Observations by Marianne Moore

Author:Marianne Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713614
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

MARRIAGE

This institution,

perhaps one should say enterprise

out of respect for which

one says one need not change one’s mind

about a thing one has believed in,

requiring public promises

of one’s intention

to fulfill a private obligation:

I wonder what Adam and Eve

think of it by this time,

this firegilt steel

alive with goldenness;

how bright it shows—

“of circular traditions and impostures,

committing many spoils,”

requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity

to avoid!

Psychology which explains everything

explains nothing

and we are still in doubt.

Eve: beautiful woman—

I have seen her

when she was so handsome

she gave me a start,

able to write simultaneously

in three languages—

English, German and French

and talk in the meantime;

equally positive in demanding a commotion

and in stipulating quiet:

“I should like to be alone”;

to which the visitor replies,

“I should like to be alone;

why not be alone together?”

Below the incandescent stars

below the incandescent fruit,

the strange experience of beauty;

its existence is too much;

it tears one to pieces

and each fresh wave of consciousness

is poison.

“See her, see her in this common world,”

the central flaw

in that first crystal-fine experiment,

this amalgamation which can never be more

than an interesting impossibility,

describing it

as “that strange paradise

unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings,

the choicest piece of my life:

the heart rising

in its estate of peace

as a boat rises

with the rising of the water”;

constrained in speaking of the serpent—

that shed snakeskin in the history of politeness

not to be returned to again—

that invaluable accident

exonerating Adam.

And he has beauty also;

it’s distressing—the O thou

to whom, from whom,

without whom nothing—Adam;

“something feline,

something colubrine”—how true!

a crouching mythological monster

in that Persian miniature of emerald mines,

raw silk—ivory white, snow white,

oyster white and six others—

that paddock full of leopards and giraffes—

long lemonyellow bodies

sown with trapezoids of blue.

Alive with words,

vibrating like a cymbal

touched before it has been struck,

he has prophesied correctly—

the industrious waterfall,

“the speedy stream

which violently bears all before it,

at one time silent as the air

and now as powerful as the wind.”

“Treading chasms

on the uncertain footing of a spear,”

forgetting that there is in woman

a quality of mind

which as an instinctive manifestation

is unsafe,

he goes on speaking

in a formal, customary strain

of “past states, the present state,

seals, promises,

the evil one suffered,

the good one enjoys,

hell, heaven,

everything convenient

to promote one’s joy.”

There is in him a state of mind

by force of which,

perceiving what it was not

intended that he should,

“he experiences a solemn joy

in seeing that he has become an idol.”

Plagued by the nightingale

in the new leaves,

with its silence—

not its silence but its silences,

he says of it:

“It clothes me with a shirt of fire.”

“He dares not clap his hands

to make it go on

lest it should fly off;

if he does nothing, it will sleep;

if he cries out, it will not understand.”

Unnerved by the nightingale

and dazzled by the apple,

impelled by “the illusion of a fire

effectual to extinguish fire,”

compared with which

the shining of the earth

is but deformity—a fire

“as high as deep as bright as broad

as long as life itself,”

he stumbles over marriage,

“a very trivial object indeed”

to have destroyed the attitude

in which he stood—

the ease of the philosopher

unfathered by a woman.

Unhelpful Hymen!

“a kind of overgrown cupid”

reduced to insignificance

by the mechanical advertising

parading as involuntary comment,

by that experiment of Adam’s

with ways out but no way in—

the ritual of marriage,

augmenting all its lavishness;

its fiddle-head ferns,

lotus

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