INTENSITY OF EMOTION - Shodhgangashodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/37135/3/chapter2.pdf · INTENSITY OF EMOTION ... perhaps fears of death, ... For analysis the poem can

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INTENSITY OF EMOTION

The poems of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore exhibit a

profound intensity of emotion and their poems also focus on this as

a subject extolling the virtues of such intensity when modern readers

ranked them as the major new voice whose literary innovations were

unmatched by any other in the nineteenth and twentieth century poets

in the United States. Their poems are not a turning loose of emotion,

but an escape from emotion, it is not the expression of personality,

and emotion know what it means, to want to escape from these

things, they employ subtle imageries striking emotions and morals,

and erratic punctuation to ultimately produce a repertoire or definitive

statements through simple diction.

In their almost poems Dickinson and Moore, painfully at times,

exert emotions. Dickinson and Moore were highly skilled in the use

of humor and irony and they effectively used these tools in their

poetry to stress a point or idea. However, their frustration, bitterness

and independence are felt through the expressive lines of their poetry

while at the same time concealing their concerns in a light-hearted

and irreverent tone. The works of Dickinson and Moore contain deep

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emotions and their works will continue to amaze those that have the

privilege of reading them.

Dickinson at the start of the American civil war, commented

little on the event, and chooses not to help the war effort, through

making bandages. To be fair, this attitude of distance from the war

was quite common in the north. Death of close friends was a

significant feature of Emily’s life; many close to her were taken

away. This inevitably heightened her interest in fascination and

perhaps fears of death, which informed so much of her poetry. The

civil war years were also the most productive for Emily interms of

quantity of poems, it appears. Dickinson was influenced imperceptibly

by the atmosphere of war, even if it appeared somewhat distant to

her.

As well as writing over 1,700 poems, Emily was a prolific

letter writer; these letters, giving her the opportunity for contact with

others, that in other respects she denied herself. Her letters show her

love of language and are often not dissimilar to her style of poetry.

She went to a great length to express her personal sentiments of

gratitude and love to others. This emotional style of writing and

communicating was fairly common for the time. They should also be

seen in regard to Emily’s other letters, which freely express intense


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emotional sentiments. Despite Emily’s seclusion and frail health, her

poetry reveals that she did experience moments of great joy. Through

nature and life she was able to glimpse into a mystic dimension

beyond worldly distractions; although it is clear that this did not

become a permanent feeling. For every ecstatic joy, there seems to a

contrasting doubt and of uncertainty. But she was able to offer a

concise and direct revelation of thought-provoking ideas through a

powerful command of language.

Moore is embarrassed by – betrayed by – feelings. So what

will she do? She will describe the world of plants and animals and

things up close, she will dissect human behavior from a distance.

And above all, she will do what we all do, when we don’t want to

eat something we are required to eat. She will move things around

on her plate. Whatever the case, her poems wind up strangely

electrified with the feelings that is not directly encountered. In having

recently read a great deal of Moore’s works, we can see some

surprising, not quite mental but exclusively muscular sensation; the

extravagantly gorgeous, linguistically tormented, lacunae-packed poems

of Marianne Moore are simple in some essential way and relaxing to

read.


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Moore’s poems aren’t exactly results. They are more like

particles in suspension. They depend on whatever is holding them in

place, but is more the way jewels need the prongs of the setting.

Emotion is shifty, unstable stuff to Moore. Moore’s strong emotions

tolerate the use of generalization being accurate, defuses the emotion

mastering it through dispersion. The description of the suffering self

as being enlightened as ironic, for although this enlightenment is the

only light in the darkness, it is still characterized by suffering that is

given in the poem The Heart asks Pleasure – First :

The Heart asks Pleasure – first – (1).

Appears to be simple, but close study reveals complexities. The first

eight lines deal with the desire for pleasure, and remaining lines treat

pain and the desire for its relief. This proportion may at first suggest

that pleasure is being sought as a relief from pain, but this idea is

unlikely. The rapid shift from a desire for pleasure to a pursuit of

relief combines with slightly child-like voice of the poem to show

that the hope for pleasure in life quickly yields to the universal fact

of pain, after which a pursuit of relief becomes life’s center. The

Heart asks pleasure – first – takes a passive stance towards

suffering, but it also criticizes a world that makes people suffer.


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Such attitudes are shown more subtly in the first line of this poem

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (1).

Dickinson’s most popular poem about suffering, and one of her

greatest poems. As are the two poems just discussed, it is told in the

third person, but it seems very personal. The speaker watches her

suffering protagonists’ withdrawal from the world, a withdrawal

which implies criticisms of those who have made her suffer. In the

second stanza, the protagonist is sufficiently desirous of relief to

walk around. She walks in a circle as an expression of frustration

and because she has nowhere to go, but her feet are unfeeling, her

path and her feet as well, are like wood – that is, they are

insensitive to what is beneath and around them. Almost from its

beginning, the poem has been dramatizing a state of emotional shock

that serves as a protection against pain. As the second stanza ends,

this stance become explicit, the feet and the walking now standing

for the whole suffering self which grows centered with its hardened

condition in the opening line of Twas like a Maelstrom, with a

notch.

twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch – (1).


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is an interesting variation of Dickinson’s treatment of destruction’s

threat. This poem employs neither the third person of After great

pain nor the first person of I felt a funeral and It was not death

instead, it is told in the second person, which seems to imply

involvement in and yet distance from an experience that almost

destroyed the speaker. The speaker appears threatened by psychic

disintegration; although a few critics believe that the subject is the

terror of death. For analysis the poem can be divided in to three

parallel parts, plus a conclusion: the first two stanzas; the second two

stanzas; the fifth stanza and the first two lines of the last stanzas

and then the final two lines. In each of the three major sections, the

speaker – who addresses herself with a generalizing you – is

brought to the brink of destruction and then is suddenly spared. In

the first section, her torturer is a murderous device designed to spill

boiling water, or to pull her by the hem of her gown into a

cauldron. The experience however, turns out to be a nightmare from

which she awakens. In the second section, the torturer is a goblin or

a fiend who measures the time until it can seize her and tear her to

pieces with its beast like paws.

She reacts stiffly and numbly – as in other poems – until

God forces, and satanic torturer to release her. God seems to act by


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whim – just barely remembering a task that ought to greatly concern

him. In the third section, the torturer is a judicial process which

leads her out to execution. The luxury of doubt in which she had

been imprisoned in luxuries because, it atleast offers some hope of

freedom from a miserable condition. But, the prison from which she

has been led cannot be the same thing as the forces that have been

threatening to destroy her. Probably the prison is experienced as a

realm of conflict, and the torturer – executioner who appears in three

different guises is the possibility that her conflicts will drive her mad

and kills her by making her completely self-alienated. In the last

section, she is offered not freedom, but a reprieve implying that the

whole process may start again, that is why she cannot tell if :

1. being destroyed and leaving her suffering behind, or

2. going on life which faces constant threat causes the great

anguish.

This poem probably treats the same kind of alienation,

lovelessness and self-accusation found in After great pain and I felt

a funeral in my brain .

In I like a look of agony, she shows that only the most

intense emotions can be trusted, can be exhibited for others with


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honesty, and thus only the most intense emotions belong in poetry.

Dare you see a soul at the white heat? shows, however that while

positive, this level of emotional intensity is neither easy to produce

and experience, nor it is easy to observe. In this poem, the speaker

must enact a painful forging process to refine her emotions to this

heightened level, and while it is glorious, almost divine when she

does, it is still a challenging thing for the reader to observe.

The first day’s night had come shows just how dangerous

such intensity of emotion can be, why the reader must dare to

witness it. In this poem the speaker’s emotions are so overpowering

that she cannot maintain a whole incorporated identity, and so she

loses her mind. Thus, while most of Dickinson’s poem extol the

honesty in heightened emotions, we see that there is a risk in all of

this.

Dare you see a soul at white heat? can be read to be about

the emotional intensity of Dickinson’s poems, and what it requires of

both the reader and the poet to confront that intensity. Dickinson’s

poetry is certainly filled with emotional intensity that is not hidden

behind any fancy language or stale-tropes, there are no colors

distracting from it, only pure white-light which makes it difficult to

gaze at straight on. That this difficulty is emphasized in the first line


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of the poem, the question Dare you – this is no easy passive task,

but may end in the reader getting burned. And although the then

that starts the second line implies that yes, the reader does dare, the

implication of asking the question at all is that not everyone would.

And although, the reader who darts can gaze on the soul at white

heat, they must still do it from the door way they cannot actually

participate. This intensity is not just difficult and painful to gaze on

– it requires significant effort and pain to create it and display it.

Dickinson does not just portray these emotions for the sake of

her poetry without feeling them, the intensity of the portrayal

requires that they be true, that she feels them and even refines them

to make them more intense, more-overpowering. The forge is her

experience, her effort and her willingness to refine these emotions

until they are in their purest form. Like her other poems that deal

with the positive side of hardships, pain and failure, this poem makes

clear that the kind of emotional intensity that is available in her

poetry cannot come out with ease and happiness and success.

Leaving aside the grim omission, however an encumbered

reading of Dickinson’s poetry must take into full account its

irrepressible play of mind and words. Her great subjects were also

her obsessions: love and its rejection; nature and its almost desired


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sacramental Presence; death and its almost desired inevitability and of

course, immortality. She perceived the natural world in far-lovelier

and more vivid images and she circumscribed the darkness that

enclosed the guild-ridden fictions of Hawthrone and Melville.

Dickinson was unique, an American original, and arguably our purest

poet.

Grief is virtually omnipresent in Dickinson’s poetry, other

characters are few and far between in those poems, but grief is

practically Dickinson’s primary companion. When other people do

appear, it is only grief that allows Dickinson to feel connected to

them. She trusts only people who display a look of Agony, because

it is the only emotion that she knows must be true. Thus it is only

with the death and dying that Dickinson’s wall of distrust collapses.

In I Measure Every Grief I Meet, grief does not just bring

Dickinson closer to others because she can trust it, but rather

because it is a bond between them, and knowing they are grieving to

make her burden of grief somewhat lighter. Thus, in I look a like

of Agony and I Measure every grief I meet, it is only grief that

allows Dickinson to feel that she is a part of the community.

Dickinson also shows another positive side of grief – it gives her

strength. In I can Wade Grief – she makes it clear that happiness


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only intoxicates her, makes her stumble and ostensibly lose her great

perceptive abilities. Grief, however emboldens her, makes her able to

face anything, and gives her the strength and perceptiveness to write

the poetry she does.

I can Wade Grief – enacts a common Dickinson maneuver,

that of taking something largely viewed as negative. She has a great

reward for strength and in this poem, as in Dare you see a soul at

the white heat?, her speaker declares that, such strength and the

power that it brings can come only from hardship. This poem does

not just transform a negative into a positive, but shows how, what is

usually considered positive-joy is also negative. The metaphor she

uses to describe this all deal with physical strength, but it is clear

that what she is actually talking about, what these metaphor stands

for, is emotional intense.

She describes happiness as not just weakening – bringing

giants down to the level of mere humans – but also as intoxicating.

Even the smallest amount of joy makes her so drunk as to not be

able to walk without stumbling for, like liquor joy is more powerful

when one has no tolerance for it. The parallel structure of the

metaphor in the final four lines emphasizes the either-or stance of

this poem – one either faces hardship, and become stronger, or has


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joy, and is weakened. There is no happy medium, it seems, so that

hardship becomes the only good choice. The strength gained through

pain or hardship or ease, at first seems useful however, only in

facing those very hardships as they come. The Giants for example,

use the Himmaleh – the challenge they are given – only to gain the

strength to overcome that very same challenge, in the act of lifting

it. Yet, if we take this poem to be not just about living, but about

writing poetry, because the person drunk on it certainly will not see

the world with the clarity required for art. Instead, pain provides that

clarity sharpening the poets perceptions and ability to reproduce life

truthfully.

The first line of the poem Dare you see a soul at the white

heat?, Dare they see passions that burn so intensely, that they are

like an iron so hot, it turns white? if so, Dickinson says,

crouch within the door – (2)

and watch. Red, she says is the usual, common color of fire

Red-is the fire’s common tint – (3)

yet although it is the fire that heats an iron, the iron overpowers it,

becoming hotter than the fire itself,


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But when the vivid ore

Has vanquished flame’s conditions – (4-5)

and emerges from the forge

It quivers from the forge – (6)

when it comes out hotter than the fire that heated it, it is white

without a color, but the light of an anointed blaze – (7)

white being colorless pure light, like she imagines the fires of hell.

Every village, even the smallest, has a blacksmith,

least village has its blacksmith – (9)

who enacts this refining process, acting as a metaphor for the

spiritual, internal process –

Whose Anvil’s even ring

Stands symbol for the finger forge – (10-11)

of one refining their one soul

that sound less fugs within – (15).

Inside the soul, this same refining process is happening

silently, but not painlessly – it requires Hammer and Blaze. This

continues until the passions themselves, transform like the iron that


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become hotter than the fire that heats it, overpower what refines and

creates them.

And as in several other poems, pain and hardship here are

closely connected to the soul and what happens to it after death.

Only through this painful experience of refining, through hammer and

fire, can the soul become refined enough that it can repudiate the

forge, that is, leave it behind, and rise on to something better,

ostensibly and after life. This final repudiation is emphasized in the

rhyme scheme which enacts it. Throughout the poem the second and

fourth line of each stanza, until in this final stanza, which doesn’t

even have an offrhyme – blaze and forge. This therefore makes the

word forge come as a surprise and seem to not fit correctly, it has

essentially being repudiated from the very poem.

Through simple words, Dickinson creates a queasy feeling in

the reader, easily causing suspicion of the stay of one’s own sanity.

For Dickinson, Juhasz says the difference and similarities between

mind and world are a central concern of consciousness ( Juhasz,73 ).

It is perhaps through the scant, yet effective wording of Dickinson

that the reader is able to utilize his own perceptions and realize the

images and scenes that her poetry creates. Her effect of reality is


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achieved not by an accent on pleasure or pain but by her dramatic

use of their interaction ( Anderson, 9 ).

One of her most powerful poems To fight aloud is very brave,

reads :

To fight aloud is very brave, / .. / And uniforms of snow – (1-12).

In this poem, Dickinson compares the bravery of soldiers to

the little triumphs of ordinary people. In the beginning, she seems to

almost be chastising the soldiers for their ostentatious displays of

gallantry but, in the end by creating graveyard image, she equalizes

all human beings; the foot of our graves being even foot, and the

ground being uniforms of snow. Dickinson construes an obvious fear

of God and Death and of falling short of his expectations thereafter;

as it is evident in her poem Drowning is not so pitiful,

as the attempt to rise, she ends the poem by seemingly chastising

humankind:

The makers cordial visage / ……. / Like an adversity – (9-12).

Again it is probably Dickinson’s scant wording that allows the

reader to more readily observe emotion and obvious lessons. Emily

Dickinson is perhaps most noted for maintaining a type of cadence

through erratic punctuation and unique phrasing. To Dickinson, as to


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many Victorian Americans, flowers weren’t just beautifiers; they were

mortal and personal problems. Dickinson, with her auburn hair,

identified with the orange tiger lily and sometimes called herself

Daisy, for a flower that symbolized innocence. She associated certain

richly scented flowers like roses and jasmine, with men and women

to whom she formed emotional attachments.

In the following poem I know a place where summer strives,

Dickinson presents a hope that is perpetually defeated. Its first stanza

( of three ) indicates the condition of the poem as a whole :

I know a place where summer strives / ………………………….. /

Recording briefly – Lost – (1-4).

Here, ice-cold despair always wins again the Daisies of

summer. It is the dangerous cold that for Dickinson often

accompanies the depths of despair and alienation. For instance, the

Dickinsonian cold here in this poem After a great pain, a formal

feeling comes depicts suffering in terms of its somatic effect :

After a great pain, a formal feeling comes – / ………………… /

First – chill – then stupor – then the letting go – (1-13).

The great pain that is depicted could be physical, for

example a kind of horrific injury such as those American’s were


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trying to come to terms with during the war ( the poem is dated on

1862 ). However, the fact that the formal feeling comes after the

great pain, and because the feeling is atleast in part psychological, it

seems more likely that the speaker describes an experience that

follows a spiritual or emotional crisis. That being the case, the poem

gives a Dickinsonian view of the unity of body and psyche. The

nerves referring both to the physical body and to one’s emotional

condition, sit[…] like Tombs –.

The ceremonious posture is rigidly formal, and the word

appropriately joins with the comparison to Tombs by the allusion to

the cerements in which corpses are shrouded for burial. The heart is

stiff, the feet, mechanical, as we notice in the regular iambic meter

that marks out much of the movement in the poem, and in the

traditional pentameters of lines preceding the appearance of feet,

which are unusual in Dickinson and gives a formal feeling of a

stupefied poetic language. The speaker states with chilling effect that

This is the Hour of lead, heavy, gray and inert, and she likens it to

snow, which though relatively weightless and windblown, as she puts

in another poem, I Cannot live without you,

that white sustenance – / Despair – (47-48).


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bearing the whiteness of the death pallor and a chill like cold metal,

in the final lines, the boundary between recollect(ion) of the survivor

and the stupor of the dying loses definition incrementally, until

finally the lettinggo, in surrender to death prevails. The wonder and

sense of sacrament in nature seen in many Dickinson’s poems are

offset by this strain, as for example in this poem Doom is the House

without the Door when she says that :

Doom is the House without the Door – / ………………………. /

Because Escape – is Done – (1-4).

The Doom is exacerbated – it seems by the speaker’s ability to

know what is happening in the world of nature:

‘Tis varied by the Dream / ………………………………………. /

And Hemlocks – bow to God – (5-8).

Death is suggested in the homonymous word dye used intransitively,

as die would be used, the unexpected mention ( after the rather

ordinary squirrels and Berries ) of Hemlock with its traditional

association with death, depicted here again with the word bow that

could be a noun but is used as an intransitive verb. As in My Life

has stood – loaded gun where the speaker has

but the power to kill without the power to die – (23).


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the speaker suggests that part of her Doom is a similar inability to

die in the ordinary course of nature. Dickinson often presents the

idea and a pain that is magnified by the awareness of or a closeness

to an opposite condition of something like grace in the poem The

Zeroes taught us Phosphorous

We learned to like the fire / …………… / Unto vitality – (2-8).

Just as opposite here has the power to effect a stanza break

and a shift from the past tense to present, so does that power bear

intense to a prospect of hopefulness on the other side of pain. In

this poem great pain does not leave a formal feeling in its wake;

instead, the darkness of Eclipses and the paralysis of resignation imply

the existence of suns and vitality. In this way they serve as the

primer dumb, that guides through the via negative to the place of

wary hope. She expresses a similar idea in a poem Of so divine a

loss from 1871:

Of so divine a loss / ………………………………….. /

That such a bliss has been – (1-4).

Here the speaker’s present bliss is a node on a continuum of

emotional response to an experience of something divine. The

emotion has been a feeling of loneliness, but it has now entered into


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the compensatory Indemnity not only, it seems for the loneliness , but

for the loss itself. This differs from The zeroes taught us, however,

in ending in a state of serenity as the payoff for a prior loss,

perhaps a version of the fortunate fall. In the previous poem, we saw

an equipoise between paralysis and vitality.

The following poem I lived on Dread presents a similar idea

but the emphasis is on a necessity for pain :

I lived on Dread – / ……… / Were challenging Despair – (1- 9).

Dread and Danger do not bring on paralysis but instead stir

one to act and are even life-giving. For those who know this – those

who have a knowledge derived only from this experience, it would

seem – no other impetus has this life-energy, but is numb and

vitalless. The word vitalless is emphasized by its placement as the

final word of the stanza and its ironic rhyme with stimulus and

impetus. The second stanza shifts back to movements with the simile

of the spur to represent fear a connection tightened by the rhyme of

spur with urge – the verb describing what fear does – and twere –

the verb that effects the comparison of fear and spur. Despite the

near rhyme of fear and despair, the latter word represents what the


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impetus and spur enable the speaker to avoid. Nonetheless, Despair

remains a powerfully ominous presence.

It is the last word of the poem literally and it is suggested

figuratively, and as such it complements the dead vitalless condition

that ends the first stanza. Thus, while the speaker describes how she

has lived ( in a psychologically fragile condition ) and thereby

presents an element of Hope, the spectre[..] appears following the

center of the ambiguity, on the side where Despair occurs, which

together with the elements that emphasize the word Despair,

undermines the speaker’s faith in the stimulus and spur, and suggests

that live on Dread –, but we do not know her present condition. In

the end, though the poem is not one of resignation, it is very wary

indeed about the hope it expresses.

Moore is worrying her something missing. In the early poems

from 1907 to 1913 – she’d be twenty to twenty-three, she introduces

the don’t touch theme. Here is an example poem A Red flower :

Emotion, / ………………………… / The leaves again – (1-8).

Clearly, despites the strangeness of imagining emotion as

miracle – Gro, a little feeling goes a long way. And look at this

A Fish,


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No heart was planted in my body, / ……………………………… /

Had vouchsafed me courtesy – (1-4).

She is looking around inside herself and she is finding her a

fish, don’t we think? That is a brave thing to do. And she’s not

miserable about it, it has its compensatory courtesy. Moore became

known for her mandarin displays of courtesy. Courtesy eventually

looms so large for Moore that it is a sort of warrior’s path. When

she writes :

Like panshin’s horse, not permitted to be willful,

Trembling incessantly and hamping at the bit – (5-6).

She has managed a fine compression. The horse itself

contains compressed opposites: it obeys, but it trembles and champs,

its willfulness expresses only in nerves. One immediately imagines

this high-strung thorough-bred, a picture of barely-reined-in energy

and beauty that is thrilling on its own. She employs this horse first

as an analogy to the spirit of the metalsmith whom she supposes,

created some reprobate silver thing itself, giving us three levels of

horse image to Moore herself as a self-portrait. She is the trembling

horse not permitted to be willful. And of course, she is also the one

who prevents the horse from being willful. And then, because it is a

very good self-portrait, its application is Universal.


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We each know this feeling that she has described in not

describing any feelings. Somehow this rubegold bergian contraption of

the poem is also the alchemist’s flame in which we see the fiery

and checked, spirit of Moore. She latches and thrives upon the

tension between freedom and restraint. It is the well-spring of so

many fruitful conflicts in her poems. Moore’s artistry reaches a peak

with The Pangolin, in a large part because it shows her ability to

merge inner values and outer surfaces with playful ingenuity and yet

serious intent. From the poem’s opening phrase –

Another armored animal – (1)

we hear the tone of surety that results when an artist has come to

know fully her material and to have seen that it fully serves her

thematic aims. In some ways The Pangolin is the most positive self-

possessed poem of the book which shares its title. But its tensions

and ironies are present, and they reverberate with the knowledge of

the preceding four poems.

By using animal grace as the ostensible subject in five poems,

Moore skillfully mediates between the concern with civic virtue and

the complexities of the artistic and civil realms, and Moore herself

has often been discussed as if she had little or no interest in public

matters outside of manners and decorum.


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Her concern with decorum, however, as well as her concern

with perpetual accuracy and artistic responsiveness, has a moral

dimension that is fulfilled on a public-scale. Moore understood that

The Pangolin is a nocturnal, isolated animal, stealthy and seldom

seen, but its solitariness is in the service of genius virtues, patience,

skill, the wise use of strength. These virtues have social

consequences in the human realm, and so what the pangolin

emblematizes through its poetic representation, is a didactically

important awareness for existing in the human world. The witty

equation between Pangolin and artist gets a playful introduction in

the poem The Pangolin’s opening stanza:

This near artichoke….. / ………………………………………….. /

And toiler, of who we seldom hear – (4-8)

The Pangolin is not only a dreamy artist figure, but an artist-

engineer, a creature, who masters its environment by purposive

activity. Having begun the identification of animal and artist with her

usual tentative touch, Moore is freed to explore the pangolin’s habit

in a way that can easily be read as an allegory of the moon-struck

romantic artist, even down to his propensity to have his activity and

character imaged forth as yet another art from while he explores the

world on his own aesthetic terms. We enjoy several levels of


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identification when he endures exhausting sole trips through

unfamiliar ground at night returning before sunrise.

Again a pause after the first moonlight suggests, Moore is

about to lift the level of suspended disbelief needed to tease out the

implications of the animal’s grace. The economy of the animal /

artist is, what is perhaps most striking, how he saves his claws for

digging, how he allows only a harmless hiss to express his fear and

disregard and how, like the durably wrought ironwork of the Abbey’s

tomb, his fragility is in part illusionary. It is no wonder that Moore

can end a stanza with a peroration in which the ability to live and

even prosper in alternating state can be the distinctive mark of both

man and animal.

sun and moon and day and night and / …………………………… /

set aside; Each with an excellence – (34-37).

Here Moore echoes not only Hamlet’s awareness of man’s

divided nature, but also her own phrase from another poem life’s

faulty excellence. This stanza ending also anticipates the poem’s

closing lines, when the sun is addressed as an alternating blaze.

Again, Moore may have Stevens’ Sunday Morning in mind, with its

concern that humanness is inextricably tied up with alternation, and

that any single unchanging state would be insipid. But it is also her


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sense of fallenness, the particular texture of human virtue – it

Excellencies and its limitations – that is richly conveyed in the

poem’s structure. It is directly to man’s character that Moore turns in

the poem’s last three stanzas, not altogether abandoning the

allegorical framework of animal grace, but emboldened enough to

speak directly in a way that is altogether rather unique in her poetry.

Though she draws an industrious picture of where :

Beneath sun and moon / Man slaving /

To make his life more sweet – (76-78)

Moore is wry enough to point out that he

……………. / leaves half the flower worth having – (78)

She goes on to emblematize various human traits through agencies of

animal graces, until she presents him as

capsizing in / Disheartenment – (85-86).

As Moore says earlier in the poem,

To explain grace requires / A curious hand – (60-61).

We might even speculate that she was using curious hell in its

17th

century sense of finely and intricately wrought as well as the

modern sense of desiring knowledge. In either case, the identification


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of man and Pangolin is indeed curious. In the Pangolin, and perhaps

most impressively in the title poem, she achieved that rare sort of

balance between inner-conflict and outer symmetries. In part, the

achievement came from a mastery of will, self-discipline in working

out the thematic consequences of her visions without abandoning

didactic goals or stinting on artistic delight. In this she had made a

masterpiece out of her struggles. What Moore shows us in the

struggle of the pangolin is repeated in her own poetic behavior. The

problem the poem pose in part is, how to stabilize the struggles,

how to make it graceful and the pangolin becomes the model for

her solution.

Both Moore and her father appreciated silence, for example the

deepest feeling always shows itself in silence, from the lyric named

silence, from his habits the pangolin too seems to appreciate it. The

Pangolin are silent animals and are not known to produce any noise

through the mouth other than a hiss, a sentence which the poem

transforms in to

… he draws / away from danger unpugnaciously

with no sound but a harmless hiss – (22-24).

The struggle draws directly into questions of writing, which is based

on likeness. But the sense of man’s fallibility does not discourage the


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speaker because among animals, one has a sense of humor. The

central embarrassments of writing are met with this consolation that

we can stand aside and look at our errors even if we cannot avoid

them in action. The poem does not conclude in precis definition or

in resignation but only in the celebration of process. Similarly, Moore

celebrates the Pangolin’s adventure, for which his scales are a sign

and protection, and the struggle of

monk and monk and monk – (65).

now laid out across stone allusions. In a monument to their efforts

and to intervening grace, throughout the poem she assumes the

possibility of some intervening force that can steady her in the flux

of life and thought.

The Pangolin – is a long circuitous poem with an elaborately

disgusted structure. Finding herself unable to order experience, Moore

makes failures of order, a life-supporting good and produces orders

that both define this position and provide respites from it. Moore

made this relationship between struggle and harmony explicit in her

comment on Universal harmony in aesthetics.


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The poem ends with a climax of grand proportions, a climax

of hope bred of deep emotion. And the poem has also moved from

darkness, the nocturnal world of the pangolin.

In A Grave, Moore begins with a meditation on the

impossibility of seeing the sea, when a

man looking into the sea – (1) takes

the view from those who have as much right to it as

you have to it yourself – (2-3)

Moore calls attention to two difficulties here, the problem of

seeing through a man including a man’s view point and the related

problem of establishing herself as a centered speaker when she

cannot stand in the middle of this. Moore’s depiction of the sea

correspondingly emphasizes its opacity over its translucency and its

surface activities over its symbolic meanings.

While Moore may well have written this poem out of a

personal crisis that involved thoughts of suicide, the speaker reminds

herself that to seek relief in the sea is not to be mirrored in any

improvement or to be freed of herself. The speaker works her way

out of her crisis by establishing and confronting the actuality or

literality of the sea and of death and her difference from them. The


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speaker’s initial mood of unhappiness or dejection is transformed

through an aspect of change in the scene itself – for example,

sudden winds or a clearing sky. Through, meditation the speaker

achieves an insight faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral

decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Moore’s A Grave

begins and ends with a short meditation, the sea prohibits the self-

projection and identification prominent ( male ) romantic poems, for it

is

quick to return a rapacious look – (11)

The sea’s look is very different from the viewer’s gaze, for her look

can be destroyed :

There are others beside you who have worn that look – / ……... /

For their bones have not lasted – (13-16).

Here, Moore is alluding to her own thoughts about suicide, or to

those of others, she repudiates suicide as meaningful action. The sea

is not a mirroring surface, but an actual grave. Consequently, it is

man’s surface activity – his particular and careful acts – and not his

self-projections which ultimately save him. Whereas men lowering

nets unconsciously desecrate this grave, as if there were no such

thing as death, the speaker of this poem portrays conscious of the


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ultimate meaning of penetrating the depth of the sea, trains her

vision to the surface which become more intense near the end. The

poem resolves its initial questions about perspective and of seeing

with an understanding of the opacity of the ocean and what the

ocean is not.

The tone of ending is intriguing, sounding both of victory

and defeat. But it is precisely because of its irresolute and

provisional perspective, a perspective that does not claim too much in

the face of death, that the poem can reach closure. Importantly, the

poem concludes with consciousness, not volition, for it is the

speaker’s unswerving awareness of the sea as a grave and not her

will to power over it that allows her to resolve her crisis. Unwilling

to sentimentalize her own personal powers by urging a notion of will

in the face of death, the speaker and presumably Moore, establishes

her strength ultimately through her circumspect conscious of this

grave. The overall effect of this poem is of a kind of containment,

as if everything could be known only through its most pronounced

boundedness. The eccentric image of fir trees, for example comes

directly after the first appearance of the word grave, and darts

peculiarly away from the gravity of the meditative situation. After the

second appearance of grave half way through the poem, we come


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across oared boats, figured as water spiders that row quickly away

and then immediately following the single mention of death we meet

with Moore’s elaborately metaphoric wrinkles or waves. Collectively,

these quick turns from frightening mass to fanciful minutiae and from

depth back to surface – may be seen as evidence of Moore’s

psychological skittishness of that impulse to row quickly away from

a disturbing and submerged subject which we sense other poems such

as Marriage or The Fish. A grave is a place where dead things are

put to rest, but Moore’s A Grave is a locus of vital and challenging

re-vision. The sense of threat of a necessary caution in attempts

profit from or even to understand the oceanic indifference that

surrounds man is emphasized in A Grave.

In Moore’s Marriage, Taffy Martin, an all-seeing speaker

catalogues pain and confusion. The poem ends pessimistically by

equating artificially regulated promises with closed books and empty

gestures. An octopus records another sort of confusion. Rather than

denying the fear involved in facing the unknown, the poem argues

that the fear itself can become a positive adventure. Marriage begins

by categorizing its subject with unremitting equanimity and precision.

The poem’s subject identified in its title will be dismissed as to

fulfill a private obligation.


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Moore continues the attack by piling one devastating anecdote

upon another. Marriage is both preposterous and painful. As in

Melanchthon, Moore ridicules insincere attempts at communication.

Here, however, the mistaken approach leads to warfare, Instead of

conversing the participants in that war exchange mechanical

nonsequiturs.

I should like to be alone – (31) to which the visitor replies,

I should like to be alone ; Why not be alone together? – (33-34)

Beneath this conversation lurks a sub surfacing of churning passion

that recognizes beauty but distorts the perception. Indeed,

overwhelming passion so distorts perception, the even pristine beauty

leads to disaster. In each case, the excess arises from a common

error. Wrong from the start, any attempt at marriage,

this amalgamation which can never be more

than an interesting possibility – (45-46)

will be doomed to failure. Moore’s criticism has been impartially

distributed since each participant in the union shares the same fault.

Her attack becomes even more successful because she reinforces this

impatiently with relentless dispassion.


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The poem offers neither a death blow nor an alternative to the

institution but a depressing version of half-success. Marriage is an

unuseful poem in the Moore canon because its treatment is more

openly personal than that of most of her poems. More important

treatment of passion, confusion and delude vision is undeniably

negative. The fact that her sensuous language vividly captures the

attraction of one party to another, only intensities that shocks of the

rest of the poem.

In most poems, Moore treats such confusion and deluded

vision as positive qualities, as opportunities for wordplay or

enjoyment. Marriage begins in that cool manner for which Moore

was already well known among a small circle of connoisseurs. This

institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for

which, one says one need not change one’s mind about a thing one

has believed in requiring public promises of one’s intention to fulfill

a private obligation.

We can remember here that Mrs. Moore ( Moore’s mother ) had

fled her marriage and had seen to it that she was never drawn back

into either by her husband or by any obligation to his family. She

had taught them rather than go to them for money. The poem does

not precisely mean anything. It is instead a conversation, a


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comprehensive dialectic based upon some of the greatest myths,

motifs, symbols, visions and commentaries on the subject of

marriage. It passes no judgment, solves no problems.

Taffy Martin has argued that the voice here and in other

poems remain deadpan, that it does not seem to convey grand

emotions ( Martin, 21 ). In such a stance Martin feels, Moore has

created a music particularly suitable for the twentieth century. The

real intensity lies in the reader’s final awareness that although human

words attempt to communicate logic and feeling, people really seldom

touch each other. Communication is a difficult thing; especially what

is to be communicated is shaded by intense feelings like those of

love and desire. Early note on Marriage includes statements such as

the following which were left out of or were changed for the final

version:

This institution / one should say enterprise – (1-2).

which is universally associated with the fear of loss. Excluded from

the final version of the poem, such remarks are openly critical of

marriage, while tempering the intensity of her feelings towards it.

Moore’s poem is difficult to decipher because the reader has to make

connections between seemingly random quotations. Our understanding

of these intensions is complicated by Moore’s ambivalent feelings


71

about the marital state. Although she believes firmly in the continued

viability of the institution, as evidenced in her focus on it, she

nevertheless criticizes it. For Moore, marriage means shared

loneliness, pure conversation or pompous ritual, a mixture of

servitude and flutter ( 194 ) – in short, temptation, but certainly

entrapment, then contain atleast two kinds of debate or disputation –

Moore’s word for the arguments of the poem ;

1. the dramaticized and primarily rhetorical exchange of her

stylized characters, and

2. with herself about the virtues and dangers of this relationship.

In what follows, we shall focus on the disputational aspects of

the poem as crucial to illuminating not only Moore’s passionately

mixed feelings on the subject of marriage but also the structure of

this particularly obscure work. From this focus we hope a fuller

understanding of disputation as a central value of her poetry will

emerge. Moore’s internal argument about marriage, evident in her

personal correspondence and private notebooks leading up to the

poem’s composition appears most clearly in the poem’s rapidly

shifting perspectives.


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Changing voices and attitudes establish expansive discursive

boundaries within which Moore explores her subject. Thus, in the

course of this important poem, Moore clarifies for the reader that her

internal disputation is not simply evidence of ambivalence or

vacillation; it is the model she proposes for the exploration of any

truth. The notable difficulty of Marriage derives originally from the

degree of turmoil and contradiction in Moore’s attitude towards this

particular subject. Marriage stands apart in the degree of inner

conflict it contains. For though she had by this time chosen the

socially criminal stance of one who avoids marriage, and though she

was highly critical of marriage as commonly practiced, Moore,

maintained the vision of marriage as an ideal in human relations.

Moore’s play with a similar opening statement in the

Marriage workbook indicates her comparable complexity of feeling

about this subject, her sharp criticism of the failure of marriage

reflect her high standard for the institution. In the published versions

of Marriage instead of repeating the open strategy of Poetry, Moore

reveals the divisions within her thinking by creating an extremely

disjunctive structure in which perspectives and voices shift rapidly.

It is Moore’s longest and most loquacious poem. The voices

in the poem play with the public / private dichotomy represented by


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sentimental notions of marriage as a refuge. Traditional images

construct marriage as a private retreat, a locus of respite for the

world – weary husband. Moore’s position in the early modernist

movement is prior suspicious because she cannot inherit the mantle

of the spokesman. Her experience as a relatively poor unmarried

woman who writes for a living informs Marriage as convoluted

presentation of relationships.

Moore’s ambition is not to write simply in the isolation of

ego, but to write as if she were a team or an orchestra. She was

willing to take responsibility to a new enlarged arena, then to present

and credit views other than own and to provide a context for hearing

a concert of voices. The tensions which characterize the highly

ambiguous language of the poem reflect the internal split of the

subjects, a split represented by the opposition of speech and writing.

The last lines of Marriage figures intolerance and absurdity of that

particular positions even as they inscribe its dominance.

Thus, Dickinson and Moore are over-whelmed with their

intense Emotions and depicted the same in their poetry.


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INTENSITY OF EMOTION - Shodhgangashodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/37135/3/chapter2.pdf · INTENSITY OF EMOTION ... perhaps fears of death, ... For analysis the poem can