Marianne Moore Quotes

Injudicious Gardening Fear is Hope

the power of relinquishing
what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur-
skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod
and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be
dull. Don’t be envied or
armed with a measuring rod.

Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?

You've the beat
of a dancer to a measure or harmonious rush
of a porpoise at the prow where the racers all win easily — like centaurs' legs in tune, as when kettledrums compete;
nose rigid and suede nostrils spread, a light left hand on the
rein, till
well — this is a rhapsody.

china eyes and furry countenance confront the nymph’s large eyes — gray eyes that now are black, for she with controlled agitated glance explores the insect’s face and all’s a-quiver with significance. It is Goya’s scene of the tame magpie faced by crouching cats. Butterflies do not need home advice. As though the admiring nymph were patent-leather cricket singing loud or gnat-catching garden-toad, the swallow- tail bewitched and haughty,

But don’t give me, if I can’t have the dress,
a trip to Greenland, or grim
trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him
make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim
marvel, and if a success
that I stoop to pick up and wear,
I could ask nothing more.

Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron
iron is iron till it is rust.
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
I inwardly did nothing.
O Iscariot-like crime!
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron,
iron is iron till it is rust.
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
I inwardly did nothing.
O Iscariot-like crime!
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.

« No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles ». No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculpture
flowers - at ease and tall. The king is dead.

America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions;

the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in
which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that
one has not looked far enough.

EDITOR’S NOTES Poetry Diary of Tolstoy; Dutton, p. 84: “Where the boundary between prose and poetry lies, I shall never be able to understand. The question is raised in manuals of style, yet the answer to it lies beyond me. Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books.

one must not borrow a long white beard and tie it on
and threaten with the scythe of time the casually curious