Volume 7, Number 12 · January 12, 1967
Moorish Gorgeousness
By Denis Donoghue
Tell Me, Tell Me
by Marianne Moore
Viking, 57 pp., $3.95
Marianne Moore's first book was called, simply, Poems; her second, Observations. The titles are interchangeable. 'I like to describe things,' she remarks in 'Subject, Predicate, Object,' an aesthetic given in three modest pages of her new book. Her favorite mood is the indicative, pointing to things. Optatives are rare; imperatives, addressed only to herself. The pleasure of writing a poem, for this scrupulous and exacting poet, is 'consolation, rapture, to be achieving a likeness of the thing visualized.' Poetry is a way of looking, various because vision is irregular, reasonable because, irregular, it is not indiscriminate. Yeats distinguished between the glance and the gaze, and William Empson took care to discover what a man sees through the corner of the eye. The distinction between appearance and reality is not to Miss Moore a cause of persistent distress. To think appearance significant is not, even yet, a mark of folly; it is a mode of appreciation, predilection. Things may be deceptive, but a relation between one thing and another is something achieved. William Carlos Williams said of a poem by Miss Moore that it was an anthology of transit; prompting us to see that a poem like her 'Marriage' is traffic on the move, a parallelogram of forces, or a great highway seen from a helicopter. It is a privilege to see so much confusion mastered.
Review, 2602 words
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