Marianne Moore's Marriage

MARIANNE MOORE'S "MARRIAGE" begins with superb lack of passion, on the far abstract end of the continuum of meaning that reaches between it and dream. It is a purely verbal consideration:

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.

Enter Adam and Eve, not as immediate protagonists, but as absent mentors who, having been the first to propose conjugal bliss, so the myth has it, might have some useful observation to make. Their answer is of course entirely a matter of our own imaginations. It is really we who are asked to reflect on the glint of a wedding ring and some cynical words drawn from Francis Bacon. Not love, but an "enterprise," is the center of attention as the poet wonders

what Adam and Eve

think of it by this time,

this fire-gilt steel

alive with goldenness;

how bright it shows--

"of circular traditions and impostures,

committing many spoils,"

requiring all one's criminal ingenuity

to avoid!

Moore's quotation of Bacon, so aptly placed for rendering the symbol of love into an image of social greed, and the eternal circle into an image of unprogressive self-interest, applies as much to a style of writing and speaking as it does to the life style of prospective husbands and wives. Social mores, ingenious in the enshrinement of the original felix culpa, must be fought with like ingenuity. What Adam and Eve might think of it is certainly no consolation.

The "hand" that is offered the reader in "Marriage" is, like the hand offered in marriage described by the poem, "impatient to assure you" that its groping is free of obligation. Whatever they say, though, both poet and lover know that this is not true. The poet beginning an ambitious poem is not unlike the applicant for marriage in that there is an obligation to fulfill at least one's own definition of a plausible poem, and at most to make a lasting and public union of words and sense. The applicant for marriage is squeezed between the danger of uncontrollable affection, something alive with goldenness which requires criminal ingenuity to obtain as well as to avoid, and a certain abstract bondage to universal meaning. To maintain a balance between the inner irrationality and the outer reasonableness of any such "enterprise" leads almost inevitably to a moral strain; it is perhaps this strain, more than any other, that holds the fragments of a life, a marriage, or a poem together.

Late in the poem "Marriage" someone is quoted as saying:

"Married people often look that way--

seldom and cold, up and down,

mixed and malarial

with a good day and a bad."

Marriage is a strain. A poem of more or less loosely "married" images also looks a bit "mixed and malarial," with a good line and a bad, according to its various mental predispositions, chance associations, arid a certain amount of unconscious fastidiousness. Part of the strain of "Marriage" is due to the intended comprehensiveness of it despite the knowledge, or intuition at least, that such an enterprise is to be necessarily incomprehensible in the end. What Allen Tate has said about Hart Crane's poem The Bridge is splendidly true of Marianne Moore's "Marriage." He is speaking of the image or central idea of "bridge"; we can easily substitute "marriage."

Because the idea is variously metaphor, symbol, and analogy, it tends to make the poem static. The poet takes it up, only to be forced to put it down again when the poetic image of the moment is exhausted. The idea does not, in short, fill the poet's mind; it is the starting point for a series of short flights, or inventions connected only in analogy--which explains the merely personal passages, which are obscure, and the lapses into sentimentality. . . . Crane's difficulty is that of modern poets generally: they play the game with half of the men, the men of sensibility, and because sensibility can make any move, the significance of all moves is obscure.

"Marriage" is obscure for these reasons, for the brevity of its insights and the lack of smooth transitions between them. The poem is true to the "conscientious inconsistency" of the mind described by Moore in "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing"; it is a poem that describes the poet's mind with as much faithfulness as it describes what is in the poet's mind. "Marriage" is constantly changing tones, seemingly in response to itself, its own inner need to leave an unsatisfactory phrase or unexplainable or unenlargeable image. Clearly Moore thinks of "marriage" not so much as an event as a set of attitudes toward a hypothesis. It is centrally concerned with mental, not physical actions, and it leads eventually to a marriage within one mind of its various attitudes toward marriage rather than to a marriage of different minds.

Moore's initial picture of Eve, for instance, marries the old my thy attractiveness with a very peculiar mental ability:

Eve: beautiful woman--

I have seen her

when she was so handsome

she gave me a start,

able to write simultaneously

in three languages--

English, German, and French--

and talk in the meantime;

This Eve gives us a start, too, but not because of her alleged handsomeness. Moore's note on this passage refers us to an article in the Scientific American entitled "Multiple Consciousness