Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore is justly appreciated for her carefully detailed poems that reveal her observation of the natural world. If, as she claims, "it is human nature to stand in the middle of things," then she does so in her poetry, bringing objects (and especially animals) closer to the reader.

But the poem from which the above quote comes, "A Grave," also shows a bit of the symbolism she is often credited with avoiding. This becomes apparent right at the beginning of the poem. Moore often comes up with titles that lead directly into the poem, the classic example being "The Fish," which begins as if the title was the beginning of the first line. "A Grave" is less clearly this type of beginning, causing the reader to wonder if the poem is titled "A Grave" because it concerns one's final resting place, or because those words begin the first phrase: "A grave man looking into the sea." This ambiguous beginning creates a situation in which neither the grave nor the sea (or the man) are objects-in-themselves; they operate as figures for one another.

Moore explains about the sea "you cannot stand in the middle of this." It is too vast and, more importantly, filled with the emptiness of death. I hope I can be permitted such an oxymoronic phrase because, although Moore insists that "the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave," she nonetheless describes it in great detail, as is her general poetic tendency.

But it seems that these descriptions do not describe the truth of the sea as an object; the end of the poem explains that the activities of the ocean only create an appearance: "and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbouys, / advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- / in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness." Some might read this and say that the ocean is given pure object status; it is without consciousness; it is only the activity within and around it. But my reading, and one that I feel may have been intended during its composition, assigns some importance to the human understanding of this pure object. In other words, the poem's project is not just to achieve objectivity; it is to understand human powerlessness in the face of such a vast object. The poem deliberately starts with the human perspective, explaining the desire to understand.

In a way, this poem replicates the Romantic sublime in which the vast natural object traumatizes the person who experiences it. But the resolution of the experience is very different; the poem doesn't chart the speaker's restorative revelation at the end of the poem. The experience is so traumatic, in this sense, that the human disappears in the face of it. In the same way that the grave symbolizes death, the ocean initiates the sublime and terrible death of subjectivity, so vast and uncontrollable that it abolishes the human.

But this is nonetheless a human drama. A poet still writes the poem; a reader still reads it. The victory of the object is one that is witnessed by the vanquished human, and though the poem doesn't chart the viewer's existential angst, it nonetheless proceeds through meaning-making systems of those whose meaningfulness has been brought into question. Very ambiguous, but Moore's line that things interact with the ocean "neither with volition nor consciousness" is written in language and understood through symbolim, giving at least some hope that our actions are not meaningless.