Love (by William Carlos Williams)

Love
by William Carlos Williams
[first appeared in Poems (1909)]

Love is twain, it is not single,
Gold and silver mixed in one,
Passion ’tis and pain which mingle
Glist’ring then for aye undone.

Pain it is not; wondering pity
Dies or e”er the pang is fled:
Passion ’tis not, foul and gritty,
Born one instant, instant dead.

Love is twain, it is not single,
Gold and silver mixed in one,
Passion ’tis and pain which mingle
Glist’ring then for aye undone.

    

Marianne Moore (by William Carlos Williams)

Marianne Moore
by William Carlos Williams
[first appeared in Contact (December 1920)]

Will not some dozen sacks of rags
observant of intelligence
conspire from their outlandish cellar
to evade the law?

Let them, stuffed up, appear
before her door at ten some night
and say : Marianne, save us!
Put us in a book of yours.

Then she would ask the fellow in
and give him cake
and warm him with her talk
before he must return to the dark street.

    

Poetry (by Marianne Moore)

Marianne Moore in 1948  [photo by Carl Van Vechten]
Poetry
by Marianne Moore, 1919

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
                beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
                one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
       Hands that can grasp, eyes
       that can dilate, hair that can rise
            if it must, these things are important not be-
                    cause a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them
                but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to
                become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us – that we
       do not admire what
       we cannot understand. The bat,
            holding on upside down or in quest of some-
                    thing to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll,
                a tireless wolf under
    a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a
                horse that feels a flea, the base-
    ball fan, the statistician – case after case
        could be cited did
        one wish it; nor is it valid
            to discriminate against “business documents
                    and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important.
                One must make a distinction
    however: when dragged into prominence by half
                     poets,
                the result is not poetry,
    nor till the autocrats among us can be
        “literalists of
        the imagination” – above
            insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads
                in them, shall we have
    it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
                in defiance of their opinion –
        the raw material of poetry in
     all its rawness, and
     that which is on the other hand,
        genuine, then you are interested in poetry.


[Marianne Moore published several versions of this poem. 
This one is from Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse.]



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People’s Surroundings (by Marianne Moore)

Marianne Moore in 1948  [photo by Carl Van Vechten]
People’s Surroundings

They answer one’s questions,
a deal table compact with the wall;
in this dried bone of arrangement
one’s “natural promptness” is compressed, not crowded out;
one’s style is not lost in such simplicity.

The palace furniture, so old-fashioned, so old-fashionable;
Sèvres china and the fireplace dogs–
bronze dromios with pointed ears, as obsolete as pugs;
one has one’s preferences in the matter of bad furniture,
and this is not one’s choice.

The vast indestructible necropolis
of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units;
the steel, the oak, the glass, the Poor Richard publications
containing the public secrets of efficiency
on paper so thin that “one thousand four hundred and twenty pages make one inch,”
exclaiming, so to speak, “When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use;”
the highway hid by fir-trees in rhododendrons twenty feet deep,
the peacocks, hand-forged gates, old Persian velvet,
roses outlined in pale black on an ivory ground,
the pierced iron shadows of the cedars,
Chinese carved glass, old Waterford, lettered ladies;
landscape gardening twisted into permanence;

straight lines over such great distances as one finds in Utah or in Texas,
where people do not have to be told
that a good brake is as important as a good motor;
where by means of extra sense-cells in the skin
they can, like trout, smell what is coming–
those cool sirs with the explicit sensory apparatus of common sense,
who know the exact distance between two points as the crow flies;
there is something attractive about a mind that moves in a straight line–
the municipal bat-roost of mosquito warfare;
the American string quartet;
there are more questions than answers,

and Bluebeard’s tower above the coral-reefs,
the magic mouse-trap closing on all points of the compass,
capping like petrified surf the furious azure of the bay,
where there is no dust, and life is like a lemon-leaf,
a green piece of tough translucent parchment,
where the crimson, the copper, and the Chinese vermilion of the poincianas
set fire to the masonry and turquoise blues refute the clock;
this dungeon with odd notions of hospitality,
with its “chessmen carved out of moonstones,”
its mocking-birds, fringed lilies, and hibiscus,
its black butterflies with blue half circles on their wings,
tan goats with onyx ears, its lizards glittering and without thickness,
like splashes of fire and silver on the pierced turquoise of the lattices

and the acacia-like lady shivering at the touch of a hand,
lost in a small collision of the orchids–
dyed quicksilver let fall,
to disappear like an obedient chameleon in fifty shades of mauve and amethyst.
Here where the mind of this establishment has come to the conclusion
that it would be impossible to revolve about oneself too much,
sophistication has, “like an escalator,” “cut the nerve of progress.”

In these non-committal personal-impersonal expressions of appearance,
the eye knows what to skip;
the physiognomy of conduct must not reveal the skeleton;
“a setting must not have the air of being one,”
yet with X-ray-like inquisitive intensity upon it, the surfaces go back;
the interfering fringes of expression are but a stain on what stands out,

there is neither up nor down to it;
we see the exterior and the fundamental structure–
captains of armies, cooks, carpenters,
cutlers, gamesters, surgeons and armorers,
lapidaries, silkmen, glovers, fiddlers and ballad-singers,
sextons of churches, dyers of black cloth, hostlers and chimney-sweeps,
queens, countesses, ladies, emperors, travelers and mariners,
dukes, princes and gentlemen,
in their respective places–
camps, forges and battlefields,
conventions, oratories and wardrobes,
dens, deserts, railway stations, asylums and places where engines are made,
shops, prisons, brickyards and altars of churches–
in magnificent places clean and decent,
castles, palaces, dining-halls, theaters and imperial audience-chambers.


[in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: MacMillan/Viking, 1967), but first published in Dial (June 1922)]



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When I Buy Pictures (by Marianne Moore)

Marianne Moore in 1948  [photo by Carl Van Vechten]
When I Buy Pictures

or what is closer to the truth,
when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the  imaginary possessor,
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:
the satire upon curiousity in which no more is discernible
than the intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite–the old thing, the medieval decorated hat-box,
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass,
and deer and birds and seated people;
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps,
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three parts;
the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave, or Michael taking Adam by the wrist.
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one’s enjoyment.
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honored–
that which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.


[poem appears in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: MacMillan/Viking, 1967), but was first published in Dial (Jan. 1921)]



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Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like (by Marianne Moore)

Marianne Moore in 1948  [photo by Carl Van Vechten]
Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like

I have a friend who would give a price for those long fingers all of one length–
those hideous bird’s claws, for that exotic asp and the mongoose–
products of the country in which everything is hard work, the country of the grass-getter,
the torch-bearer, the dog-servant, the messenger-bearer, the holy man.
Engrossed in this distinguished worm nearly as wild and as fierce as the day it was caught,
he gazes as if incapable of looking at anything with a view to analysis.
“The slight snake rippling quickly through the grass,
the leisurely tortoise with its pied back,
the chameleon passing from twig to stone, from stone to straw,”
lit his imagination at one time; his admiration now converges upon this.
Thick, not heavy, it stands up from its traveling-basket,
the essentially Greek, the plastic animal all of a piece from nose to tail;
one is compelled to look at it as at the shadows of the Alps
imprisoning in their folds like flies in amber the rhythms of the skating-rink.
The animal to which from the earliest times, importance has attached,
fine as its worshippers have said–for what was it invented?
To show that when intelligence in its pure form
has embarked on a train of thought which is unproductive, it will come back?
We do not know; the only positive thing about it is its shape; but why protest?
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best.


[poem appears in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: MacMillan/Viking, 1967), but was first published in Broom (Jan. 1922)]



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England (by Marianne Moore)

Marianne Moore in 1948  [photo by Carl Van Vechten]
England

With its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral,
    with voices–one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept–the
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal
    shores–contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been

extracted: and Greece with its goat and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions:
    and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,” in
whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one’s
    object–substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional

shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,
    all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the 
    street in the north; where there are no proofreaders, no silk-worms, no digressions;

the wild man’s land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written 
    not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter a in psalm and calm, when 
    pronounced with the sound of a in candle, is very noticeable,

but why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the 
    fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? Of mettlesomeness which may be 
    mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no con-

clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed 
    that one has not loooked far enough. The sublimated wisdom
of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed 
    in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able

to say, “I envy nobody but him, and him only, who catches more fish than 
    I do”–the flower and fruit of all that noted superi-
ority–should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine 
    that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.


[fromMarianne Moore’s Poems (London: Egoist Press, 1921); first published in Dial 68 (April 1920)]



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