Morals, Manners, and "Marriage": Marianne Moore's Art of Conversation

This training in righteous hypocrisy, combined with the fact that "men have power / and sometimes one is made to feel it," begins to explain the mistrust that fuels the long duologue between "He" and "She" (presumably Adam and Eve) that follows. Adam's principle grievance is Eve's duplicity. He calls her "uniquely disappointing, / revengefully wrought in the attitude / of an adoring child / to a distinguished parent." [13] Eve, on her part, complains of Adam's thoughtless power, claiming that "men are monopolists / of 'stars, garters, buttons / and other shining baubles'-- / unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness." The only point of contact their monologues can manage is the final, pointed interchange in which Eve notes, "you know so many artists who are fools," to which Adam replies, "you know so many fools who are not artists" (79). Otherwise their "conversation" is really an alternation of incompatible perspectives from people too distant from each other to actually converse. This is a pe ssimistic poem about the possibility of real communication between the most intimately connected people; the narrator, having reported the strange nonconversation of Adam and Eve, remarks that "he loves himself so much, / he can permit himself / no rival in that love. / She loves herself so much, / she cannot see herself enough--" (79). Moore equals this distaste only in "Novices," published in the same year. In that poem she chastises "stupid man; men are strong and no one pays any attention: / stupid woman; women have charm, and how annoying they can be" (Selected Poems 69).

The narrator ends on this note, with a long, ironic portrait of Adam and Eve, locked together and fighting their battles:

What can one do for them-

these savages condemned to disaffect

all those who are not visionaries

alert to undertake the silly task

of making people noble?

This model of petrine fidelity

who "leaves her peaceful husband

only because she has seen enough of him"-

that orator reminding you

"I am yours to command." (79-80)

In representing the deadlock between the flighty wife and the pompous husband, the poem turns increasingly to emblems of restrictive and distorting form:

One sees that it is rare--

that striking grasp of opposites

opposed each to the other, not to unity,

which in cycloid inclusiveness

has dwarfed the demonstration

of Columbus with the egg--

a truth of simplicity--

that charitive Euroclydon

of frightening disinterestedness

which the world hates (80)

The idea of "opposites / opposed each to the other, not to unity" demonstrates that in fact the problem lies not so much in the man or in the woman but in the "unity" to which they are asked to submit. The reference to Columbus illustrates the damage of such enforced conformity. An old and cranky Columbus, so the story goes, claimed to be able to make an egg stand up straight on one end. When asked to prove it he gently crunched in one end of an egg shell, giving it a flat surface on which to balance. This is a less than optimistic view of what marriage asks of its participants, and an equally skeptical image for literary form. Not surprisingly, the poem ends in increasing stylistic fragmentation and thematic suspicion. The introduction of the Euroclydon, a tempestuous wind (Acts 27:14), blows the rest of the poem out of joint as its shape, the remaining force of continuity, alters for the first time: