Marianne Moore

И мне она противна: есть кое-что поважнее всей этой волынки.
Однако, даже питая к стихам презренье, можно при чтенье
в них обнаружить внезапно определенную непод-
дельность.…

все та же;
приветлива и чудо как зелена,
зеленее, клянусь, не бывает страна.
Что ни имя, то песня, без исключенья.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that…

Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this, with eight stranded whales to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.
One by one in…

If external action is effeteand rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible classthe teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words - "Hebrew poetry is…

Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape vine,
twine
your anatomy
round the pruned and polished stem,…

you've seen a strawberrythat's had a struggle; yetwas, where the fragments met,a hedgehog or a star-fish for the multitudeof seeds.
What better foodthan apple seeds - the fruitwithin the fruit - locked inlike counter-curved…

В чем мы безвинны, в чем
Мы виноваты? Все на свете смертны,
Все жертвы под мечом.
Кто объясненье даст: откуда — храбрость,…

Those
various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled
echoes
struck from thin glass successively at random—the…

not of silver nor of coral, but of weatherbeaten laurel. here, he introduced a sea uniform like tapestry; here, a fig-tree; there, a face; there, a dragon circling space — designating here, a bower; there, a pointed passion-flower.

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather thanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing that you must have brains.
For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and…

Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience thesun, I do these…

Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats,
he sleeps his time away — the detached first claw on his foreleg which corresponds
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds
or…

has not altered;— a place as kind as it is green, the greenest place I've never seen.
Every name is a tune.
Denunciations do not affectthe culprit; nor blows, but itis torture to him to not be spoken to.
They're natural,—

мне она противна: есть кое-что поважнее всей этой волынки.
Однако, даже питая к стихам презренье, можно при чтенье
в них обнаружить внезапно определенную непод-
дельность.

You make me think of many men Once met, to be forgot again
Or merely resurrected In a parenthesis of wit That found them hastening through it
Too brisk to be inspected.
Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the…

The illustrationis nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit.
You crush all the particles downinto close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.
Sparkling chips of rockare crushed down to the level of the…

"No water so still as thedead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askanceand gondoliering legs, so fineas the chinz china one with fawn-brown eyes and toothed goldcollar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged…

There! You shed a ray
of whimsicality on a mask of profundity so
terrific that I have been dumbfounded by
it oftener than I care to say.…

For authorities whose hopesare shaped by mercenaries? Writers entrapped by teatime fame and bycommuters' comforts? Not for these the paper nautilus constructs her thin glass shell. Giving her perishablesouvenir of hope, a dull white outside and…

wadethrough black
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keepsadjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like aninjured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the sideof the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of…

lest by diminished vitality and abated
vigilance, I become food for crocodiles—for that quicksand
of gluttony which is legion. It is there—close at hand—
on either side…

It is made clear by the phrase,
even the mood—by virtue of which he saysthe thing he thinks—that it pays,
to cut gems even in these conscience-less days;but the jewel that always
outshines ordinary jewels, is your praise.

Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary - Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly -born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company, braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary - since the flight to Egypt, blooming…