388 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

By Samuel Terrien

"My favorite poem? The Book of Job, for the verity of its agony and the fidelity that contrives glory for ashes." -Foreword, A Marianne Moore Reader, pp. xviii.

SHE DEALT chiefly with small things, but she was always aware of their sacred character. She saw the holy everywhere, in the pirouetting of ballet dancers or the risks of trapeze artists, in the athletic fulgurance of baseball players, or in the iridescent wings of the dragon-fly.

She liked to quote Sherlock Holmes, "My dear Watson, it has been an axiom of mine that little things are infinitely the most important," but she did not espouse this thought in the Conan Doyle sense of seeking to solve a murder. She loved small things in the sense of Wordsworth, "the unassuming things that hold a silent station in this beauteous world."

Perceiving the holy within the secular is a rare ability. Conventional religions, including Judaism and Christianity, have shunned it because they like to sanctify their own rituals only, and they are prone to relish their private preserves to the exclusion of all others.

Marianne Moore excelled at translating into words, sometimes with impishness, often with biting wit and irony, yet always without arrogance, the three dimensional aspect of the whole of life: first, the esthetics of wonder; second, the ethics of responsibility; and third, the theology of unobtrusive transcendence.

I

First, the esthetics of wonder. All artists, of course, share a sensitivity to the marvelous, but Marianne Moore expressed it with an astounding economy of words, a restraint of emotion, and a chasteness of tone. These qualities set her apart from the other great poets of the twentieth century.

Samuel Terrien is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Union Theological Seminary, New York. He is the author of numerous works, including The Elusive Presence: The Heart of Biblical Theology (1978) and Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood (1985). He has also written on Mozart (THEOLOGY TODAY, Jan. 1986 and Oct. 1988) and T. S. Eliot (Jan. 1988). In this present article he is paying tribute to Marianne Moore the poet and personal friend. Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. Permission to cite from the poetry of Marianne Moore has been granted by the publishers.

389 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

As a college student at Bryn Mawr, she took courses in biology, but the study of the evolutionary process, at that time presented as the result of either chance or determinism, never deterred her from the certitude that the cosmos is moving toward its entelechy-that is to say, she believed that the universe and human history have a meaningful purpose.

A hundred and eighty years ago, William Blake wrote of natural wonders as "the holiness of the minute particular." Like him, Marianne Moore did "see the world in a grain of sand, and a Heaven in a wild flower." Unlike the Romantic poets or many shallow religionists of today, however, she would not have claimed, as Blake had done, "to hold Infinity in the palm of [her] hand." She was not a pantheist. She knew somberly the meaning of human finitude, the deceitful banality of evil, the scandal of suffering, and the plight of mortality.

Foremost a lover of the accurate word, not only in English, but also in French, Italian, German, Latin, Greek, and even biblical Hebrew, she was possessed by a rigorous respect for language.

In her poem entitled "The Past Is the Present," she appealed to her favorite Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk.

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said-and I think I repeat his exact words-
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness."¹

Anyone who has heard her tone of voice can imagine her profound disdain for this quoted opinion. Her comment was

Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.²

Elsewhere, in a piece called "Novices," quoting the eminent biblical exegete from Scotland, George Adam Smith, she praised

"the spontaneous unforced passion of the Hebrew language-
an abyss of verbs full of reverberations and tempestuous energy"

in this drama of water against the rocks-this "ocean of hurrying consonants"
with its "great livid stains like long slabs of green marble,"
its "flashing lances of perpendicular lightning" and "molten
fires swallowed up,"
with foam on its barriers,"
"crashing itself out in one long hiss of spray."³

¹The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York, Macmillan/Viking, 1967), p. 88. This excerpt and all other excerpts from poems included in this essay are reprinted with the permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.

²Ibid.

³Ibid., p. 61.

390 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

This was, for her, an exceptional burst of stylistic exuberance. Usually she cultivated conciseness and reticence, that did not conceal, but on the contrary revealed plainly, her deep reverence not only for the esthetic economy of nature within its seemingly prodigal waste, but also the marvels of the human intellect. She wrote:

THE MIND IS AN ENCHANTING THING
is an enchanted thing
like the glaze on a
katydid-wing
subdivided by sun
till the nettings are legion.
Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti...⁴

Whimsically, she once declared that she disliked poetry, but she confessed that "Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine."⁵

It was not authentic poetry that she disliked, but as she put it, in an essay inspired by Ezra Pound, which she called "Subject, Predicate, Object," she expressed her distaste for "anything mannered, disparaging, or calculated to reduce to the ranks what offends one."⁶

She asked me one day, "Don't you think that the decrease of attendance in churches on Sunday mornings comes from parsons who do not know that homiletics is a rigorous art-form, and that the sermon is not just a rambling talk about current events?"

Against those who spoke of poetry as "divine fire, a perquisite of the gods," she suggested that she wrote simply "under the spell of admiration [for a book, a piece of music] or of gratitude [for a friend]. " She further confided that it never occurred to her that people imagined her to be a poet. She said, "If what I write is called poetry, it is because there is no other category in which to put it."

Marianne Moore never indulged in writing free verse. Actually, she was a superb technician of prosody. Her rhythms were extremely varied, but when, for example, she composed a stanza with six lines of 5, 3, 5, 2, 5, and 7 syllables, respectively, this complex pattern was faultlessly repeated, stanza after stanza, with a fireworks display illuminating the intentional drabness of the words.

Her vignettes of exotic animals were always anthropologically oriented. Like Aesop and La Fontaine, she talked of animals only to describe human beings. In a piece called "The Pangolin," a small South Asian mammal, which she extolled as a model of exactness and sobriety, she mused that despite his many achievements, man makes

⁴ Ibid., p. 134.

⁵ Ibid., p. 36.

⁶ Quoted in Sister Therese, Marianne Moore: A Critical Essay (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1969), p. 23.

391 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

disheartening mistakes:

Bedizened or stark
naked, man, the self, the being we call human,writing-
master to this world, griffons a dark
"Like does not like that is obnoxious": and writes error with four
r's. ⁷

And so, on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, November 15, 1967, W. H. Auden contributed a Festschrift in her honor:

... today, we stress your name,
Miss Marianne Moore, for, fastidious but fair, you are affronted
by those whose disposition
it is to affront: [you] who beg the cobra's pardon,
are always on time and never would let yourself write
error with four r's.⁸

She did, indeed, master accuracy of form by extreme fastidiousness. One day, she sent my wife and me a copy of her latest volume of verse, Like a Bulwark. Following a charming dedication on the fly-leaf, she added, "Please tell me if the name of the Marquise de Boufflers needs an apostrophe 's." This query concerned a French song by the eighteenth-century Marquise, whom she was quoting in the book. While she knew that the name Boufflers was pronounced as if it were Bouffle', she did not wish to err if an apostrophe should follow the silent s. The song was, incidentally, a delightful "poÀmelette."

Il faut dire en deux mots
Cc qu'on veut dire;
Les longs propos
Sont sots. ⁹
[One must say in two words
What one has to say;
Only fools
Give long speeches.]

Her cultivation of conciseness and reticence made her verse often obscure, and she was frequently accused of opacity. In one of her prose essays, "Burning Desire to Be Explicit," she told how her professor of English at Bryn Mawr had returned to her a term paper, of which Marianne Moore said forty years later, and not without animus, "I had taken a great deal of trouble with it." She still resented the grade of "C" and the teacher's comment in the margin, "I presume you had an idea if one could find out what it is."

⁷Complete Poems, op. cit., p. 119.

⁸W. H. Auden, "A Mosaic for Marianne Moore" (On the Occasion of Her Eightieth Birthday, November 15, 1967), City without Walls and Other Poems (New York, Random House, 1969), p. 2S.

⁹Complete Poems, op. cit., p. 285.

392 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

Some years later, at a literary gathering in Manhattan, she read her celebrated poem "Tell Me, Tell Me," in which she exhorted,

flee
to metaphysical new mown hay,
Honeysuckle, or woods fragrance.¹⁰

A strikingly well-dressed woman with an equally positive manner inquired, "Miss Moore, what is 'metaphysical new mown hay'?" The answer came at once, "Oh, something like a sudden whiff of fragrance in contrast with the doggedly continuous opposition to spontaneous conversation that had gone before." Thereupon, the lady retorted, "Then, why don't you say so?" She had apparently never heard of Blaise Pascal's distinction between "l'esprit de finesse" and "l'esprit de g¾om¾trie."

When gently accused of being too cryptic, Marianne Moore replied:

Expanded explanation tends
to spoil the lion's leap ....
We must be as clear as our own
reticence allows us to be.¹¹

II

Second, the ethics of responsibility. Marianne Moore cultivated the esthetics of wonder, but she was never ignorant of ethical demands and responsibility. Her literary method was actually a modulated gymnastic, a choreography, an acrobatic feat of the whole person in a self-discipline of expression, an askesis, attuned to a respect for all human beings.

Nevertheless, self-restraint was not in any way an ascetic renunciation that denied her the pleasures of this world. She traveled widely. She saw the Great Pyramids, the Parthenon, Rome, Florence, Venice, Oxford and Cambridge, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and the South Pacific Islands. She patronized museums and concert halls and was as much at home with Leonardo da Vinci, Diirer, El Greco, and Titian as she was with Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach. The Centennial Exhibit at the Grolier Club in New York, November 1987, included a rather unexpected photograph of Marianne Moore, champagne cup in hand, laughing along with Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Martha Graham, Igor Stravinsky, Brendan Gill, and Alfred Barr. She could sing of the Caves of Lascaux and also of Carnegie Hall. Her picture was taken with Cassius Clay. She threw the first ball at the World Series in 1968, when she was eighty-one, just four years before her death. Her enjoyment of life may be characterized as "a measured and considered hedonism." She did not indulge in moralism, but she was an artist with an ethical conscience. "Virtue consists in not acquiescing to vice" was

¹⁰Ibid., p. 231.

¹¹Predilections (New York, Viking, 1955), p. 3.

393 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

one of her maxims. She also liked her own quaint phrase, "Egomania is not an obligation."¹²

Long before World War II, she pleaded for civil rights. With the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and during the horror of Nazism, she took her stand on justice and paid moving tributes to men and women in the Allied Forces. Like Hercules, she wrote, they had "to clean the pig-sty." Yet, after the reconquest of Paris, she warned the victors against "fat-living" and the enslavement of the self. She feared that those "marching, marching, marching [fighters] ... marching to death," had been marching in vain.¹³

With set jaws they are fighting,
fighting, fighting-some we love whom we know,
some we love but know not-that
hearts may feel and not be numb.¹⁴

During a memorable television interview, she asked Sidney Poitiers to read,

"Tell Me, Tell Me"
where might there be a refuge for me
from egocentricity? .... ¹⁵

Elsewhere, as in her poem "In Distrust of Merits," she sadly observed,

The world's an orphan's home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?...
If these great patient
dyings-all these agonies
and wound-bearings and bloodshed
can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted....
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war.... ¹⁶

The poem "Keeping the World Large" was a plea for the conversion of the self-deceiving, well-off, and seemingly solid citizens that we are, Philistines all. But she did not preach to others. She merely vowed for herself: "If Christ and his apostles died in vain, I'll die in vain with them."¹⁷ Incidentally, I think that this was the sole explicit reference to Christianity in the entire corpus of her poetry and of her prose essays. Unless I am mistaken, she did not refer, even once, to God by name. She was not glib about her religion. Yet, she was a deeply religious poet. During the celebration of her centennial, her critics and admirers missed or willfully ignored her Hebrew-Christian inspiration. The few

¹² Cited as "Egomania is not a duty" in "Blessed Is the Man," Complete Poems, op. cit., p. 173.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 145-46.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 137.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 231.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 137-38.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 145.

394 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

exceptions were the poet Donald Hall,¹⁸ Sister Th¾rÀse,¹⁹ Elizabeth Phillips,²⁰ and Helen Vendler.²¹

III

Thus, the third aspect of her poetry deserves special attention. I call it the theology of unobtrusive transcendence. Marianne Moore's esthetics of wonder and her ethics of responsibility are rooted and articulated, first and last, upon her unshakable, sturdy, yet discreet faithfulness to the Hebrew-Christian dynamics as seen especially in the Psalms, Job, the Prophets, and the sayings of Jesus.

Years ago, I was asked to substitute for an ailing minister at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. I had not known that Marianne Moore was a member of that church. There she was Sunday morning, sitting in the third pew. I recognized her at once, although I had seen only photographs of her, with her eighteenth century black tricorn and her black cape. Her abundant hair, no longer the flaming red of her youth, was snowy white, crowned by a circular braid beneath the three-cornered hat.

As it happened, on that Sunday morning I had planned to quote two or three lines from one of her poems that fitted perfectly the thesis of my sermon. After a momentary hesitation, I decided to go ahead, but-as was my custom with quotations-to give them without precise attribution. Following the service, she remained in her pew until the congregation had departed. Then she came to me, saying, "Thank you for not mentioning my name." In the years after this initial acquaintance, she used to exclaim whenever we met, "Imagine, to discover that we have Habakkuk and La Fontaine in common, right here in Brooklyn!" I had preached that morning on a text from Habakkuk on the fig tree that would not flourish, and I had quoted both La Fontaine and Marianne Moore.

As we were talking one day about the intelligence of animals and the lessons that we human beings can learn from them, Marianne Moore mentioned, to my delight, that exegetes of the book of Job, in her judgment, should not dismiss the carnival of animals-the horse, the eagle, the ostrich, etc.-as if they were irrelevant. So, I told her the following story. The faculty of a theological school where I taught at one time were discussing plans for the next Student-Faculty Retreat on Ash Wednesday. I proposed, half-seriously, that instead of a gabfest, morning, afternoon, and evening, we should go to the local zoo and, in complete silence, observe the penguins for two hours. That, I concluded, would be a true retreat. Penguins walk like clergy in a procession, but they seem wiser and more humble. My faculty colleagues looked daggers at me and said nothing. After a second or

¹⁸ Donald Hall, "Interview with Marianne Moore," McCall's, 87 (1965), pp. 74 ff.

¹⁹ Sister Therese, op. cit., pp. 38-42.

²⁰ Elizabeth Phillips, Marianne Moore (New York, Ungar, 1982) pp. 115-153.

²¹ Helen Vendler, "Poet's Prose," The New Yorker, March 16, 1987. pp. 94-96.

395 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

two, the subject was dropped. Marianne Moore's eyes flashed as she said, "Professional theologians know nothing about a silent God!"

Her faith was complex and cannot be defined in few words. She had been a lonely adolescent and all her life remained a lonely woman. Her father had died insane when she was fourteen. Two years later, she wrote an essay called "I Was Sixteen Today," in which she asserted, "The cure for loneliness is solitude." She had not yet read Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, or Paul Tillich, but, like them, she knew that loneliness is sterile unless it is transformed into solitude, which is the sine qua non of spiritual growth.

In a poem entitled "A Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle," she depicted much later "a Rosalindless red bird" that says,

"Without
loneliness I should be more
lonely, so I keep it."²²

Yet, her most recurrent theme was not solitude, but fortitude. "The Paper Nautilus," precisely on account of its fragility and of its struggle against confinement, is actually

hindered to succeed .²³

Or again,

Victory won't come
to me, unless I go
to it;
holding on, like
a grape tendril...²⁴

The fable of the Book of Jonah fascinated her. "Sojourn in the Whale" reduced to a skeleton of sounds the whole myth of death and transfiguration.

"Water in motion is far
from level." You have seen it, when obstacles happened to bar
the path, rise automatically.²⁵

Marianne Moore knew that humankind is "trapped in mortality." The desert mirage, especially for Jacob, the biblical symbol of Israel Agonistes ("The One Who Fights with God"), was just that-a mirage. His ladder did not necessarily give access to heaven; it was part celestial, but also part terrestrial. This ladder had

steps of air,
and the angels, ascending and descending upon it were
air angels: [whose]
friends were the stones.²⁶

²² Complete Poems, op. cit., p. 104.

²³ Ibid., p. 121.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 125.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 90.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 13.

396 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

She often thought of angels, but only to put human beings in their proper place. "Angels," she wrote, "are not happier than men because they are better than men, but because they don't investigate each other's spheres.²⁷ She perceived the deep truth hidden in mythological thinking. In a poem called "By Disposition of Angels," she asked,

Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.
Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?

One has seen, in such steadiness never deflected,
how by darkness a star is perfected.

Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate...²⁸

In view of the ambiguity of Jacob's ladder, the question of the human predicament remains more perplexing, more haunting than ever. From the plight of Jacob, the poet proceeded to that of Job and of Hamlet. Condemnation to pain and the fear of death generate only hatred of self and hatred of others under the guise of hate for hatefulness itself. Is this cause for despair? Elsewhere she wrote, "For mortal rage and immortal injury,...are there not medicines? Job and Hamlet insisted that we dare not let ourselves be snared into hating hatefulness; to do this would be to take our own lives."²⁹

Her brooding did not, however, endure for long in a balancing act of doubt. She continued, "It is a fact as well as a mystery that weakness is power, that handicap is proficiency, that the scar is a credential, that indignation is no adversary for gratitude or heroism for joy."³⁰ And she concluded, "There are medicines."

In the days of her youth, her stance might have been described as a manifestation of stoic humanism. At eighteen, she had published in the Bryn Mawr Literary Magazine the following quatrain:

If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try.

But later, in her full maturity, she came to sing of

"...the heart rising
in its estate of peace
as a boat rises
with the rising of the water."³¹

The notes she provides at the end of her books of poems, in order to indicate her sources, reveal without equivocation respect for transcendence.

²⁷ Cited by Denis Donaghue, Reading America: Essays on American Literature (New York, Knopf, 1987), p. 206.

²⁸ Complete Poems, op. cit., p. 142.

²⁹ The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, P. C. Willis, ed., (New York, Viking, 1986), p.369.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Complete Poems, op. cit., p. 63.

397 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

Here she was quoting from Richard Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest. The stoic humanism of her youth had now made room for a theology of grace, unsought, unmerited, thankfully received, and humbly accepted.

The startling El Greco
brimming with inner light-that
covets nothing that it has let go. ³²

In "Distrust of Merits" she expanded on a virtue of heroic dimension which can be caught

As contagion
of sickness makes sickness,
contagion of trust can make trust .³³

This assurance was due to her sense of belonging to "a cloud of witnesses," which enabled her to affirm in the Apostles' Creed "the communion of saints."

Hers was not a mercantile religion, corrupted by the syndrome of work and reward. She was not a Pelagian but an Augustinian. She belonged to the ancient lineage of the prophets Habakkuk and Jeremiah, also to St. Paul and to Luther, who saw that the righteous were not traders of virtue for bliss, but satisfied to live by faith alone. She saw that Job was the victim of conventional religionists, who confuse salvation with moralism. As a critic of legalistic Christendom and Judaism, Marianne Moore restated in her own terms the true meaning of the old and misunderstood doctrine of justification, not by works but by faith.

At the core of "In Distrust of Merits," she declared:

Job disheartened by false comfort knew

that nothing can be so defeating
as a blind man who
can see....
that walks so arrogantly...³⁴

Fraught with dangers always, doubt must be kept modest. But it is still doubt. "The Steeple Jack"

gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope

discovers that always "Danger is juxtaposed to hope"³⁵ and that nevertheless, "hope is high above life's peril."³⁶

³² Ibid., p. 9

³³ Ibid., p. 136.

³⁴ Collected Poems, (London, Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 137.

³⁵ Therese, op. cit., p. 40.

³⁶ Complete Poems, op. cit., p. 7.

398 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

In a modern interpretation of the First Psalm, Marianne Moore wrote,

BLESSED IS THE MAN
who does not sit in the seat of the scoffer-
the man who does not denigrate, depreciate, denunciate;
(Ah, Giorgione! there are those who mongrelize .... )

She was alluding to the painter's self-portrait with warts and all. At the end of the poem, she offered another subtle critique of the church:

Blessed is the man whose faith is different
from possessiveness-of a kind not framed by "things
which do appear"-

whose illumined eye has seen the shaft that gilds the
sultan's tower. ³⁷

Here is an echo of the Rubayat of Omar Khayyam and a reminiscence of the Middle East, where she had learned that so-called Christians or Jews who boast and bicker among themselves should not be sure of their superiority over the followers of Islam.

IV

This was the Marianne Moore I knew-a woman who, in spite of her modesty, was fully convinced of her poetic gift and of her faith. She was unwilling to yield to the fads of the moment or to use literature for sectarian propaganda. But she ventured once to offer a prayer that disclosed something of her theology. It was addressed to the Sun of Righteousness, whom the prophet Malachi heralds with an eschatological duality of threat and expectation. The prayer is called simply "Sun," and its epigraph is "Hope and fear accost Him."

"No man may him hyde
From Deth holow-eyed";
For us, this inconvenient truth does not suffice." ³⁸

Then she addresses directly the unnamed God as the Day Star, knowing that the word "God" has no gender:

You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.
Splendid with splendor hid you come, from your Arab abode....
O Sun, you shall stay
with us; holiday,
consuming wrath ...
Insurgent feet shall not outrun
multiplied flames, O Sun. ³⁹

Years ago my wife invited students to our New York apartment for an evening of poetry reading by Marianne Moore, who at the last

³⁷ Ibid., p. 174.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 234.

³⁹ Ibid. An allusion to Pss. 24 and 104.

399 - Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness

moment discovered that she had forgotten her glasses. Sara said to her quietly, "One of your poems I like especially is What Are Years'9" At once came the response, "Oh, do you?" And, eyes sparkling, the poet began to recite the lines flawlessly. One poem led to another for a whole hour. The reading glasses had indeed been forgotten.

The title of the poem "What Are Years?" is a question, but the poem itself is an affirmation. It summarizes the major themes of her thought as they are spread throughout her whole poetic work. There are, I think, three intertwining themes within each of the three strophes: (1) the courage that overcomes guilt; (2) the freedom of inner deliverance; and (3) the song that rises from time to immortality.

What Are Years

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt-
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.⁴⁰

Because she conceived such poems, Marianne Moore ranks with Emily Dickinson as one of the two greatest American poets who unobtrusively celebrated Christian faith.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 95.