Marianne Moore

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 first publicat...

"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 i...

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

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,— the coat, lik...

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 ou...

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 twinhazelnuts
...

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 pare...

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 tw...

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 sharp,conscious of ...

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 t...

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 prosewith...

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 katydid legs above ...