Table of Contents

The Poems of Marianne MooreIntroduction

Prelude, December 25, 1895

Dear St. Nicklus;

Early Poems, 1907-1913

Under a Patched Sail
To Come After a Sonnet
To My Cup-Bearer
The Sentimentalist
He Made This Screen
Ennui
A Red Flower
A Jelly-Fish
Progress
A Fish
My Lantern
Tunica Pallio Proprior
My Senses Do Not Deceive Me
Qui S'Excuse, S'Accuse
Elfride, Making Epigrams
A Talisman
Leaves of a Magazine
The Beast of Burden
Things Are What They Seem
This Is The Way Toads Talk:
To Pierrot Returning to His Orchid
To Pharaoh's Baker Plucking Up Courage to Ask the Interpretation of His Dream, When a Favorable Interpretation Had Been Accorded the Dream of Pharaoh's Butler
Piningly
Artificers and the Alchemist
To You1—of the World, Not in the World:
Wisdom at Last
To a Stiff-winged Grasshopper
Emeralds
Sun, Moon, and Stars: Polyphonic Craftsman, Coated Like a Zebra, Fleeing Like the Wild Ass, Mourning Like a Dove,
All of It, as Recorded
"Am I a Brother to Dragons and a Companion to Owls?"
"And Shall Life Pass an Old Maid By?"
The Assassins
Axiomatic
Reprobate Silver
The Candle-Stick Maker
"Coral-and-Brown" Admiring Herself in the Mirror
"Crepe Hanger?" He
To a Cantankerous Poet Ignoring His Compeers—Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Henry James
The Fashion, Poor Lady, Behaving Like a Dungeon, Looking Like a Church
Flints, Not Flowers
The Grass That Perisheth
Guillemots
He Did Mend It. His Body Filled a Substantial Interstice
"I Like a Horse but I Have a Fellow Feeling for a Mule"
I Tell You No Lie
Ichabod
Inheritance
"It Makes No Difference to Balbus Whether He Drinks Wine or Water"
Kay Nielson in Cinderella
Kay Nielson's Little Green Patch in the Midst of the Forest
A Lady with Pearls, to a Blood Red Rook from Turkey, Who Has Depicted Her with Pathos in Surly Monotone
Light through a Keyhole
Like Bertram Dobell, You Achieve Distinction by Disclaiming It
Majestic Haystack
Man's Feet Are a Sensational Device
Patriotic Sentiment and the Maker
As Has Been Said
Rencontre
Rodin's Penseur
Suaviter in Modo
To See It Is To Know That Mendelssohn Would Never Do:
To Worldly Wisemen Recommending the Town of Carnal Policy as a Substitute for the Celestial City
God Bless You, Sir
We All Know It
Why That Question:
You Are Very Passive—Hammering Out in Darkness What Will Not Bear the Light of Day

Little Magazines, 1915-1919

Ezra Pound:
To a Man Working His Way Through the Crowd
To Military Progress
Pouters and Fantails
That Harp You Play So Well
To an Intra-Mural Rat
Counseil to a Bachelor
Appellate Jurisdiction
The Wizard in Words
To William Butler Yeats on Tagore
The North Wind to a Dutiful Beast Midway Between the Dial and the Foot of a Garden Clock
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel
To a Strategist
Injudicious Gardening
To a Prize Bird
Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight
To a Steam Roller
To Statecraft Embalmed
To a Friend in the Making
Blake
George Moore
So far as the future is concerned, "Shall we not say, with the Russian philosopher, 'How is one to know what one doesn't know?'" So far as the present is concerned,
Masks
Diogenes
Sun
"He Wrote the History Book"
To a Chameleon
Is Your Town Nineveh?
You Are Fire Eaters
Pedantic Literalist
Critics and Connoisseurs
In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and
To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity
Feed Me, Also, River God
Apropos of Mice
"She Trimmed the Candles Like One Who Loves the Beautiful"
In "Designing a Cloak to Cloak His Designs," You Wrested from Oblivion a Coat of Immortality for Your Own Use
Holes Bored in a Workbag by the Scissors
The Just Man and
Those Various Scalpels
Like a Bulrush
To the Peacock of France
Sojourn in the Whale
Roses Only
The Monkeys
Melanchthon
An Ardent Platonist
Reinforcements
The Fish
Callot-Drecol-Cheruit-Jenny-Doucet-Aviotte-Lady
You Say You Said
Old Tiger
Radical
Poetry
In the Days of Prismatic Color
Dock Rats
Picking and Choosing

The Dial Years, 1920-1925

England
Lines on a Visit of Anne Carroll Moore to Hudson Park Branch
When I Buy Pictures
A Grave
New York
The Labors of Hercules
Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like
People's Surroundings
Novices
Bowls
Marriage
Silence
Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns
An Octopus
An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
To a Snail
"The Bricks Are Fallen Down, We Will Build with Hewn Stones. The Sycamores Are Cut Down, We Will Change to Cedars"
"Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape"
Peter
The Monkey Puzzle
A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic

Lyrics and Sequences, 1926-1940

The Steeple-Jack
The Student
The Hero
No Swan So Fine
The Jerboa
To Peace
The Plumet Basilisk
Camellia Sabina
The Frigate Pelican
The Buffalo
Nine Nectarines
Pigeons
Virginia Britannia
Bird-Witted
Half Deity
Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle
The Pangolin
Walking-Sticks and Paper-Weights and Water Marks
See in the Midst of Fair Leaves

World War II and After, 1940-1956
Four Quartz Crystal Clocks
What Are Years
The Paper Nautilus
Rigorists
Light Is Speech
He "Digesteth Harde Yron"
Spenser's Ireland
The Wood-Weasel
Pale Morning Moon, Dark Blue Black Sea,
You, Your Horse
In Distrust of Merits
Nevertheless
Elephants
The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing
A Carriage from Sweden
"Keeping Their World Large"
His Shield
Propriety
Advent
A Face
Efforts of Affection
At Rest in the Blast
Like a Bulwark
Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting
By Disposition of Angels
Armor's Undermining Modesty
The Stuttering Quagmires Speak
The Icosasphere
Pretiolae
Quoting an Also Private Thought
We Call Them the Brave
Then the Ermine:
Apparition of Splendor
Tom Fool at Jamaica
The Web One Weaves of Italy
Rosemary
The Staff of Aesculapius
The Sycamore

The Magic Flute, 1956-1965

Style
Logic and "The Magic Flute"
Blessed Is The Man
Values in Use
Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reece
O to Be a Dragon
Enough: Jamestown, 1607-1957
Melchior Vulpius
In the Public Garden
The Arctic Ox (or Goat)
Saint Nicholas
For February 14th
No Better Than "a Withered Daffodil"
Combat Cultural
Leonardo da Vinci's
Saint Valentine,
Lines for Narrator
Tell Me, Tell Me
Carnegie Hall: Rescued
Rescue with Yul Brynner
To Victor Hugo of My Crow Pluto
Yvor Winters—
Baseball and Writing
Arthur Mitchell
Blue Bug
Charity Overcoming Envy
To a Giraffe
"Avec Ardeur"
W. S. Landor
The Master Tailor
An Expedient—Leonardo da Vinci's—and a Query
Old Amusement Park

Late Poems, 1965-1972
Dream
In Lieu of the Lyre
The Mind, Intractable Thing
Granite and Steel
Love in America—
For Katharine Elizabeth McBride, President of Bryn Mawr College
Tippoo's Tiger
The Camperdown Elm
Assistance
Mercifully
"Reminiscent of a Wave at the Curl"
A Christmas Poem
Enough
The Magician's Retreat
Prevalent at One Time

Selections from The Fables of La Fontaine

The Fox and the Grapes
The Lion in Love
The Animals Sick of the Plague
The Bear and the Garden-Lover
The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid

Marianne Moore's Notes
Editor's Notes, with the Poetry's Attributions and Variants
Index of Titles and First Lines

About the Author

Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, on November 1, 1887, and spent much of her youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. After graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1909 she taught for four years at the Carlisle Indian School. Her poetry first appeared professionally in The Egoist and Poetry magazines in 1915 and she moved to New York City in 1918. Her first book, Poems, was issued in England by the Egoist Press in 1921. Observations, published three years later in America, received the Dial Award. From 1925 to 1929 she served as acting editor of The Dial, the preeminent American literary periodical. She moved to Brooklyn in 1929, where she lived for the next thirty-six years. In 1935 Selected Poems, with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot, brought her work to the attention of a wider public.

Three additional books of poetry were followed, in 1951, by her Collected Poems, which won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She went on to publish a verse translation of the complete Fables of La Fontaine, a collection of critical essays, and three more volumes of poems.

Among the many awards Marianne Moore received are the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for poetry, the Poetry Scoiety of America's Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and the National Medal for Literature, America's highest literary honor. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters since 1947, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. In 1967 she was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic, and in 1969 she received an honorary doctorate in literature from Harvard University, her sixteenth honorary degree. Marianne Moore died in New York City, in her eighty-fifth year, on February 5, 1972.

Reviews

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (altnerate volume)
Winner of the National Book Award (alternate volume)

"A splendid, much-needed edition... by one of the most witty, alert, scapular and truthful American modernists. —Edward Hirsch, “Highly Recommended Poetry Books of 2003,” The Washington Post"I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet." —John Ashbery