While studying Marianne Moore’s poetry, it is often more effective to focus on the symbolism reflected in her poetry in order to apprehend the meanings. Jerrald Ranta’s essay entitled “Marianne Moore’s Sea and the Sentence,” agrees that when faced with the difficulties of interpreting poetry, Moore’s critics tend to “generalize” and “settle for assigning abstract and/or symbolic meanings and values” to her work (245). A clear example is Bernard Engle’s oversimplifying assertion that the sea in Moore’s “The Fish” signifies “‘a symbol of forces to be resisted with bravery and independence’” (245). Given the predominate foci surrounding World War I, Engle’s interpretation effectively summarizes the response to the war’s horrifying and reverberating effects. While Ranta promises Engle’s choice of symbolic labels is not wrong, he simply suggests Moore’s critics should pay closer attention to how Moore chooses to construct her poetry.
In order to truly understand Moore’s poetry, critics must dive further, or in this case, formally examine the structure of “The Fish” as Ranta maintains, “[W]e begin to understand her work with water in the sea-poems better, and to understand the poems themselves better, when we examine their sentences” (246). According to Ranta’s essay, Moore’s sea-poems (“A Grave,” “Novices,” “Sojourn in the Whale,” and particularly “The Fish”) use an approach known as prosody as a “tool” for extending “syntactical structures into geometric patterns. These seven lines in the poem have the following syllables: 6, 28, 57, 49, 54, 20, and 6. Furthermore, in Ranta’s article, he discusses W. S. Merwin’s observation that, “ ‘in a world of technique…motions tend to become methods” (his italics) (246). (Please see the diagram below.)
Sentence 1: ——.
2: —————————-.
3: ———————————————————.
4: ———————————————-.
5: —————————————————–.
6: ——————–.
7: ——.
Moore manipulates her sea-poems to mimic the motion of the ocean by setting them up in sequences of sentences, referred to as “syntactical constructions” by Ranta, rather than line and stanza arrangements. In fact, Moore wrote in 1934 that she feels the “motion of the composition should reinforce the meaning” (247) and in “The Fish” (1918), Moore’s concern was to “reenact the action of a wave as it builds, crashes into a cliff, then recedes” (250). By giving her poetry over to the activity of the poem, Moore instills a sense of naturalness to poetry that has not been assigned before. The subject “fish” are but the objects experiencing the motion of Moore’s metaphorical wave device such that people are riding the waves of consciousness, cognitive thought, and life revealing the “naturalness” of poetry that Moore, according to Ranta, was most concerned with.
Excellent critical post. One line in particular stands out: Moore was “giving her poetry over to the activity of the poem.” This seems like such a modernist thing to say! Very fitting for a poet like Stein in particular who even more explicitly tried to dislodge our ability immediately seek the reference behind a word and instead urge the reader to experience the textures of language itself. And in a sense, all that talk of durability and the chasm-side being dead (which does sound quite abstract and profound) does distract from the remarkable textures of that poem–“split like spun glass”!