What Color is Jerboa Fur?

“I know more of farm life,” Ezra Pound said of Robert Frost’s second volume, North of Boston, “than I did before I had read his poems. That means I know more of ‘Life.’”

In Marianne Moore we learn more about the habits of jerboas. Moore preferred scarcities to common things, the filigreed to the plain, “fastidiousness” to vulgarity. In place of the world at large she gives us curios and whatnots, rhinoceros horns, candelabra, eggshell goblets, the pangolin, the plumet basilisk, the ostrich. You can’t read her without thinking of Whitman, that other Brooklyn poet, whose radical amplitude is so unlike Moore’s petri-dish and eyedropper scrutiny. Whitman, “no stander above men and women or apart from them,” represents the beauty of immersion, while Moore represents the beauty of remaining scrupulously, attentively apart. It is no surprise she loved zoos and circuses, where the distance between rapt subject and tantalizing object is made material by bars and barriers. She is exquisitely the poet of what you cannot touch, or to put it another way, of what even in touching you cannot touch.

Her levels of fineness are infinite. In a single short poem (“No Swan So Fine”), she will move, with characteristic winnowing attentiveness, from a Louis XV candelabrum to the decorative swan upon it, from the neck of the swan to the collar around it to the gold on the collar, each detail more tactile and immediate than the last:

“No water so still as the
dead fountains at 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 sculptured
flowers—at ease and tall. The king is dead.

Strange that what we discover lodged most deeply within the gilt and chintz is a phrase, a language-object: “The king is dead.” Moore’s word-masonry reveals how material, how thinglike, words can be, and vice versa. This poem is not about candalabra, of course, but rather about the networks of power and property within which candalabra come to mean, and the fate of their meanings after those networks unravel. Which is why the poem begins and ends with things said, statements made: the first a trouvé from the New York Times Magazine, May 10, 1931, the last a commonplace. From possession to dispossession: the Times quote, like the swan, wears a “toothed gold collar” of quotation marks to show it belongs to someone, while the commonplace is,...