Apparition of Splendor by Gregory Elizabeth;

Author:Gregory, Elizabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 22. T. S. Eliot and Valerie Eliot, London, 1958. Photographer: Evening Standard via Getty Images. Reprinted by permission.

The second stanza of this earlier draft moves from a first-person account to third-person rule-giving. “They say it is not permissible” in line 3 distances the speaker from the claim more clearly than the “If it is not permissible” of the published version, by distinguishing “them” from the “me” of line 1. And in being emphatically personal, the “me” of stanza 1 directly contradicts what “they say” in stanza 2. The third stanza furthers the speaker’s distancing from “their” views by affirming that “animal, / creatures can’t help being personal.” Though this line may seem to distinguish people from beasts (if animals can’t help it, perhaps people can), in Moore’s poetry, where animals often stand in for aspects of the human, the distinction is not firm (and people are also animals). The line also recalls the claim in “In the Public Garden” that “Art . . . is always actually personal.”

The fourth stanza jumps directly into the realm of animal-human interaction and equivalence, with the phrase “Let me feel thy fair large ears,” set in quotation marks and followed by a direct attribution of the quote (another rarity for Moore). By asking if we “Recall Titania and Bottom?” Moore invites us to remember the source of the quote in the love scene between the queen of the faeries and a man-turned-ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, apparently as an example of interspecies love.68 The reference to the source text also asks us to recognize the change Moore has introduced: in the original, immured in their hallucinatory bower, the doting Titania invites Bottom, her new darling, to

Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,

While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,

And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,

And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy. (Act IV, scene 1)

Moore substitutes the friendly “feel” for the more directly erotic “kiss,” making her poem more discreet, but the elided kisses become part of the poem too via the reference, lingering in the background and expanding the frame to include romance—and comedy. Stanza 5 emphasizes the comedy, telling readers to take the analogy innocently (or risk a fatality—or just a very bad reading of the poem). Stanza 6 addresses the giraffe again (“Regal/beast”) and invites him to repeat the Titania/Bottom affair in a sequel—a parallel that casts the poem’s speaker as Titania. By drawing a parallel between the giraffe and Bottom, the poem further suggests that the beloved beast is actually a person transformed—through a magic spell or, more mundanely, through metaphor.69

By choosing to delete the final four lines of the May draft (the preceding four were also cut in May but made their way into the final poem), with their humorously self-contradictory last line (“If I daren’t say giraffecal”), Moore may seem to enact the very failure to dare that she undermines when she initially “says,” or writes, the word giraffecal (or the riskier words, “really lovable,” which are also deleted).

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