Marianne Moore’s poem, “To a Steam Roller”, is strange. The language lets you in, like peeking through a hotel door chain-locked open to a supposed image of a steam roller, but like watching a deft illusion, is it really a steam roller? Moore waves her hand and the language drifts off toward complex abstractions. As an exercise in reading, I want to write out the poem’s six sentences:
The illustration is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit.
You crush all the particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.
Sparkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not “impersonal judgment in aesthetic matter, a metaphysical impossibility,” you might fairly achieve it.
As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
First, the lack of the title in this reading really shows how important the title is. The title seems to be a mirror for the language, which read isolated only holds a distant relation to our physical idea of a steam roller. Notice, too, how Moore speaks in second person directly to the supposed steam roller.
As a second exercise, I counted the syllables of each sentence, an exercise reserved normally for Romantic poems that use formal syllabic structures, and not something I would normally do with free verse. Sentence one has 17 syllables. Sentence two has 4 syllables. Three has 23. Four has 17. Five has 33. Six has 38. I think she’s unafraid of verbose language, that seems as if it were pulled out of a technical journal of some sort.