Moore’s critical essay in verse, “Poetry” (1921), plays the devil’s advocate by forcing the art to prove itself. Composed in her fastidious “if . . . then” style, the poem names types of response: “Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise / if it must . . .”
In line 18, she reaches a pivotal point in the discrimination between poetry and prose with the declaration that “One must make a distinction.” Like a punctilious grammar teacher, she calls for “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” an image freighted with her expectations of “raw material” that she labels “genuine.”
With the graceless pedantry of a schoolmarm, Moore pursues a clear definition of nationality in “England” (1921). In line 26, she halts differentiation between English and French style or Greek from American to pose a rhetorical question: “Why should continents of misapprehension / have to be accounted for by the fact?” As though chastising the slipshod student, she concludes, “To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough.” With crisp geometric finality, she winds down her argument against comparisons with incontrovertibility of logic: “It has never been confined to one locality.”
Curiously devoid of humanity, “A Grave” (1924) offers a naturalistic view of the sea as a repository of lost objects and the dead. Moore pictures the “well excavated grave” flanked by firs standing appropriately at attention, “reserved in their contours, saying nothing,” like well-disciplined ushers. She pictures the drowned corpse as unheeding to scavenging fish and unintrusive on sailors, who row on the surface with no thought to the skeletal remains below.
The second half of the poem plays with a flexible analogy—the water-spider shape of a boat propelled by oars as seen from under water. The seriality of motion parallels waves rustling the seaweed, but in no way inhibits the sea bird overhead that scouts the scene at water level. The advance of the tide is significant to the combined movement of shore life “as usual,” sweeping over the restless turnings of objects below. Moore enlarges meaning in the choice of “breathlessly,” a reminder of drowning, and “rustle,” a suggestion that the sea carries off its conquests like a rustler stealing livestock.
“The Mind Is an Enchanted Thing” (1944), a masterwork of deliberation and diction, pursues a similarly minute definition by following human sense perceptions over explicit stimuli—a “katydid-wing,” kiwi, piano performance, and gyroscope. Mimicking a question in line 1, the poem moves over examples of meticulous mental analysis to arrive at a conclusion in line 13: “It has memory’s ear / that can hear without / having to hear.”
The ability of the brain to replicate stored sounds, smells, and images bemuses the poet-speaker, who describes the power as “strong enchantment.” In the last three stanzas, the puzzle of intricate patterns leads Moore to conclude that memory delights in “conscientious inconsistency.” Unlike the heart, which veils itself in self-willed mist, the mind dismantles dejection, the eye-to-the-ground state introduced in line 12. By accepting variant patterns as “unconfusion,” the mind opens itself to an unlimited number of interpretations.
