The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

When I first read Lawrence's poetry, I didn't like it much, but I had no difficulty in understanding it. But when in 1935, I first tried to read Marianne Moore's poems, I simply could not make head or tail of them. To begin with, I could not "hear" the verse. One may have a prejudice against Free Verse as such but, if it is in any way competendy written, the ear immediately hears where one line ends and another begins, for each line represents either a speech unit or a thought unit. Accent has always played so important a role in English prosody that no Englishman, even if he has been brought up on the poetry written according to the traditional English prosodic convention in which lines are scanned by accentual feet, iambics, trochees, anapaests, etc., has any diffi­culty in recognizing as formal and rhythmical a poem, like Christabel or The Wreck of the Deutschland, which is written in an accentual meter. But a syllabic verse, like Miss Moore's, in which accents and feet are ignored and only the number of syllables count, is very difficult for an English ear to grasp. One of our problems with the French alexandrine, for example, is that, whatever we may know intellectually about French prosody, our ear cannot help hearing most alex­andrines as anapaestic verse which, in English poetry, we associate with light verse. Try as one may to forget it, Je le vols, je lui parle; et mon coeur . . . Je tn'egare reminds us of The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold. But, at least, in listening to Racine all the lines have twelve syllables. Before I had encountered Miss Moore's verse, I was well acquainted with Robert Bridges's syllabic experiments, but he confined his verses to a regular succession of either six-syllable or twelve-syllable lines. A typical poem by Miss Moore, on the other hand, is written in stanzas, containing anything from one up to twenty syllables, not infrequendy a word is split up with one or more of its syllables at the end of a line and the rest of them at the beginning of the next, caesuras fall where they may and, as a rule, some of the lines rhyme and some are unrhymed. This, for a long time, I found very difficult. Then, I found her process of thinking very hard to follow. Rimbaud seemed child's play compared with a passage like this:

they are to me

like enchanted Earl Gerald who changes himself into a stag, to a great green-eyed cat of the mountain. Discommodity makes

them invisible; they've dis­appeared. The Irish say your trouble is their

trouble and your

joy their joy? I wish I could believe it;

I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

Uncomprehending as I was, I felt attracted by the tone of voice, so I persevered and I am very thankful that I did, for today there are very few poets who give me more pleasure to read. What I did see from the first was that she is a pure "Alice." She has all the Alice qualities, the distaste for noise and excess:

Poets, don't make a fuss; the elephants crooked trumpet' 'doth write;' and to a tiger-book I am reading—

I think you know the one— I am under obligation.

One may be pardoned, yes I know one may, for love undying.

The passion for setting people right is in itself

an afflictive disease. Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best

the fastidiousness:

I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford, with flamingo-coloured, maple-

leaflike feet. It reconnoitred like a battle­ship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were

the staple

ingredients in its

disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood

was not proof against its proclivity to more fully appraise such bits of food as the stream bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it to eat. I have seen this swan and

I have seen you; I have seen ambition without understanding in a variety of forms

the love of order and precision:

And as

MEridian one-two one-two gives, each fifteenth second

in the same voice, the new data—"The time will be" so and so— you realize that "when you hear the signal," you'll be hearing Jupiter or jour pater, the day god—

the salvaged son of Father Time— telling the cannibal Chronos

(eater of his proxime new-born progeny) that punctuality is not a crime

the astringent ironical sharpness:

One may be a blameless bachelor and it is but a step to Congreve.

She says, "This butterfly,

this waterfly, this nomad

that has proposed

to setde on my hand for life'.—

what can one do with it.

There must have been more time

in Shakespeare's day

to sit and watch a play.

You know so many artists who are fools."

He says; "You know so many fools

who are not artists."

Like Lawrence's, many of Miss Moore's best poems are, overtly, at least, about animals. Animals have made their appearance in literature in a number of ways.