Marianne Moore's "Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish" and the poetry of the natural world

Robin G. Schulze

In the pages of her editor's "Comment" in The Dial for August 1927, Marianne Moore paused to ruminate about, of all things, snakes. "The usefulness, companionableness, and gentleness of snakes," she began, "is sometimes alluded to in print by scientists and by amateurs."

Needless to say, we dissent from the serpent as deity; and enlightenment is preferable to superstition when plagues are to be combated - army-worms, locusts, a mouse army, tree or vegetable blights, diseases of cattle, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, and floods. Destruction such as was experienced by us in western states and in Florida the past winter, from tornadoes and from the Mississippi in the spring, could not have been more portentously afflicting or more usefully admonitory had we believed ourselves to have been preyed upon by an aquatic serpent or by a wind god. (Complete Prose 187)

Moore's comments appear to bespeak an internal conflict. Initially, Moore approaches her subject from the pose of a rational skeptic. "Needless to say," she insists, that "we dissent from the serpent as deity." Her emphatic phrase, "Needless to say," places her firmly on the side of the enlightened scientists who prefer to rely on technology rather than superstitious ceremony to solve the pesky problems - locusts, mice, and vegetable blights - that nature doles out. No sooner has Moore uttered her preference for "enlightenment," however, than she invokes images of the destructive powers of nature that extend well beyond the reach or control of technological know-how: earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes. Such natural disasters, Moore states, are "usefully admonitory." Even though rational science insists that nature is not a collection of powerful gods, floods and tornadoes warn us to check our arrogant assumption that nature, however void of vengeful spirits, is comfortably controllable. Qualifying her own scientific pose, Moore turns back to the serpent and professes her admiration for those less-skeptical cultures that once viewed nature with reverence, wonder, and a healthy dose of dread.

A certain ritual of awe - animistic and animalistic - need not, however, be effaced from our literary consciousness. The serpent as a motive in art, as an idea, as beauty, is surely not beneath us, as we see it . . . in the turtle zoomorphs, feathered serpent columns, and coiled rattlesnakes of Yucatan; in the silver-white snakes, "chameleon lizards," and stone dragons of Northern Siam. Guarding the temple of Cha-Heng in Nan, the hundred yard long pair of blue-green-yellow painted monsters - with reared head and flowing, skin-like rise of body - are, one infers from Reginald le May's description and partial photograph, majestic worms. Nor does the mythologic war between serpent and elephant seem disproportionate when one examines a stone dragon which guards rice fields in Northern Siam from raiding herds of elephants. As Edward Topsell has said in his Historie of Serpents, "Among all the kinds of serpents there is none comparable to the Dragon," and the fact of variants seemed to Aldrovanus, no detraction. "Dragons there are in Ethiopia ten fathoms long" and there are little ones. In an old letter to the public we read: "Thirty miles from London, this present month of August, 1614" - and the news is attested by two men and by a Widow Woman dwelling near Faygate - there lives a serpent "or dragon as some call it," "reputed to be nine feet, or rather more, in length. It is likewise discovered to have large feet, but the eye may be there deceived" and "two great bunches" "as some think will in time grow to wings; but God, I hope, will defend the poor people in the neighborhood, that he shall be destroyed before he grow so fledged. Farewell. By A. R. He that would send better news, if he had it." (187-88)

Engaging the mythology of the serpent, Moore's thoughts move from the companionable snake to the mysterious dragon, from a gentle creature to a fierce myth, from an image of nature's utility to an implication of nature's might, from the rational present to the imaginative past. Moore the scientist makes way for Moore the poet and a poetic sense of nature alive with imagined creatures. Those who filled their woods with dragons, she suggests, participated in an animistic "ritual of awe" that implied a wary respect for nature's depths. Having professed her poetic appreciation for ancient animism, however, Moore changes hats once more and ends her ruminations with yet another twist.

The death of our own two carnivorous dragons - brought last year from the Island of Komodo - was an evil of the opposite sort: punitive possibly; in any case a victory, making emphatic to us our irrelevance to such creatures as these, and compulsorily our mere right to snakes in stone and story. (188)

Moore's final comment has the effect of a carefully prepared punch line. Turning her attention from imagined to actual "dragons," monitor lizards from the Island of Komodo captured and exported to the Central Park Zoo, Moore implies that our modern lack of superstition, rather than bring us closer to gentle and companionable creatures, in fact does nature no good. Where the unskeptical folk of the Renaissance, like A. R. and the Faygate widow, believed themselves preyed upon by powerful forces beyond their comprehension, modern scientists seem to think that all of physical nature can be understood, captured, and controlled. Ironically, Moore suggests, we are far more effective at slaying dragons in the modern world than our dragon-fearing ancestors ever were. The modern mind has no respect for nature's integrity and arrogantly assumes an ownership of all creatures that proves deadly. Moore reads the demise of the dragons as a "victory" for the natural world, the ultimate assertion of nature's independence in the face of human desires.

Within the parable of the Komodo dragon, then, Moore moves from the vantage point of a scientific naturalist to that of a poet fascinated by the animate nature of myth and legend, to a blending of the two perspectives. While she "dissents from the serpent as deity," she still endorses the "rituals of awe" that imaginative persons perform in nature's presence. Such rituals, in Moore's view, keep alive a sense of physical nature's specialness and humanity's humble irrelevance. Moore implies the need for an approach to nature that can blend a scientific quest for accuracy and familiarity with a profound poetic respect for nature's otherness.

Moore's ruminations about snakes and dragons in the pages of her editorial "Comment" were not simply the passing thoughts of a busy editor. The questions Moore raised in her 1927 prose piece about the proper way to examine the earth's creatures are central to much of her poetry and speak directly to a principal problem that has divided critics of Moore's verse. Throughout her career, Marianne Moore wrote a large number of poems about plant and animal subjects. These poems about flora and fauna, some of them Moore's best-known and most anthologized verses, have attracted the lion's share of the critical attention devoted to Moore's work and split critics of Moore's poetry into two distinct camps. The first group - exemplified by T. S. Eliot, R. P. Blackmur, Charles Molesworth, and, in an odd conjunction of circumstances, feminist critics Adrienne Rich and Suzanne Juhasz - claim that Moore's creatures serve principally as vehicles for covert or repressed self-expression. Moore's animal poems become veiled autobiographies, impersonal masks through which Moore ponders her own condition or releases taboo emotions. Where Eliot and Blackmur praise Moore's animal disguises as an expression of her modernist desire to avoid directly personal poetry, feminist critics tend to condemn Moore's knowing participation in such a self-effacing male-dominated aesthetic.(1) The feminist critics of this first group have also given rise to a related wave of more charitable feminist scholars who, while they still endorse an autobiographical reading of Moore's animals, see them not as expressions of the self alone but as a more generalized record of female experience. Moore's creatures become projections of the self as "other" that bespeak Moore's powerless position in a patriarchal society.(2)

The second large camp of critics, exemplified by Jeredith Merrin and Andrew Kappel, associate Moore's animal poems with her tendency, born of her devout Presbyterian sensibility, to see nature as a symbolic record of God's purpose.(3) Merrin and Kappel both suggest that Moore's view of nature owes much to her reading of seventeenth-century poetry and prose, particularly collections of Protestant meditative and emblematic lyrics in which writers contemplate subjects from the "Book of Nature" in order to discover the Word made flesh. Drawing a link between Moore's animal poems and the works of Protestant literary menagerists Thomas Browne and Edward Topsell, Merrin states that Moore's study of nature amounts to "a religious act, akin to biblical exegesis" (Merrin 23). As the title of Moore's first American book of published poetry proclaims, Moore, these critics argue, was a poet of religious Observations. Like Browne and Topsell before her, she saw God's creatures as a series of emblems, a second divine text full of valuable moral lessons.

While critics of both these camps have offered astute insights into Moore's animal poems, still a third group of scholars have pointed to the limits of the dominant paradigms. The sticking point for most dissenters is Moore's eye for complex natural detail. Moore's poems inevitably include well-informed discussions of the bodies and behaviors of the various critters she examines. If Moore is principally interested in fashioning her animals and plants into personal masks or religious emblems, then why, these critics wonder, does she introduce seemingly unrelated particulars of the biota she examines into the equation? Both Margaret Holley and Bonnie Costello, for example, agree that Moore's animals serve a symbolic function, but they also acknowledge that, somehow or other, Moore's animals remain animals.(4) Moore's well-informed discussions of the bodies and behaviors of various critters never quite resolve into simple religious emblem or autobiography.

To borrow a cliche from the animal kingdom, it seems to me that critics have been barking up the wrong trees. In their efforts to cast Moore as an impersonal modernist poet of masks, a feminist poet principally intent on writing (in however repressed a fashion) a poetry of women's experience, or a Puritan poet of moral emblems, critics have rarely stopped to consider what Moore's animal poems have to say about the relationship between humankind and the natural world. It may seem odd to suggest that Moore, a confirmed New York City dweller most of her adult life, should be considered a nature poet. Yet, much of Moore's verse (like her prose comments on the Komodo dragons) ruminates on the intersection between nature and culture, on the issue of human use and misuse of the natural world and the cost, to nature, of human ignorance and arrogance. Trained in the biological sciences and a passionate student of a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century naturalists, Moore spent much of her career pondering her relation to nature and the proper way to view and render the earth's creatures. She studied John J. Audubon's birds, Jean Henri Fabre's insects, Ronald Lyddeker's mammals, and Alphonse De Candolle's plants. She read works by the popular nature writers John Burroughs, Raymond L. Ditmars, W. H. Hudson, and Ernest Thompson Seton, and copied passages from the books of conservationist John Muir. She clipped pictures from National Geographic Magazine and Natural History and scrupulously studied articles written by naturalists J. Arthur Thomson and W. P. Pycraft that appeared in the science pages of the Illustrated London News. She read pieces about the instruction and social application of evolutionary biology by Henry Fairfield Osborn, J. B. S. Haldane, Edward Murray East, Leonard Darwin, and Havelock Ellis. She frequently graced the halls of the American Museum of Natural History and the grounds of the Bronx, Prospect Park, and Central Park zoos. She admired and pored over the scientific descriptions and evolutionary theories of the world's most famous "monkey puzzler," Charles Darwin.

Despite the depth of Moore's curiosity about the earth's creatures, scholars have yet to fully acknowledge Moore's intellectual involvement in the contemporary debates afoot in the fields of natural history and evolutionary biology. While indebted, in part, to seventeenth-century bestiaries and Protestant "observations," Moore's poems are equally the product of her twentieth-century post-Darwinian education and the scientific "observations" of the naturalists she admired and emulated. The very animal and vegetable subjects of many of the poems that critics deem Moore's most thoroughgoing efforts to create religious emblems in the Protestant tradition - the pigeon, the pangolin, the echidna, the ostrich, the rose, and the ape that Moore deems her "cousin" - are, in fact, animals and plants of particular interest to naturalists engaged in the study of organic evolution. In many of her poems, Moore's explorations of the emblematic or moral associations of her animals and plants rest side by side with her discussions of their Darwinian origins and evolutionary descent. Such juxtapositions speak to Moore's keen awareness of a scientific tradition that saw no need to ascribe moral impetus to natural forms or processes - a tradition, beholden to T. H. Huxley's reading of Darwin, that took God's spirit out of nature altogether. Shaken by Darwin's undeniable biological relation between man and ape, Huxley looked into the realm of autolectic nature and perceived a dark, brutal, and chaotic jungle driven only by the forces of competition and unbridled instinct. In such a Godless universe, Huxley asserted, it was man's duty, by virtue of his rational powers, to step in and direct the "cosmic process." Exerting a moral check on nature, man must make the Darwinian jungle into a garden (Huxley's favorite metaphor) and bring nature's slovenly wickedness under human control. As he wrote in the prolegomena to Evolution and Ethics, the human "administrator" of nature should

look to the establishment of an earthly paradise, a true garden of Eden in which all things should work together towards the well-being of the gardeners: within which the cosmic process, the coarse struggle for existence of the state of nature, should be abolished; in which that state should be replaced by a state of art; where every plant and every lower animal should be adapted to human wants, and would perish if human supervision and protection were withdrawn; where men themselves should have been selected, with a view to their efficiency as organs for the performance of the functions of a perfected society. (77-78)

Huxley envisioned civilized man as the consummate husbandman. All of nature, all animals and plants, should be domesticated and shaped to suit civilized man's superior creative will.

Moore's diaries indicate that she encountered Huxley's ideas about the domestication of nature in works by numerous authors, both popular and scientific, throughout the course of her voluminous reading. In 1916, Moore read N. C. Macnamara's Instinct and Intelligence (1915), a book ostensibly intended to aid in the proper education of British children.(5) "Educationists of the present time," Macnamara declares in his preface, "appear to exaggerate the importance of training the intellect, and are apt to overlook the fact that each individual possesses certain instinctive qualities which to a large extent determine his behavior throughout life" (v). Drawing on Huxley's interpretations of Darwin, Macnamara argued that the human mind, the product not of God's special creation but of organic evolution, was merely a malleable material organ - a collection of ganglia governed by inherited animal instinct. In the absence of the notion of a God-given soul, it became the job of parents and educationists to train a child as one would train "the lower animals."

We know that the instinctive behavior of many animals under the influence of selective breeding and domestication becomes greatly modified, and that even wild beasts, if taken in hand when young, may by the exercise of patient and kindly treatment have their inherited dispositions much altered. . . . In like manner we can regulate an individual's undesirable hereditary tendencies. (181-82)

Man, the rightful subduer of nature, must learn to domesticate himself. Such a vision of Huxley's garden gained special urgency during the years of the First World War when it seemed possible that the release of man's aggressive animal instincts might well lead to his own extinction. In the July 1918 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, an issue that Moore found important enough to save in her library, Kirtley Mather's essay "Parables from Paleontology" proclaimed with optimistic fervor that

Dominion over nature, so far as inanimate objects and non-human organisms are concerned, has well-nigh been accomplished by mankind. The future years hold many triumphs which must patiently be achieved and which will doubtless add many more conveniences to the long list of human attainments.

Mather was quick to add, however, that "the subduing of the earth" had "made man the master of the external world; but he cannot even hold what he has gained unless he becomes also master of himself" (42).(6)

Moore's reading diary covering the year 1925 indicates that she knew Huxley's work well enough to take note of the well-publicized centenary of his birth. In early 1925, she read and copied passages from his essay "A Liberal Education and Where To Find It," Huxley's 1868 talk to the students of the South London Working Men's College.(7) An argument to make hard science rather than classics the backbone of British liberal education, Huxley's essay contains another of his most vivid metaphors for the confrontation between humankind and the natural world. Huxley pictures the struggle between humans and nature as a game of chess. "It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own," Huxley explains. "The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature" (Collected Essays 3: 82). The object of the game, in Huxley's view, was for men and women to learn the laws of nature so that they could beat and subdue their "harsh and wasteful" opponent, the physical world. Ignorance of the rules, Huxley argued, would result in swift "extermination" for poor players (85).

Looking at the role of nature in Moore's poems, it is easy to spot her deep distrust of such arrogant pronouncements on the part of human engineers like Huxley. Convinced of the scientific fact of evolution by natural selection, Moore, as her verses suggest, could not bring herself to believe that the natural realm was either spiritless or inherently evil.(8) A devout Christian, she was committed to the idea of precise scientific inquiry, but rebelled against the imperialistic and skeptical bent of the modern science that held her interest. Moore also deplored the specter of human arrogance. If God's spirit did, in fact, infuse the natural world, could man claim more skill in managing the cosmic process? Moore was raised in a Presbyterian home dedicated to the love of Christ and the idea of a simple, unacquisitive life, and her poems suggest that she found man's willingness to assume the role of divine director not only presumptuous but cruel. Her verses are filled with living things that suffer the fates prescribed by aggressive and arrogant humans: domestic animals and plants misshaped by endless breeding, animals hunted to extinction or trapped behind bars, frightened animals pursued deep into their wild habitats or exploited for commercial gain. The creatures that appear in Moore's poems frequently run the risk of being dragged into Huxley's civilized and civilizing garden. Borrowing the terminology of biological classification, Moore once commented to Grace Schulman that humans often mistook animals for a "lower order." In Moore's view, animals were beings in their own right, worthy of respect and capable of instructing humans on the finer points of how to live harmonious and humble lives. Man would do better to study and emulate nature than to seek to dominate and subdue it. Many of Moore's poems mitigate against, to use her own phrase, "injudicious gardening."

Perhaps nowhere in Moore's poetry is her distrust of Huxley's garden of civilized discontents more pronounced than in her paired poems of 1934, "The Buffalo" and "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain." Moore published these two poems together under the heading "Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish" in the November issue of Poetry (Chicago) and, although critics rarely discuss these poems in tandem, Moore clearly conceived of them as a pair. Each poem focuses on an Eastern subject: one fauna, the domestic Indian water buffalo (Bos bubalis) and one flora, the close cousin of the Chinese peach, the nectarine. Both the Indian buffalo and the Chinese nectarine hold special value, symbolic or spiritual, in the cultures that cultivate and use them. The "imperious ox" and his bovine relations are respected creatures in both the Buddhist and Hindu philosophies of India and, while Hinduism deems the Brahman cow a sacred representation of godhead, both philosophies argue, for religious reasons, against the consumption of taurine creatures. The nectarine and the peach, ancient fruits thought to originate in China, serve as emblematic motifs in Chinese art and symbolize immortality and the promise of eternal spring. Taoist philosophy cites the peach as the principal ingredient of the sacred elixir vitae.

Both of Moore's poetic subjects suggest her fascination with the emblematic associations of Eastern flora and fauna and her involvement in the Protestant tradition of religious emblematic nature poetry more generally. However, the domestic ox and the cultivated peach also, like so many of Moore's subjects, hold particular scientific interest for naturalists concerned with theories of evolution. Throughout both "The Buffalo" and "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain," Moore offers some of her most startling juxtapositions of ruminations on the emblematic associations of her subjects and considerations of their genetic histories. Moore gleaned information on the evolution of the domestic ox from W. P. Pycraft, a popular expositor of evolutionary theory and a regular contributor to the Illustrated London News, and Alvin H. Sanders, a specialist on the breeding of cattle whose work appeared in the National Geographic. For data on the genetic relationship between the peach and the nectarine, Moore turned to botanist Alphonse De Candolle's The Origin of Cultivated Plants (1895). The crucial common source for Moore's scientific information, however, is Charles Darwin's 1868 work, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. In Variation, Darwin presents both the many existing varieties of domestic cattle and the various types of cultivated peach as key examples of the mutability of species - a concept vital to his theory of "evolutionary descent with modification by means of Natural selection." Tracing the vastly different varieties of domestic cow and the many kinds of cultivated peach back to their respective common ancestors, Darwin argues that breeders of plants and animals have long understood how to manipulate the natural world for human benefit. Man himself, over the ages, has proved the power of "selection" to change the shape of living things. Darwin explains:

Although man does not cause variability and cannot even prevent it, he can select, preserve, and accumulate the variations given to him by the hand of nature in any way which he chooses; and thus he can certainly produce a great result . . . . It can, also, be clearly shown that man, without any intention or thought of improving the breed, by preserving in each successive generation the individuals which he prizes most, and by destroying the worthless individuals, slowly, though surely, induces great changes. As the will of man thus comes into play, we can understand how it is that domesticated breeds show adaptation to his wants and pleasures. We can further understand how it is that domestic races of animals and cultivated races of plants often exhibit an abnormal character, as compared with natural species; for they have been modified not for their own benefit, but for that of man. (1: 14)

Throughout his introduction to Variation, Darwin emphasizes the tremendous power that humans have to vary the domestic species under their control. "Domestic races," Darwin asserts,

often have a somewhat monstrous character; by which I mean, that, although differing from each other, and from other species of the same genus, in several trifling respects, they often differ in an extreme degree in some one part, both when compared one with another and more especially when compared with the species under nature to which they are nearest allied. (1: 37-38)

Where "natural selection" preserves the "fittest" members of a given species, human "selection" or, as Huxley later termed it, "artificial selection" preserves the members that man deems most useful, despite their "unnatural" weaknesses. Domestication, in Darwin's view, often reflects the whims of human fancy. The modifications to animals and plants that Huxley found so universally beneficial, Darwin, less convinced of man's inevitable rightness in such matters, was less willing to endorse.

Moore's imperious ox and imperial peach, then, have far more in common as poetic subjects than critics have yet noted. Both hold a sacred place or have special significance in non-Western cultures. Both reflect the human desire to invest nature with intrinsic spiritual value. Yet both domestic bovine and cultivated peach also carry the marks of man's unquenchable drive to shape the natural world and bring all plants and animals deep into the heart of Huxley's soulless garden. The varieties of ox and peach that Moore examines in her poems raise questions about the uses of scientific knowledge and the proper relationship between nature and culture in an increasingly skeptical, post-Darwinian age.

The opening of Moore's buffalo poem seems to endorse a reading of Moore as a poet of Protestant religious emblems, but the tension between a scientific view of nature and a moral or spiritual understanding of the same exists in the extended metaphor that Moore uses to introduce her subject. Focusing first on the woolly visage of the American bison, Moore begins her poem with a frank attempt to "read" the book of nature in the same way that a student of blazonry would read a coat of arms.

Black in blazonry means prudence; and niger, unpropitious. Might hematite- black incurved compact horns on a bison have significance? The soot brown tail-tuft on a kind of lion-

tail; what would that express? ("Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish" 61)

Moore's questions suggest her desire to interrogate the ultimate meaning behind the animal's appearance, and, by implication, behind the surface of nature itself. Like the knight in the field, the buffalo has protective devices, shields to aid the bison in the struggle for existence. Do the shapes and colors of the bison's "armor," Moore wonders, offer a discernible code, as in heraldry, to the moral or divine character of nature? Do the bison's hematite-black horns indicate the prudence or the propitiousness of nature's "order?" Moore's questions flirt with the idea that nature constitutes a legible sign system of the divine mind. However, Moore couches her sense of American nature as moral cipher in distinctly tentative terms. She uses the words "might" and "would" to frame her questions, leaves them unanswered, and shifts the ground of her inquiry in the stanzas that follow away from the notion of the bison as a divine emblem to the question of the bison's lineage. Moore plays on the fact that the purpose of heraldry is not only to display a readable account of a knight's moral qualities but also to trace and record his genealogy. If the bison's "armor" can say nothing definite about nature's moral essence, it can, from the scientific perspective of the naturalist, say something about the animal's evolutionary history. Matters of spirit give way to matters of science.

As the poem unfolds, the American bison's adaptive weapons point Moore toward questions of the Darwinian pedigree of his bovine relations and what such pedigrees reveal about the state of the civilized world. The question that drives Moore's poem is not the divine order of nature but the order that man hath wrought upon nature in the apparent absence of a discernible divinity. The questions about the divine significance of the bison's shape that go unanswered at the beginning of the poem leave a kind of spiritual vacuum. In a modern post-Darwinian world lacking "proof" of nature's divinity, man, armed with the tools of science and technology, assumes the place vacated by the creating hand of God. How have such creatures changed since prehistoric times and what do the changes reveal about the modern world?

The modern ox does not look like the Augsburg ox's portrait. Yes, the great extinct wild Aurochs was a beast to paint, with stripe and six- foot horn-spread - decreased to Siamese-cat-

Brown Swiss size, or zebu shape with white plush dewlap and warm-blooded hump; to red- skinned Hereford or to piebald Holstein. (62)

Following Darwin's lead, Moore makes it clear that, in her view, the history of the animal's subjugation to "human notions" has not been a completely happy one. In the beginning, the ox was wild, free, and impressively aggressive - "the great extinct wild Aurochs" that once roamed in large herds over prehistoric Britain and Europe. In his article "The Smithfield Cattle Show," a key source for Moore's poem, naturalist W. P. Pycraft describes the gigantic aurochs (Bos premigenisus) as the stuff of legend. "Caesar (De Bello Gallico)," Pycraft reminds his readers, "asserted that in stature they were but little inferior to elephants and that they spare neither man nor beasts when they see them" (996). Recalling her vision of the American bison, Moore admires the aurochs for his adaptive weaponry - the daunting "six-/foot horn-spread" that allows the wild ox to protect himself from human capture. "Yes,/" she states, breaking her line at the affirmative to stress her approval, the aurochs was an animal worthy of a portrait - a "beast/to paint." Ending her line with the word "beast," Moore applauds the aurochs's savage disposition at the same time that she laments its eventual subjection. Moore rhymes "beast" with "decreased." The breeds of modern domestic ox, fashioned by human will, pale in comparison with their enormous and ferocious ancestor. Human control leads inevitably to the wild thing's diminishment.

On the heels of the aurochs's portrait, Moore presents a series of domestic breeds that, through human intervention, have become stunted, sedate, or monstrous. Moore describes the Brown Swiss, a small alpine cow known for its exceedingly docile disposition, as "Siamese-cat-Brown." Under human control, the mighty aurochs shrinks to the comparative stature of a tiny (and grossly inbred) domestic house pet. The aurochs's collapse into the zebu shape, in turn, reflects a human desire for soft and sensuous ornament. Moore points to the animal's "plush" dewlap and "warm-blooded" hump - the fleshly and velvety body parts that breeders exaggerate at the expense of the animal's overall function. Moore rounds out her genealogy with the Hereford, bred only for its meat (Pycraft notes that some "show animals" are so "grossly overloaded with fat" that they seem barely able to walk), and the gigantic-uddered Holstein, bred only for its milk. Products of the various human ideas of what cattle "ought to be," such animals bear little resemblance to their ancient form.

Faced with such scientifically deformed descendants of the aurochs, Moore turns her attention to the one breed of ox that has managed in some ways to resist human impositions - the Indian buffalo (Bos bubalis).

Yet some would say the sparse-haired buffalo has met human notions best - (62)

The result of a different set of "human notions" about the natural world, the Indian water buffalo, in Moore's portrait, most closely resembles his wild ancestor. Unlike the "red-skinned" Hereford, "piebald" Holstein, or plush dewlapped zebu, the "sparse-haired" Indian water buffalo has no colored hide or ornament to mark its domestication. Moore uses the word "met" in two senses here: the Indian buffalo "meets" or satisfies Moore's idea of buffalo-hood in its ability to "meet" or oppose human attempts to define its character. Indeed, so resistant is the Indian buffalo to human ideas of what it should be that Moore's first efforts to describe the animal lead only to negative comparisons.

no white-nosed Vermont ox yoked with its twin to haul the maple sap, up to their knees in snow; no freakishly

Over-Drove Ox drawn by Rowlandson, (63)

The emphatic "yes" that accompanies Moore's approval of the wild aurochs becomes a resounding "no" as Moore separates the aurochs-like Indian buffalo from those tame oxen specifically bred for their muscle. Moore presents the Vermont ox as the embodiment of dutiful domestic service. Subjected to the yoke, the passive beast, having lost all its natural instincts, endures not only a heavy load but also the further obstacle of deep snow. Rowlandson's caricature, in turn, pictures an ox overworked to the point of exhaustion. Again critiquing the perverse ideas of nature that shape such animals, Moore describes the "Over-Drove Ox" as "freakishly" altered, made so physically grotesque by its labor that it no longer resembles an ox at all. The Over-Drove Ox is not a freak of nature but a freak of human notions, a beast that, as Darwin states, exhibits "an abnormal character," for it has "been modified not for [its] own benefit, but for that of man."

In contrast to its tame and hard-working relatives, Moore's Indian buffalo retains much of its wild character. Steadfastly independent, it refuses to sacrifice its aurochs-like spunk.

but the Indian buffalo, albino- footed, standing in the mud-lake, with a day's work to do. No white Christian heathen, way- laid by the Buddha,

serves him so well as the buffalo - as mettlesome as if check-reined - free neck stretching out, and snake-tail in a half twist on the flank; nor will so cheerfully assist the Sage sitting with

feet at the same side, to dismount at the shrine; nor are there any ivory tusks like those two horns which when a tiger coughs, are lowered fiercely and convert the fur to harmless rubbish. (63)

While Moore pictures the Vermont ox and the Over-Drove Ox toiling under human authority, she depicts the Indian buffalo lounging in its favorite habitat, the "mud lake." In spite of the demands of a "day's work to do," the Indian buffalo defiantly follows the call of its wild nature. "Tame as well as wild Buffaloes," writes Alvin H. Sanders in his account of the taurine world, "spend much time in the water" (644). While the Vermont oxen submit uncomplainingly to their yoke, the Indian buffalo remains instinctually belligerent, as feisty as if restrained even though it remains with a "free neck," unreined by those who ride it. Perhaps most importantly, however, the Indian buffalo does not lose the ability to defend itself against wild predators. Throughout her account of the various domestic breeds of oxen, Moore pointedly omits all mention of their horns. Where, as Darwin argues, the process of natural selection favors those armored animals best equipped to survive, "the great battle of life," human or artificial selection works to destroy the ox's weaponry and its evolutionary "fitness." Only the Indian buffalo retains the aurochs-like horns, more valuable than ivory by Moore's accounting, that allow it to fend off its natural enemies. Rather than merely submit to the conversions dictated by "human notions," the buffalo maintains the ability to "convert" the tiger's fur "to harmless rubbish." Its power to change rather than be changed marks its strength.

Moore's appreciation of the Indian buffalo, however, extends beyond the animal's resistance to imposed "human notions" into a wider, and ultimately profound, environmental ethic. Moore also admires the Indian culture that, valuing the buffalo "as is," finds a place for the animal in the social scheme without demanding either its docility or its deformity. In the final stanzas of the poem, Moore pictures the buffalo as the fit companion of a Buddha, an enlightened wise man who, having extinguished the selfish desires of his own ego, understands the essence of all life and his spiritual connectedness with all living things. As John Furgeson notes, the Buddha historically professes a particular fondness for bovines. The ancient and canonical Buddhist work Sutta-nipata quotes the Buddha as saying, "Cattle are our friends, just like parents and other relatives, for cultivation depends on them. They give food, strength, freshness of complexion, and happiness. Knowing this, Brahmins of old do not kill cattle" (8:111). Part of a culture that cherishes the buffalo, Moore's Buddha expresses his respect for the animal by riding the beast without a saddle. Preferring not to direct nature, but rather to accompany its progress, the Sage sits humbly on the animal's bare back with his "feet at the same side." The posture of Moore's Sage also echoes the symbolic representation, common to Chinese art, of the reputed founder of Chinese Taoism, Lao-tzu (Old Sage). Throughout Chinese pottery and painting, Lao-tzu appears riding with "feet at the same side" on the back of a water buffalo, the indomitable physical symbol of Lao-Tzu's humble simplicity and spiritual strength. Like Buddhism (a religion common to China as well as India), the Taoism of Lao-tzu professes a connectedness between all living things - in Moore's words, "a oneness that is tireless" (A Marianne Moore Reader xvi). Like the Buddhist, the Taoist strives to be free of all desire - to be simple, pure, and above all, in tune with the natural way, or Tao, of the universe. Lao-tzu argued that "the nature of people is what it ought to be," and he concluded that any human interference in the natural scheme of things amounted to gross egotism. An emblematic conglomeration of Eastern philosophies, Moore's buffalo and rider bespeak her profound admiration for Eastern notions of quietism and humility that allow the natural world and its creatures to exist unmolested by deforming "human notions."

Drawing on Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants, Moore thus fashions a strenuous argument against deforming control of the natural world that juxtaposes two very different views of nature: the progressive, scientific perspective of the West that works to dominate and use nature, and the conservative, philosophical perspective of the East that, in Moore's view, humbly accepts the integrity of nature and its processes. The rapacious Western mind knows everything of science and nothing of the soul of nature. The Eastern mind, Moore implies, eschews Western ways and acknowledges the indwelling spirit of the natural world, the mysterious essence that scientific knowledge cannot touch.(9) Frank Davis, art critic for the Illustrated London News, offers a similar appraisal of the differing attitudes toward the natural world that divide East and West in an article that Moore read and recorded in her reading diary during her creation of "The Buffalo" and "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain." In his piece entitled "Zoological Inexactitudes," Davis examines a group of Chinese sculptures of animals and compares them with Western renditions of similar animal subjects:

A book of English sporting paintings was reviewed on this page last week: the illustrations to this article have been deliberately chosen to follow it. . . . What I want to do is to talk about the attitude of two such different peoples as ourselves and the Chinese towards the various animals we either live with or see about us. We in the West are the inheritors of the Greek tradition that man is the measure of all things: we also inherit a passion for scientific study. The latter enthusiasm caused that fine animal painter, George Stubbs, to spend hours and days and weeks dissecting the carcasses of horses. . . .

But it is notorious that, in so subtle a matter as art, accuracy is not always synonymous with truth. If a literally exact representation of a man were the ideal portrait, we should find waxworks in Baker Street by the dozen that were finer than anything painted by Gainsborough or Velasquez, and the taxidermist would be a greater artist than Donatello. It is just this disregard of mere detail that makes the unknown Chinese craftsmen who were responsible for these little carvings such extraordinarily good interpreters of animal nature. At the same time, it is not wholly fanciful to suggest that they retained a childlike and primitive feeling that beasts have a place in the cosmos quite irrespective of their service to man; as if they were not satellites ever moving round and round a human and infinitely superior planet, but endowed with thoughts and desires of their own - a conception as unlike that of the Greeks as it is possible to imagine. (Davis 870)

Like Davis, Moore makes a distinction in "The Buffalo" between the "man is the measure of all things" scientific arrogance of the West (nature exists solely for human use) and the simple fellow-feeling humility of the East (nature has thoughts and desires of its own). Yet, where Davis sees the egalitarian ethos of the East as a mark of cultural immaturity - the quaint fancy of a childlike people - Moore's poem establishes the sense of interrelatedness between man and beast as a mark of profound wisdom. Indeed, in "The Buffalo," Moore's Buddha rejects the temptations of the Western view of the natural world.

No white Christian heathen, way- laid by the Buddha,

serves him so well as the buffalo - (63)

The "white / Christian heathen" in Moore's poem is yet another kind of cow - the Chillingham "wild white (or park) cattle" of England. W. P. Pycraft describes the park cattle as a surviving link between the prehistoric aurochs and the "improved breeds" of cattle evident in Europe and North America. Pycraft adds, however, that, although once wild in early Christian England, the park cattle have been aggressively cloistered and bred over the years to produce their snowy white hides. "White cattle," Pycraft asserts,

are unknown in a wild state in any part of the world. . . . There is every reason to believe that originally, when they were rounded up and enclosed in parks, they were black. In the belief that they should be white, any calves that reverted to the ancestral color have always been promptly slain. (996)

Imported by the colonial British to India, the "white Christian heathen" cow appears in Moore's poem as a symbol of the extreme and repressive measures Westerners take to shape the creatures under their control, slaying all those that do not meet standards of beauty or purity. The Buddha, however, wants nothing to do with the anthropocentric Western view that makes such manipulations possible. Both the Sage and Moore prefer the rough buffalo to the purified white product of Western domestic engineering.

Moore ends her poem with a last look at the Indian buffalo and its tamed and exploited Western relatives. The Indian buffalo, she declares, "need not fear comparison / with bison, with the twins, / nor with anyone / of ox ancestry." In her final references to the bison and yoked Vermont oxen, Moore turns back specifically to the American continent and recalls her questions about the meaning of the American bison's visage that started the poem. The "bison" and the "twins," placed side by side, mark the range, wild to domestic, of America's taurine creatures, a juxtaposition that invites Moore's American audience to ponder the fate of its own feisty native species. While the Indian buffalo has found a home in a culture willing to accept its wild nature, the American buffalo has not been so lucky. The story of the near extinction of the American bison is one of the best known sagas of environmental plunder in recorded history. Current estimates of pre-Civil War bison populations place the number of American buffalo roaming the Great Plains alone at somewhere between 30 to 40 million animals. In 1871, Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, a military man and a hunting enthusiast, recorded seeing a single herd of bison 25 miles long, so densely packed and easily slaughtered that the "hunt" no longer seemed fair or interesting. A victim of white Western expansion and the guns of innumerable "sportsmen," the American buffalo's numbers decreased with stunning rapidity in the late 1800s. Ernest Thompson Seton estimated that by 1895, only 800 animals remained to make a last stand against extinction inside the borders of Yellowstone. By 1934, the year of Moore's poem, the bison had struggled back, under federal protection, to a meager population of 4,500 animals.(10) The contrast between the Indian and the American buffalo that inhabit Moore's poem could not be more striking. In the Eastern culture, the buffalo is and has been respected, accommodated, and cared for. In America, the buffalo, a part of disposable nature, has been used for target practice and nearly exterminated. Circling back to the image of the American bison that started the poem, Moore asks her readers to consider not what the bison "might express" about the divine order of nature, but what our conception of the bison might say about our culture. The spirit of a culture may be judged, Moore implies, by the ways in which that culture views and uses nature.

In the second poem of her pair, "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain," Moore continues her argument about the relative values of humble Eastern and controlling scientific Western attitudes toward nature. Like "The Buffalo," "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain" begins with ruminations on the appearance, structure, and ultimate meaning of a living thing, a nectarine tree. Yet while "The Buffalo" focuses principally on the cultural significance of domestication, "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain" extends Moore's thoughts deeper into the realm of aesthetics. The artistic rendition of nature, like the cultivation of nature, is an act of imagination that can be performed lovingly or cruelly, with benign or malevolent effect. Cultural attitudes toward nature may be determined not only by the ways in which humans seek to physically control and shape other living things, Moore argues in the second poem of her pair, but also by the ways in which humans represent the living things around them. The representation of nature and the exploitation of nature go hand in hand.

The nectarine tree that Moore examines in "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain" appears on a "much mended" Chinese plate, the product of the interpreting eye of a Chinese artist and a distinctly Eastern conception of nature. As in "The Buffalo," however, Moore begins her examination of the Chinese nectarine from the vantage point of a Western naturalist. Just as Moore mustered information on the genetic heritage of the Indian buffalo from Pycraft's column and Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, so she turns again to Darwin's volume and also to Alphonse De Candolle's Origin of Cultivated Plants to gain scientific insight into the genetic origins of the peach. In Variation, Darwin explores the curious interrelatedness of peaches and nectarines and cites numerous examples of genetic crossing between the two trees:

We have excellent evidence of peach-stones producing nectarine-trees, and of nectarine-stones producing peach-trees, - of the same tree bearing peaches and nectarines, - of peach-trees suddenly producing by bud-variation nectarines (such nectarines reproducing nectarines by seed), as well as fruit in part nectarine and in part peach, - and lastly on one nectarine-tree first bearing half-and-half fruit, and subsequently true peaches. As the peach came into existence before the nectarine, it might have been expected from the law of reversion that nectarines would give birth by bud-variation or by seed to peaches, oftener than peaches to nectarines; but this is by no means the case. (2: 411)

Peaches on nectarine trees and nectarines on peach trees. The lesson Darwin draws from such exchanges is that the peach and the nectarine are not distinct species but naturally occurring mutations of the same species: further evidence against the notion that species are immutable and separately God-given. Darwin also takes issue with Moore's other scientific source for her poem, botanist Alphonse De Candolle. In his 1855 work, Geographie Botanique Raisonnee, De Candolle argued that the nectarine must be solely the product of human cultivation, an engineered variation rather than a naturally occurring mutation. Darwin's evidence, however, prompted De Candolle to revise his earlier assessments in his 1890 work The Origin of Cultivated Plants. "I laid stress, in 1855," writes De Candolle in 1890,

on other considerations in support of the theory that the nectarine is derived from the common peach; but Darwin has given such a large number of cases in which a branch of nectarine has unexpectedly appeared upon a peach tree, that it is useless to insist longer upon this point, and I will only add that the nectarine has every appearance of an artificial tree. Not only is it not found wild, but it never becomes naturalized, and each tree lives for a shorter time than the common peach. It is, in fact, a weakened form. (226-27)

De Candolle goes on to insist that, in spite of Darwin's preponderant examples, he can find no evidence in the ancient historical record of the nectarine's appearance as a spontaneous tree. In the absence of historical data, he prefers to reserve judgment concerning the nectarine's possible wildness.

Moore, the poet-naturalist, incorporates Darwin's observations on the subject of nectarine trees and his dispute with De Candolle into the opening of her poem.

Arranged by twos as peaches are, at intervals that all may live - eight and a single one, on twigs that grew the year before - they look like a derivative; although not uncommonly the opposite is seen - nine peaches on a nectarine. (64)

Gazing at the painted nectarines on the antique Chinese plate, Moore, seemingly entranced by the beauty of their beneficent order, leads her readers, in lilting iambs, to the brink of an eloquent simile: "they look like. . . ." Instead of a lovely comparison, however, Moore supplies a short statement of scientific theory. De Candolle's pejorative term, "derivative," drops into the poem with a thud, a jarring clinical contrast to the stately phrase, "that all may live," with which it rhymes. Followed by the emphatic pause of a semicolon, De Candolle's assessment seems to call a halt to any further thought of the fruit's specialness. The instant the word appears, however, Moore challenges the botanist's label and offers her own rhyming couplet in defense of the nectarine's spontaneous fruithood. The nectarine tree may look like a purely artificial product of human control, but it has a habit of changing in the most unexpected ways. Moore's rhymed couplet has the aura of a magic trick: "the opposite is seen," drum roll in the shape of a dash, "nine peaches on a nectarine!" - gasp followed by applause. Nature, it seems, can be far more confounding and wondrous than De Candolle assumes.

The question of the mysterious genetic origin of the nectarine drives the opening stanzas of "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain" and, as in "The Buffalo," Moore takes issue with the Western Huxleyan mind that refuses to grant nature designs of its own or intrinsic value. Once again, the Eastern view of nature serves as a point of contrast. Returning to the pages of The Origin of Cultivated Plants, Moore resurrects the Chinese mythology of the peach, information that De Candolle, uninterested in such unscientific matters, shunts into a dismissive footnote which reads:

The Chinese believe the oval peaches, which are very red on one side, to be a symbol of a long life. In consequence of this ancient belief, peaches are used in all ornaments in painting and sculpture, and in congratulatory presents, etc. According to the work of Chinnong-king, the peach Yu prevents death. If it is not eaten in time, it at least preserves the body from decay until the end of the world. The peach is always mentioned among the fruits of immortality, with which were entertained the hopes of Tsinchi-Hoang, Vouty, of the Hans and other emperors who pretended to immortality, etc. (221-22)

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The Chinese stories about the peach that De Candolle does not wish to waste his time rehearsing in his main text, however, Moore deems central to her poem. Making herself the spokesperson for the Chinese conception of the nectarine, Moore writes:

Like the peach Yu, the red- cheeked peach which cannot aid the dead, but eaten in time prevents death, the Italian peach- nut, Persian plum, Ispahan

secluded wall-grown nectarine, as wild spontaneous fruit was found in China first. But was it wild? Prudent De Candolle would not say. We can not find flaws in this emblematic group of nine, with leaf window unquilted by curculio - which someone once depicted on this much mended plate; or in the also accurate

unantlered moose, or Iceland horse, or ass, asleep against the old thick, lowleaning nectarine that is the color of the shrub-tree's brownish flower. (65)

Stating legends in the manner of facts, Moore retells the origin story of the nectarine from the Chinese perspective. Where the Western botanist declares the nectarine a weakened, "derivative" plant and concentrates his attention on its genetic defects, the Chinese mind endows such fruits with miraculous life-giving powers. The subtle argument that Moore stages with the clinical bent of Western science reaches a crux with her statement that the nectarine "as spontaneous fruit was found in China first." Moore's emphatic alliterative words - "fruit," "found," "first" - positioned on stressed syllables imply that, given a choice, Moore prefers to imagine the nectarine as a "spontaneous" wild thing spawned outside of Huxley's domestic garden - a perspective that De Candolle only grudgingly entertains. A "prudent" man, De Candolle himself is, in Moore's poem, the intellectual antithesis of that which is "wild" or "spontaneous." Like the plants that he studies, he too has been cultivated. The empirical tradition that trained him will not allow him to speculate beyond his own realm of observed and recorded fact.

Moore, on the other hand, accepts no such restrictions. Adopting the collective "we" and a judicious tone of her own, Moore draws on Frank Davis's comments about the Chinese propensity toward "zoological inexactitude" and applauds the Eastern culture that can still see nature as animate and symbolically resonant. Eschewing, as Davis puts it, the "mere detail" of scientific analysis, the Chinese artist presents an ideal portrait of the nectarine that a botanist like De Candolle deems the frivolous stuff of a footnote. Moore rebuffs De Candolle and, repeating her emphatic alliterative [f.sub.s], will not herself "find flaws" in the Chinese representation of the nectarine as magical rather than genetically inferior. She also makes a claim for the pictorial correctness of the plate's other inhabitant, the Chinese unicorn or kylin, a creature of good omen that in Chinese mythology symbolizes longevity, benevolence, and wise government. In a phrase designed to make the animal painter George Stubbs cringe (he dissected endless horses in quest of an anatomically perfect picture), Moore insists that the image of the mythical kylin is "also accurate." The often brutal scientific "accuracy" of the West stands juxtaposed to the more generous and imaginative "accuracy" of the East - the idealizing Chinese perspective born, in Davis's view, of the conception that beasts "have a place in the cosmos quite irrespective of their service to man." Those observers disposed to find fault with any account of nature that is not strictly taxidermic, Moore suggests, are liable to miss much of nature's beauty. The plate on which the nectarine and kylin appear echoes Moore's lesson. Certainly, by the standards of most collectors, the Chinese plate itself is faulty, broken and repaired time and time again. Yet, over the years, some have found the image on the "much mended" plate beautiful and moving enough to preserve, in spite of its blemishes. They have looked beyond an accurate account of the plate's cracked surface and grasped its essence, the very act that the true lover of nature must perform.

Moore's dispute with De Candolle leads her to the heart of her poem, which, as in "The Buffalo," is essentially comparative. In "The Buffalo," Moore juxtaposes the feisty Indian buffalo and its domesticated Western relations. In "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain," she, as the title proclaims, compares the image of nectarine tree and kylin on the Chinese plate to nature scenes that appear on "other," specifically Western, "porcelain." The European plates that Moore describes, like the European cattle she examines in the previous poem, are the marked products of those who value the cultivated nature of Huxley's garden in which all wildness bends to suit human needs. The Chinese plate portrays the kylin at rest in the wild, unmolested and well fed beneath his magic tree. French plates, Moore explains, picture "hunts and domestic scenes," a human-centered world in which wild animals are pursued and killed for sport. English potters, too, offer up a retinue of images worthy of a Huxleyan utopia:

England has an officer in jack boots seated in a bosquet, the cow, the flock of sheep, the pheasant, the peacock sweeping near with lifted claw; the skilled peonian rose and the rosebud that began

with William Billingsley (once poor, like a monkey on a dolphin, tossed by Ocean, mighty monster) until Josiah Spode adopted him. (66)

In the world of English porcelain, man is clearly the master of all he surveys. Moore's catalogue of the designs that appear on English plates works outward from an Englishman in aggressive military garb, yet another reflection of the colonial intentions of the West, to an account of the plants and animals that he controls. From domestic cattle and sheep bred for food and profit, to pheasants hunted for sport, to peacocks transplanted to adorn the estates of English nobles, to the most carefully cultivated of all ornamental garden plants, the rose, the images that cover English plates celebrate the administration of the natural world. Like the "prudent" French, the English prefer to imagine nature in the service of man, civilized rather than wild.

As in "The Buffalo," Moore reserves her final stanzas for a critique of the short sightedness of the Western view of nature and establishes that the Chinese plate, with its nectarines and kylin, "need not fear comparison" with the works of Sevres or Spode.

Yet with gold-glossed serpent handles, are there green cocks with "brown beaks and cheeks and dark blue combs" and mammal freaks that, like the Chinese Certainties and sets of Precious Things, dare to be conspicuous?

Theirs is a race that "understands the spirit of the wilderness" and the nectarine-loving kylin of pony appearance - the long tailed or the tailless small cinnamon-brown common camelhaired unicorn with antelope feet and no horn, here enamelled on porcelain. It was a Chinese who imagined this masterpiece. (67)

Recalling her pejorative term "freakish" from "The Buffalo," Moore accuses Spode and his cohorts of a stunning lack of imagination. Beholden to standards of scientific accuracy, the Western potters, trapped by their own domesticated vision, cannot imagine nature as anything beyond exaggerated, abnormal versions of the domestic creatures that they themselves cultivate. The cocks may be "green," but they are still only barnyard roosters. Unable to sense the "spirit of the wilderness," the Western potters create gaudy but ultimately pedestrian images that express not a reverence for nature but a wish to see the natural world as an exploitable side-show - "mammal freaks" controlled by human barkers. The Chinese unicorn, on the other hand, utterly lacks freakish detail. It is "small," plain, dun colored, and has what Moore terms a "common" camelhair coat. It even wants a mythical horn. Yet, the Chinese vision of nature, Moore insists, is "daring," "conspicuous," and ultimately compassionate in ways that the Western vision can never be. Unfettered by Western skepticism, the Chinese freely envision the natural world as animate and grant nature, in the form of supernatural beings like the kylin, a living soul. Moore's final assertion, "It was a Chinese who / imagined this masterpiece," both praises the East and condemns the West in equal measure. Selecting words earlier in the poem to emphasize the mundanity of Western artistry, Moore states that domestic scenes "occur" on Sevres plates. Spode dinnerware simply "has" its officer in jack boots. The huge roses that adorn English porcelain demonstrate "skill," but not inventiveness. The Chinese potter, however, "imagined" his masterpiece. For the Western intelligence bent on dissecting and recording, such leaps of mind and faith are no longer possible. In a skeptical world, nature has no magical otherness.

Together, then, "The Buffalo" and "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain" make a sustained argument about the proper relationship between nature and culture that speaks directly to key elements of Moore's poetry and philosophy that, it seems to me, critics have long overlooked. Both of Moore's poems suggest that how a culture treats the living things - all the living things - within its orbit constitutes an absolute test of that culture's moral integrity. Both poems claim that the skeptical bent of Western culture leads to the abuse of the natural world in the name of scientific progress. If nature has no soul, then the arrogant humans who study and manipulate it need have no qualms about the creatures they subdue. In Moore's view, however, knowledge was fruitless without a belief in spirit, and both of these poems point toward what might be now called an environmental ethic that places Moore squarely in a tradition of nature writing that differs, in significant ways, from the works of Protestant emblematists like Thomas Browne and Edward Topsell. For all their keen interest in the facts of the natural world, both Browne and Topsell viewed animals and plants primarily as metaphors. In seventeenth-century "Book of Nature" or "Book of the Creatures" meditations, the natural creatures themselves matter less than what they stand for. "Protestants approached the creatures as objects of meditation in two ways," Barbara Lewalski explains, "emblematically, as a rich source of moral lessons . . . and symbolically, as sacramental objects invested by God with significances which may reveal something about God to the mediator" (162). Such a vision of nature reduces all plants and animals to artifacts and inevitably elevates man above the lesser (and specifically soulless) creatures provided for human instruction and benefit.

As the above poems imply, however, for Moore nature was never merely symbol or metaphor. Nature had a being, a substance, and a spirit of its own. Moore's coupling of Christian devotion with a sense of nature's sacred otherness places her work in a tradition, to use Donald Worster's term, of "Arcadian" science. In his book Nature's Economy, Worster traces the philosophy of Arcadian ecology back to the patient work of the eighteenth-century parson/naturalist Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne (1789).(11) Both scientific naturalist and country cleric, White regarded the natural world not as a book of symbols but as a site of reverent learning. His examinations of the flora and fauna of his parsonage, motivated as much by a love of nature as by a love of God, revealed, to White's mind, the careful and comforting presence of divine Providence. Only a thoughtful and kind creator could have fashioned so beautiful and rational a collection of creatures, and man would be best served to humbly follow nature's harmonious example. Nature, a realm of natural piety, presents a model for human endeavor. As Worster points out, White's book attained a kind of cult status among those dedicated to the study of natural history, and his words both inspired and influenced the rise of the natural history essay in the latter half of the nineteenth century (17). W. H. Hudson, John Muir, and John Burroughs - Moore's personal favorites in the essay genre - each paid homage to White's compassionate and spiritualized sense of nature and science in an attempt to combat the clinical heartlessness of a modern scientific age. Moore, a vicarious descendent of White's, followed their lead. Like Hudson, Burroughs, and Muir, Moore encountered a natural world evacuated of spirit by the chill of post-Darwinian thought. Like Hudson, Burroughs, and Muir, Moore made it her task to reinfuse the study of nature with a sense of piety.

NOTES

1 Eliot writes of Moore's "The Jerboa":

For a mind of such agility, and for a sensibility so reticent, the minor subject, such as the pleasant little sand-colored skipping animal, may be the best release for the major emotions. We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair. (9)

Eliot aligns Moore with the modernist aesthetic of the mask, and a number of critics have since followed his lead. Looking at Moore's animal poems, Blackmur claims that "Miss Moore's life is remote (life as good and evil) and everything is done to keep it remote" (85). Molesworth argues that Moore's creature poems constitute a "mode of allegorizing and covert self-exploration" (256). Howard, in turn, suggests that Moore

discovered in the world of creatures a vocabulary, a nomenclature of analogies, for herself. The trouble was that her poems were not really about animals - they were about the poet and about themselves, of course. She used this extraordinary manner of apparently exact description to render, in what we might call a zoophrasty or a zoophrasis, a world of suffused statement about herself. It was the most personal poetry ever written, yet it had become so by a refusal to be autobiographical. (3)

For the first-wave feminist critique of Moore's involvement in the male-dominated aesthetic of impersonal poetry, see Juhasz 33-56 and Rich 36.

2 This second wave of feminist critics constitutes a large and growing group. Alicia Ostriker claims that

Moore's proliferating bestiary of creatures in protective armor and camouflage are not only personal self-portraits in code, as many critics have observed. They imply over and over the necessary timidities and disguises of a brilliant woman in a world where literary authority is male. (52)

Jeanne Heuving argues that Moore's animal poems are complex meditations that seek "to establish coherent forms of identity" in a masculine culture (150). Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests that "Moore identifies with the nobility and charity of these plundered and brutalized species; the confluence of female poet and animals of otherness is very suggestive" (19).

3 See Kappel 39-51 and Merrin 13-38.

4 Bonnie Costello notes that Moore's poetry participates in a long and varied tradition of Protestant emblematic literature, but she is quick to add that while Moore establishes animal emblems, she also "creates a lively tension between the image [emblem] and its conventional association" by peppering her poems with naturalistic details (the snail's occipital horn, for example) that do not support an emblematic reading of a given creature (70). In Costello's view, Moore (in a postmodern gesture) musters detailed descriptions of nature in order to expose the artificiality of the poet's imposed imaginative and linguistic systems - the gap between sign (nature) and signifier (meaning, emblem, language). Margaret Holley, too, points out that purely emblematic readings of Moore's animals fall short in the face of her virtuosic display of nature's detail. "The animal kingdom," Holley states, "is one realm of these poems in which the spatial imagination - the stasis of the emblem, the vibrant stillness of the symbol - often gives way to movement, gesture, locomotion, the temporal sway" (131). Holley ultimately decides that Moore's attention to the minutiae of animal behavior serves as a rhetorical cloaking device - a diversion that "mellows and actualizes the moral ideals" that Moore's creatures have been selected to portray.

5 For Moore's notes on Macnamara's book, see Moore's unpublished reading diary, 1914-16, 1250/1, p. 23, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia.

6 Moore's copy of the Atlantic Monthly for 1918 is in the Marianne Moore Library at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia.

7 For Moore's notes on Huxley's essay, see Moore's unpublished reading diary, 1924-30, 1250/5, p. 70, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. This diary also contains Moore's first mention of Nature magazine. In May 1925, Nature, in honor of the centenary of Huxley's birth, devoted an entire issue to considerations of Huxley's life and works. The issue contained a long piece by one of Moore's favorite naturalists, J. Arthur Thomson, a regular contributor to the London Illustrated News. In his essay entitled "Huxley as Evolutionist," (Nature [London] 115 [May 1925]: 717-19), Thomson took Huxley to task for his unremittingly unfeeling and often hostile view of nature. Thomson recalled:

In his autobiography, certainly a remarkable document, Huxley says: "I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus infidelium." The only part of his medical course that really and deeply interested him was physiology, "the mechanical engineering of living machines." He speaks of the extraordinary attraction he felt toward "the study of the intricacies of living structure." He confesses: "I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me"; and one cannot but remember how, when some zoologist asked him as to his manner of dealing with birds in a current course of lectures on comparative anatomy, he answered: "I intend to treat them as extinct animals."

We refer to this outlook because it explains, perhaps what seems to us a marked limitation in Huxley's view of the "struggle for existence." No doubt he tells us that the struggle is more than "a sort of fight"; no doubt in the appendix to his Romanes lecture he refers to gregariousness, sociality, enforced "renunciation of self-will," and "rudimentary ethical process" among higher animals; but the fact remains that he gives the student an impression of animate nature as "a vast gladiatorial show," "a Hobbesian warfare," "a dismal cockpit." Therefore man, he argued, in his endeavours after social progress must set his face in a direction opposite to that of nature's regime. (718)

8 The proofs of Moore's compassionate attitudes toward the natural world, I would argue, lie principally in her poems. Moore's reading diaries, however, are also filled with comments gleaned from her favorite nature writers that suggest her sense of nature's intrinsic goodness and beauty. Starting around 1916 (to note only one of many possible examples), she began to read heavily in the works of W. H. Hudson, perhaps the late nineteenth century's most vehement critic of Huxley's attitudes toward nature. Convinced of wild nature's inherent benevolence, Hudson despised human attempts to control or subdue the natural world. From his reminiscences of his boyhood on the pampas of Argentina, Far Away and Long Ago, Moore recorded Hudson's vehement dislike for the domestic breeding of hairless dogs (Hudson 12: 166; Moore, unpublished reading diary, 1916-21, 1250/2, p. 62, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia), as well as long passages of his appreciation for the much-despised and, in Hudson's view, much-misunderstood serpent. In his autobiography, Hudson recalls his boyhood encounter with a "great black snake" that slid slowly over his foot while he remained frozen, first with terror, then with fascination. Moore copied Hudson's account of his reconciliation with the snake into her diary:

And that was my last sight of him; in vain I watched and waited for him to appear on many subsequent days: but that last encounter had left in me a sense of mysterious being, dangerous on occasion as when attacked or insulted, and able in some cases to inflict death with a sudden blow, but harmless and even friendly or beneficent toward those who regarded it with kindly and reverent feelings in place of hatred.

(Hudson 12: 230-31; Moore, unpublished reading diary, 1916-21, 1250/2, p. 63, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia)

Moore also took copious notes on Hudson's book Birds and Man, one of his most sustained arguments for the preservation and protection of Britain's endangered birds. Hudson reserves his particular scorn for those who "collect" birds, either by putting them in cages or stuffing them for exhibition above the fireplace. In her reading diary, Moore made special note of Hudson's chapter "Spring in Savernake Forest," in which Hudson rhapsodizes about one of the last truly wild woods in England. "At Savernake," he declares, "there is nothing so humanized as the pig, even of the old type; you may roam for long hours and see no man and no domestic animal. . . . The forest is nature's and yours" (Hudson 4: 69; Moore unpublished reading diary, 1913-16, 1250/1, p. 24, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia). From Hudson's book The Naturalist in La Plata, Moore copied passages from Hudson's passionate plea to stop the wholesale destruction of native South American plants and animals that were falling prey to the incursions of settlers and domestic sheep. Humans, Hudson complained, were thoughtless killers with a disgraceful tendency to destroy first those species that were large, splendid, rare, and ancient. "Like immortal flowers they have drifted down to us on the ocean of time," wrote Hudson of the large animals and birds he loved,

and their strangeness and beauty bring to our imaginations a dream and a picture of that unknown world, immeasurably far removed where man was not: and when they perish, something of gladness goes out of nature, and the sunshine loses something of its brightness. (Hudson 19: 30)

In her reading diary, Moore recorded Hudson's summary of such human vanity and violence: "But we think nothing of all this: we must give full scope to our passion for taking life, though by so doing we 'ruin the great work of time.'" (Hudson 19: 30; Moore, unpublished reading diary, 1913-16, 1250/1, p. 15, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia).

Moore's sensitivity to the weight of Hudson's arguments (and those of the other compassionate naturalists she read, principally John Muir and John Burroughs) found voice as well in Moore's published prose. In her editorial "Comment" for the May 1929 issue of the Dial, Moore even expressed her misgivings about an entertainment she admittedly found intriguing: the circus. "The gilded wagons and bellows-warbled, now high, now low, hollow music of the circus," she wrote "have again invited us to wander among the cages, stare at the sword-swallower and the pin-head, and surreptitiously touch kangaroo and camel." Moore pictures herself summoned to the circus by a music both haunting and hallow, attractive but potentially empty, and her comments about the human misuse of wild creatures in the circus reflect her sense that the spectacle, however seductive, may be simply cruel and vacuous. "The pain of seeing a bear ride a bicycle," she noted,

may outweigh the pleasure of seeing six little black dogs clown the maneuvers of Herman Hesse's six black stallions from Hungary. One does not admire so much the elephant's ability to beat a drum with a small cannon-ball attached to the tail.

In light of the indignities visited on bear and elephant, Moore declares in words that echo Hudson's writings: "Rashness and regality may not be teaching us anything; animals should not be taken from their proper surroundings, and in staging an act the bad taste of patrons should not be deferred to" (Complete Prose 220). The domestication of wild creatures for human pleasure seemed, to Moore, a painful display of humanity's worst impulses. In 1943, Moore returned to Hudson's ideas once more in the context of the horrors of the Second World War. Recalling naturalist/anthropologist Herbert Spinden's 1927 article "Can Man Keep Savage Virtues," Moore set out to redefine the term brute and rescue the whole of nature from Huxleyan charges of savagery she felt best laid at the feet of supposedly "civilized" humans. "'Savage' and 'brutal' are false terms, the brute is so often the man," she began. "In a documentary-film close-up, some years ago, of an elephant trimming a turf-bordered walk, the fingertip of the trunk was shown plucking off grass to an edge of better than humanly sheared precision" (Complete Prose 375). Unlike man, nature is careful and precise, patient and delicate. Drawing on Spinden's work, Moore extended her argument from animals to primitive peoples. We could learn much about how to live in harmony with the natural world, she suggested, if we could only suppress our prejudices and accept the profound lessons offered by "savage peoples." Moore wrote:

One of the most eloquent phases of savage resourcefulness is thrift, involving as it does responsibility to nature. . . . When the Indian caught a salmon and threw head and backbone into the river to generate new salmon, "it was unscientific, but as emotional restraint against waste it was magnificent." After removing a plant, the Indian was careful to drop a seed in the hole, and it is humbling to realize that no species of animal or growing thing was exterminated in America till the coming of our savage selves. . . .

"Be gentle and you can be bold" is an ancient Chinese saying; "be frugal and you can be liberal; if you are a leader, you have learned self-restraint." W. H. Hudson was unwilling to extol the bees for building their wonderful hexagons, since they were merely following instinct; but we are not bees, and when we undertake to be workmanly it is different; the most scientifically self-interested effort cannot effeminize one who walks like the tapir and works like the elephant. (376-77)

Moore ends her piece with a quote from the Chinese philosopher, Lao-tzu, and a reference to Hudson, both proponents, in their own ways, of a quiet noninterference with nature's innate wisdom. Human work, Moore argues, often proves destructive and misguided because we do not, like the skillful bees who make "wonderful hexagons," follow our natural and, in Moore's view, better instincts. In her final line, Moore takes direct aim at the descendants of Huxley, those "scientifically self-interested" engineers bent on the aggressive wholesale domination of nature. From the standpoint of such egotists, all restraint in the face of nature's bounty seems the mere sentimental product of feminine weakness. Moore counters that no such criticism can touch those who rightly model their behavior on nature's frugal and gentle ways.

9 Certainly, Moore's images of Eastern attitudes toward nature are highly idealized. Like her friends and contemporaries, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, Moore sensed that the East might prove a potential refuge from the commercial ravages of Western culture, and she essentialized Eastern culture to suit her own sense of a good and healthy life. It is important to remember, however, that Moore's notions about the East ran counter to the weight of popular opinion in the American and British press of the 1920s and 30s about the "problem" of Asia. All throughout the 20s and early 30s, Moore's favorite news periodicals - the New Republic, the Illustrated London News, the Forum, and the Literary Digest - were filled with discussions of Asia's, primarily China's, woeful resistance to modern methods. Consumed with the idea of technological advancement and the efficient development of resources, many Western observers could not understand why China remained utterly hostile to Western capitalist notions of progress. G. K. Chesterton, a running commentator on East/West relations throughout the 1920s and 30s, argued in the pages of the Forum that the East suffered principally from a lack of any sense of original sin. The modern doctrine of progress, in Chesterton's view, came not from a confidence that everything was "continually rising, but from a suspicion that everything, left to itself, [was] continually falling." Without a proper Christian sense of the fallen state of nature and the weight of human sinfulness, Asians simply could not participate in the great Western God-given task to improve the world (Chesterton 363). The London Illustrated News took great, if somewhat irritated, pleasure in noting even the smallest "advance" on the part of China's backward populace. "China is a complex," declared Captain W. E. F. Jones in an article devoted to China's fledgling attempts to develop an airforce.

It is the oldest and the newest country in the world. It boasts of the most ancient civilization and yet it is in its infancy so far as modern progress is concerned. . . . Like a vast giant waking from an age-long sleep and suffering terrible pains when stretching time-stiffened limbs, China is suffering in her efforts to adapt herself to present-day methods. (154)

In an unsigned 1931 editorial about the "Chinese mentality," the London Illustrated News declared that "the Chinese are neither a nation nor responsible, and in the failure to realize particularly the latter fact lies the fallacy of European and American thought" (798). Explanations for China's inertia in the periodicals that Moore read regularly included an unsavory gambit or racist characterizations of the Chinese people. Words like "lazy," "irresponsible," "primitive," and "lymphatic" marked most considerations of the "yellow race." Throughout the 1920s, John Dewey published a series of articles in the New Republic and Asia (Moore mentions both periodicals in her reading diaries) in which he summarized the Western debate over the "Chinese character." "There are many questions of a directly practical nature," wrote Dewey, "that cannot be understood or properly handled unless the larger background be taken into account." He elaborated, listing the questions most frequently posed by the exasperated critics of the Western press:

Why are the Chinese so unperturbed by circumstances that appear to a foreigner to menace their county with national extinction? How can they remain so calm when their country is divided within and threatened from without? Is their attitude one of callous indifference, of stupid ignorance? . . .

Again, there is the question of China's long and obstinate resistance to modern methods of industry, to machinery, railways and large scale production and her disinclination to open up her country except because of pressure from a foreign power. A natural question arises: Why hasn't China taken the lead in developing her own resources? . . . Is her course stupid inertia, a dull, obstinate clinging to the old just because it is old? Or does it show something more profound, a wise, even if largely unconscious aversion to admitting forces that are hostile to the whole spirit of her civilization? (1: 202-03)

In Dewey's view, however, the difference between East and West was not a matter of stupidity but a matter of "philosophy." Noting the important cultural force of Lao-tzu's teachings on the Chinese temperament, Dewey attributed Chinese resistance to change to the "doctrine of the superiority of nature to man, and the conclusion drawn, namely, the doctrine of non-doing. For active doing and striving are likely to be only an interference with nature" (1: 204). Dewey ultimately insisted that the West could learn a thing or two from the Chinese preference for "active patience." "They [the Chinese] are conservative," Dewey explained "because for thousands of years they have been conserving the resources of nature, nursing, preserving, patiently, obstinately. While western peoples have attacked, exploited and in the end wasted the soil, they have conserved it." Dewey ultimately concluded that the Chinese philosophy of nature constituted "a profoundly valuable contribution to human culture," one of which a "hurried, impatient, over-busied and anxious West" was "infinitely in need" (1: 206). Moore, like Dewey, sought to recast the popular sense of Eastern inertia and fatalism as patience and self-restraint. Like other Western intellectuals of her time, she hoped that China might avoid the worst sins of America's rapacious industrial revolution.

10 For a complete discussion of the fate of the American bison, see Worster's chapter "Other People, Other Lives" in An Unsettled Country 55-90.

11 For a discussion of Gilbert White's work and influence, see Worster's chapter "Science in Arcadia" 3-25.

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ROBIN G. SCHULZE is assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches modernist poetry, editorial theory, and American literature. She has written articles T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and a book entitled The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens.

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