Poems by Marianne Craig Moore

In English – En Français – На Русском Языке – Bilingual

American Literature – Children Books – American Poetry – Marianne Craig Moore – Poems by Marianne Craig Moore

In English

Black Earth
Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator … Continue Reading …

Diligence Is To Magic As Progress Is To Flight
With an elephant to ride upon—“with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,”
she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes. … Continue Reading …

Dock Rats
There are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily
as we do—who seem to feel that it is a good place to come
home to. … Continue Reading …

England
with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral;
with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the
criterion of suitability and convenience; … Continue Reading …

Feed Me, Also, River God
lest by diminished vitality and abated
vigilance, I become food for crocodiles—for that quicksand
of gluttony which is legion. It is there—close at hand— … Continue Reading …

“He Wrote The History Book,” It Said
There! You shed a ray
of whimsicality on a mask of profundity so
terrific that I have been dumbfounded by … Continue Reading …

He Made This Screen
not of silver nor of coral,
but of weatherbeaten laurel. … Continue Reading …

In This Age Of Hard Trying Nonchalance Is Good, And
really, it is not the
business of the gods to bake clay pots. They did not
do it in this instance. A few … Continue Reading …

In The Days Of Prismatic Color
not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the fineness of … Continue Reading …

Is Your Town Nineveh?
Why so desolate?
And why multiply
in phantasmagoria about fishes, … Continue Reading …

My Apish Cousins
winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras, supreme in
their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin
and strictly practical appendages … Continue Reading …

Pedantic Literalist
Prince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost,
white torch—“with pow’r to say unkind
things with kindness, and the most … Continue Reading …

Picking And Choosing
Literature is a phase of life: if
one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if
one approaches it familiarly, … Continue Reading …

Poetry
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there
is init after all, a place for the genuine. … Continue Reading …

Radical
Tapering
to a point, conserving everything,
this carrot is predefined to be thick. … Continue Reading …

Reinforcements
The vestibule to experience is not to
be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are going
to their work with this idea, advancing like a school of fish through … Continue Reading …

Roses Only
You do not seem to realise that beauty is a liability rather than
an asset—that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in
supposing … Continue Reading …

Talisman
Under a splintered mast,
torn from ship and cast
near her hull, … Continue Reading …

The Fish
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one … Continue Reading …

Those Various Scalpels
Those
various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled
echoes … Continue Reading …

To A Steam Roller
The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down … Continue Reading …

To William Butler Yeats On Tagore
It is made clear by the phrase,
even the mood—by virtue of which he says … Continue Reading …

When I Buy Pictures
or what is closer to the truth, when I look at
that of which I may regard myself as the
imaginary possessor, I fix upon that which would … Continue Reading …

You Are Like The Realistic Product Of An Idealistic Search For Gold At The Foot Of The Rainbow
Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape vine,
twine
your anatomy … Continue Reading …

Bilingual

American Literature – Children Books – American Poetry – Marianne Craig Moore – Poems by Marianne Craig Moore