Marianne Moore

PERSPECTIVE: ‘Is Your Town Nineveh?’ BY MARIANNE MOORE

 
Why so desolate?

  in phantasmagoria about fishes,

    what disgusts you? Could

      not all personal upheaval in

        the name of freedom, be tabooed?



Is it Nineveh

  and are you Jonah

    in the sweltering east wind of your wishes?

      I myself, have stood

        there by the acquarium, looking

          at the Statue of Liberty.


By Marianne Moore

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PERSPECTIVE: ‘To a Strategist’ By Marianne Moore

You brilliant Jew,
You bright particular chameleon, you
Regild a shabby fence.

They understood
Your stripes and particolored mind, who could
Begrudge you prominence

And call you cold!
But when has prejudice been glad to hold
A lizard in its hand—

A subtle thing?
To sense fed on a fine imagining,
Sound sense is contraband.

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Perspective: ‘Injudicious Gardening’ BY MARIANNE MOORE

If yellow betokens infidelity,
I am an infidel.
I could not bear a yellow rose ill will
Because books said that yellow boded ill,
White promised well;

However, your particular possession-
The sense of privacy
In what you did-deflects from your estate
Offending eyes, and will not tolerate
Effrontery.

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Perspective: ‘To A Prize Bird’ BY MARIANNE MOORE

You suit me well, for you can make me laugh,
nor are you blinded by the chaff
that every wind sends spinning from the rick.

You know to think, and what you think you speak
with much of Samson’s pride and bleak
finality, and none dare bid you stop.

Pride sits you well, so strut, colossal bird.
No barnyard makes you look absurd;
your brazen claws are staunch against defeat.

By Marianne Moore

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Perspective: ‘A Talisman’ BY MARIANNE MOORE

Under a splintered mast,
Torn from ship and cast
Near her hull,

A stumbling shepherd found
Embedded in the ground,
A seagull

Of lapis lazuli,
A scarab of the sea,
With wings spread—

Curling its coral feet,
Parting its beak to greet
Men long dead.

By Marianne Moore

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