the monuments of modernism, up there with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. Vision and viewpoint, an integral quality of modernist poets is present in the poems of Moore as well. She once wrote that poems were â€Å"imagina ry gardens with real toads in them.† Her poems are conversational, yet elaborate and subtle in their syllabic versification, drawing upon extremely precise description and historical and scientific fact. A â€Å"poet's poet,† she influenced such later poets as her young friend Elizabeth Bishop. A Grave â€Å"offered Bishop, as it offers us, an example of how a woman well-versed in the literary tradition, rather than capitulating to the convention of female silence, can wield that tradition and write her own eloquent verses.†To conclude, in the words of eminent literary critic, Jeredith Merrin, â€Å"Her ocean/grave represents death, humanity's common enemy, and yet her sea as re-former of inherited poetic patterns acts too as Nature's and Woman's ally. The heavy sibilance throughout Moore's poem (in all versions) reminds us of Satan, of the serpentine and treacherous ladies of Romantic poetry, of the actual foaming ocean that advances and retreats over the shing le of land, and of mortality which menaces and circumscribes our lives.But with her insistent sound-play–e.g., â€Å"you cannot stand in the middle of this†; â€Å"repression. . . is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea†; â€Å"their bones have not lasted†Ã¢â‚¬â€œMoore also hisses back at Man, and at the arrogant male poet in particular, who arrogates to himself dominion, who is always trying â€Å"to stand in the middle of a thing.† By choosing to conclude her poem with the word â€Å"consciousness,† Moore reserves that climactic position for the quality of attentiveness to self and to â€Å"other† which is her highest aesthetic and moral value, while giving her sea (as retributive force) the last word, the last hiss.†ReferencesMarianne Moorehttp://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/96On Marianne Moore's Life and Career http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/life.htmMarianne (Craig) Moore (1887-1972) http://www.k irjasto.sci.fi/mmoor.htmTHE POEMS OF MARIANNE MOORE  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE2DE1F3FF937A35752C0A9629C8B63 The Collected Essays and Criticism -By Clement Greenberg, Johnhttp://books.google.com/books?id=N5yfxzOr4j8C&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=%22what+are+years%22&source=web&ots=8EvqzAyM3v&sig=pchzURGxqaSTHBL3I-kmOagGf-g#PPA85,M1