Marianne Moore Poems

"No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
...

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
...

Another armored animal–scale
lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they
form the uninterrupted central
tail row! This near artichoke with head and legs and
...

Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats,
he sleeps his time away -- the detached first claw on his foreleg which corresponds
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds
or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group;
...

For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
...

Although the aepyornis
or roc that lived in Madagascar, and
the moa are extinct,
the camel-sparrow, linked
...

has not altered; -
a place as kind as it is green,
the greenest place I've never seen.
Every name is a tune.
...

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather
than
an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form
...

wade
through black jade
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
...

of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,
it lies 'in grandeur and in mass'
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
...