My neighbor, composer David Liptak, was visiting with his wife earlier in the summer. I always ask what he’s currently composing, and he said, “I’ve set two poems by Marianne Moore: ‘The Fish’ and ‘A Jelly-Fish.’ She kept revising her poems throughout her life, but I’m using the earliest versions because their copyrights have expired.”

I was intrigued. Despite majoring in American literature in college and for my doctorate, I can’t recall ever reading Moore’s poetry—though on my bookshelves I now see that she is amply represented in both my editions of The Oxford Book of American Verse: 1950 and 1979.

I immediately got from the library Becoming Marianne More: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, and turned to David’s two poems. “A Jelly-Fish” is short, and I won’t discuss it here—because “The Fish” is substantial and utterly fascinating. It’s longish: eight stanzas of six lines each, so I’m going to go through the verses one by one.

            “The Fish”

Wade
through black jade
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one
keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

I notice first that the subject of “wade” is “The Fish” of the poem’s title. And I notice, too, the rhymes of “wade”—“jade” and “keeps”—heaps.” I know, of course, that fish can’t wade, and certainly not through a rock like jade. So what Moore is doing is offering images of water that’s very dark: “black jade” and “ash heaps.” Then I look back to see what is “opening and shutting itself,” and it seems to be one of the mussel shells. But this last line’s “like” needs the next stanza to complete the simile:

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the
side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

So, that mussel shell opens and shuts “like an injured fan”—an apt yet disturbing image. What, though, about those “barnacles”? They can’t possibly “encrust the / side / of the wave,” since barnacles need something solid to attach to. What, then, is Moore imaging here? Answering this will require moving to the next stanza. But before I do this, I should note that this second stanza, in shape and rhyme scheme, follows the exact format of the first—as will all of the poem’s eight stanzas. It’s a shape that does look like a watery wave—and maybe too like a fish’s wavy movement through water. I continue reading:

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swift-
ness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating

Picking up now the previous stanza’s last line, I see that it’s the “submerged shafts of the // sun” that the poem is now imaging—and continues to throughout this stanza. The luscious image of the sun’s shafts “split like spun / glass” is followed by the motions of those shafts—which move wavingly (“in and out”), just as the fish did at the poem’s start. And, again, to know what the sun’s shafts are “illuminating,” we need the next verse:

the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a
wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff, whereupon the stars,

pink
rice grains, ink
bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like
green
lilies and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

But wait! Stars aren’t “pink”! So I realize that it’s starfish which she’s pointing to. Followed by jellyfish that appear “ink-bespattered.” (Jellyfish turn gray when they die; is this why they’re ink-bespattered?) These two kinds of fish, along with “crabs” and “toadstools” all “slide” on each other, mutually interacting. And I notice that this “pink” is the fourth color we’ve seen in the poem, preceded by “black” (jade), “turquoise” (sea), and now “green” (lilies). Then what a surprise: this fifth stanza is the first to end with a period, though there are still three more stanzas to go.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on
this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of

The poem’s focus here seems to be that cliff edge from two stanzas ago: an “edifice” marked by “abuse”—another violent image. But again the last line swirls us down to the next stanza:

ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns
and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm side is

First I smile at the breaking up of “accident” to create the rhyme “ac—lack.” Then I’m struck by all the images of violence: “dynamite,” “burns,” “hatchet strokes.” Are we still at that “cliff edge” from stanza four? This “chasm” certainly suggests so. And what, in the next and final stanza, will be the “chasm side” be?

Dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can
live
on what cannot revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.

DEAD. Full stop. This is the only stanza where the first line ends with a period. After so much life in the poem (in the sea, on the cliff), as well as death (jellyfish, hatchet, dynamite), in this stark “Dead” it’s death that seems to win out. But only briefly. Life returns in the third line’s “live.”

A puzzle in this stanza, though, is what the referent of “it” might be? It can’t be the sea, because the poem ends “The sea grows old in it.” It can’t be any other of the poem’s objects—fish, barnacles, sun, cliff, etc.—since the sea isn’t “in” any of them.

Might “it” refer to our imagination, to what has happened within our mind as we’ve entered into the world of the poem? To our imagination’s efforts to contain the poem’s turbulence, as we too, along with the fish and the water and the rocks and the shafts of sunlight, are constantly buffeted by the churning, grinding power of relentless wave on immoveable stone, all mixed and blended into the froth of surf and the roar of breakers? Life surviving, burgeoning, expanding amid forces of furious annihilation? Death and life entangled in perpetual combat, yet also in beautiful display through which a fish yields, slides, surges, and emerges poised just long enough to be named before disappearing once again into the maelstrom?

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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