In the chapter devoted to Marianne Moore in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Donald Hall examines the structure of Moore's verse, which basically comes in two forms: syllabic verse and free verse. Her syllabic lines have no meter, no feet, only particular syllable counts. Indeed, it seems that she was effectively tone deaf when it came to meter, simply not hearing it – an extraordinary thing in a poet of her accomplishment. In her memoir of Moore, 'Efforts of Affection', which Hall quotes, Elizabeth Bishop 'recalls with astonishment that Moore was baffled by conventional English prosody.' 'Why not believe,' Bishop concludes,' that the old English meters that still seem natural to most of us ... were not natural to her at all?'
There is plenty of evidence, and Hall cites an essay by Moore, 'Feeling and Precision', in which 'she spoke of "Dr Johnson's objection to rigmarole, in his takeoff on the ballad:
'I put my hat upon my head,
And went into the Strand,
And there I saw another man,
With his hat in his hand.'"
Johnson was parodying bad poets' attempts at achieving the simplicity of a ballad, and the lines depend on a thumpingly regular meter – which Marianne Moore mucks up in the last line: it simply doesn't scan. It should read 'Whose hat was in his hand' – three iambs, di-dum, di-dum, di-dum, as in the second line. Johnson first recited these lines to his friend Garrick, who passed them on to Boswell – making exactly the same mistake as Moore in the last line. When Boswell repeated Garrick's version to Johnson, the Doctor growled, 'Then he has no ear.' As for Marianne Moore's ear – Hall concludes that 'she had a remarkable and innovative ear, but not an ear for English meter. She had an ear that Johnson would have recognised as belonging to prose, not to poetry.' But, emphatically, she was a poet – a quite unique one, and a classic. 'Removed from the distractions of time,' Hall concludes his essay, 'her work grows firmer, the character more luminous, brave, exemplary, virtuous, and strange.' For another take on Moore's extraordinary poetry, here is Kay Ryan, plain-speaking as ever.
Thursday, 30 July 2026
Marianne Moore: No Feet
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I have been thinking lately about the natural cadences of English. That's because I am going deaf and gain enormously from people who do speak in the natural rhythms of the tongue. The Young, however, seem to prefer staccato bursts of words followed by a leisurely "like", or some other space-filler, before delivering another short burst of yapping.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've noticed that too – and the tendency to end a sentence on an interrogatory note.
DeleteBut isn't the last line Johnson's intended choice of words - after all it is a parody? I can't find the anecdote in Boswell, but have found this account: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol3/pp269-286 Exeter Street... In this street, as we remarked in a previous chapter, Dr. Johnson lodged when he first came to town from Lichfield, and it was during his residence here that he first commenced his condensation of the speeches in Parliament for the Gentleman's Magazine. It must have been as nearly as possible on this spot that Dr. Johnson offended Dr. Percy, author of "Reliques of Ancient Poetry," by parodying the style of that charming and simple tale, "The Hermit of Warkworth," thus:—
ReplyDelete"I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met an other man
With his hat in his hand."
"I must freely declare," says Nichols in his "Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs," "with all my partiality for Johnson, that I think Dr. Percy had very great cause to take offence at a man who, by a ludicrous parody on a stanza of his 'Hermit,' had rendered him contemptible. It was urged that Johnson meant only to attack the metre; but he certainly turned the whole poem into ridicule. Mr. Garrick soon afterwards asked me," adds Nichols, "in a postscript to one of his letters, 'whether I had seen Johnson's criticism on the "Hermit?" it is already,' said he, 'over half the town.'"
Thanks for that – very illuminating. I didn't realise he was parodying Percy's Reliques.
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