'Calm and Lambent Answers'

Marianne Moore replies to a question posed by Howard Nemerov:

“'Strangeness is a quality,’ Howard Nemerov says, ‘belonging inseparably to language and vision’ and—quoting Conrad, ‘It is above all, in the first place, to make you see,’ said Joseph Conrad, of the object of art; and he said again, more formally, that the writer’s object is ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible world.’ Seeing, and saying;—language is a special extension of the power of seeing, inasmuch as it can make visible not only the already visible world; but through it the invisible world of relations and affinities.”

 

Let’s untangle this syntactical knot without resorting to the Gordian blade. Moore begins by quoting Nemerov’s 1959 lecture “The Swaying Form: A Problem in Poetry,” followed by the well-known passage from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. See is one of those unassuming English monosyllables packed with inference. Yes, “to perceive with the eyes,” the OED assures us, before listing more than one hundred additional shades of meaning for the verb form alone, the most common being “to perceive the nature or condition of (a person or thing).” In other words, to comprehend, to understand, to get. I can’t read music. I can see the score you show me but I don’t see it, I don’t understand the musical notations. I’m blind to its meaning.

 

Moore says words are “a special extension of the power of seeing” – in both senses already mentioned, I suspect, if not more. How often, when reading a densely packed poem – Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” early Edgar Bowers – have we known a sudden illumination, a sense of enlightenment? (Note the etymologies of these words.) We see, as moments before we did not. Moore goes on to say that “poetry is not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness.” That too might be called seeing. I wish Moore had addressed Nemerov’s use of “strangeness.” She illustrates her argument with excerpts from poems by Eric Schroeder, I.A. Richards and John Bunyan. She adds, best of all, “George Herbert’s untampered-with-by-vanity ‘Heaven’s Echo’”:

 

“O who will show me those delights on high?

                            Echo.         I.

Thou Echo, thou art mortall, all men know.

                            Echo.         No.

Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?

                            Echo.         Leaves.

And are there any leaves, that still abide?

                            Echo.         Bide.

What leaves are they? impart the matter wholly.

                            Echo.         Holy.

Are holy leaves the Echo then of blisse?

                            Echo.         Yes.

Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?

                            Echo.         Light.

Light to the minde: what shall the will enjoy?

                            Echo.         Joy.

But are there cares and businesse with the pleasure?

                            Echo.         Leisure.

Light, joy, and leisure; but shall they persever?

                            Echo.         Ever.”

 

I love the gentle humor of this poem. As John Drury writes in Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Pres, 2014): “Echo responds with serene wit. Her answers are puns, as well as aural representations, which turn his querulous questions into calm and lambent answers . . .”

 

Herbert, a poet I return to regularly, was born on this date, April 3, in 1593, and died in 1633 at age thirty-nine.

 

[Moore and other poets’ answers to Nemerov’s questions are collected in Poetry and Criticism (1965). Moore’s you can also find in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986.]