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

If the poem "Marriage" has a motto, it might well be the 19th line: "we are still in doubt." As an exposition and as an experiment in style, the poem asks the same question: is the "striking grasp of opposites / opposed each to the other, not to unity," an "amalgamation which can never be more / than an interesting impossibility" (73)? Expositionally, it wonders about the possibility of amalgamating in marriage public and private, institution and enterprise, man and woman, individual and community. Stylistically it combines "experiment," "fine art," "ritual," and "recreation" (76) in conjoining its disparate tools: allusion, metaphor, citation, and epigrammatic commentary. This combination is itself an uneasy marriage, which verges frequently on unintelligibility as competing modes work side by side. Like the idea of marriage that the poem investigates, the poem itself keeps asking whether the "disputation" (77) by which it must prove itself is a fight that will tear it apart or a conversation that will bind it together, in however uneasy a peace.

In this sense, the question of how "plausibly" the poet manages to arrange her different poetic materials is of the essence. Like a good conversationalist, she should be able to inflect each change in tone, image, idea, and method so that the whole to which they contribute has a discernible shape that does not distort any one of its elements. The possibility of achieving such a balance is an issue that concerns Moore from some of her earliest poems onward. [11] "Marriage" poses the problem of complexity that must not become murkiness, either formally or thematically. Formally, as we have seen, it moves in undemarcated, rapid-fire transitions between stylistic methods, principally allusion, metaphor, citation, and epigram, challenging the reader and the poet to find the "hidden principle" by which they may be understood to belong to the same poem. Thematically, it concerns the confusion that results when Adam and Eve talk to each other, implicitly asking if their conversations can be understood to constitute the "unity" of marriage. More specifically, it asks what efficacy "politeness" can have in making conversationalists out of these opposed people, who stand in unequal relations to the social structures of the world they inhabit.

Eve's role in the difficulty (if not the impossibility) of their communication is pivotal. On the one hand, she is an appealing conversationalist,

so handsome

she gave me a start,

able to write simultaneously

in three languages--

English, German and French--

and talk in the meantime (72)

On the other hand, marriage is a realm in which her evident powers may not help her much. The poet intimates this by juxtaposing two aspects of marriage, the drawing-room banter that accompanies a proposal and the sensually charged strangeness of physical union that comes afterward:

I have seen her...

equally positive in demanding a commotion

and in stipulating quiet:

"I should like to be alone";