Classic and Contemporary Poetry
BLACK EARTH, by MARIANNE MOORE Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: Openly, yes, / with the naturalness Last Line: Beautiful element of unreason under it? Variant Title(s): Melancthon Subject(s): Elephants | ||||||||
OPENLY, yes, with the naturalness of the hippopotamus or the alligator when it climbs out on the bank to experience the sun, I do these things which I do, which please no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub- merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object in view was a renaissance; shall I say the contrary? The sediment of the river which encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used to it, it may remain there; do away with it and I am myself done away with, for the patina of circumstance can but enrich what was there to begin with. This elephant skin which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of the cocoanut, this piece of black glass through which no light can filtercut into checkers by rut upon rut of unpreventable experience it is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the hairy toed. Black but beautiful, my back is full of the history of power. Of power? What is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never be cut into by a wooden spear; through- out childhood to the present time, the unity of life and death has been expressed by the circumference described by my trunk; nevertheless, I perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after all; and I am on my guard; external poise, it has its centre well nurturedwe know wherein pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of the wind. I see and I hear, unlike the wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear; that tree trunk without roots, accustomed to shout its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact by one who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that spiritual brother to the coral plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to the I of each, a kind of fretful speech which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is? Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that phenomenon the above formation, translucent like the atmospherea cortex merely that on which darts cannot strike decisively the first time, a substance needful as an instance of the indestructibiilty of matter; it has looked at the electricity and at the earth- quake and is still here; the name means thick. Will depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no beautiful element of unreason under it? | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...PETE AT THE ZOO by GWENDOLYN BROOKS DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT by MARIANNE MOORE IT'S HARD TO BE AN ELEPHANT by JACK PRELUTSKY WE MUST BE POLITE: 2 by CARL SANDBURG DRAWN BY STONES, BY EARTH, BY THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN IN FIRE by MARVIN BELL THE ELEPHANT IS SLOW TO MATE by DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE ELETELEPHONY by LAURA ELIZABETH HOWE RICHARDS THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT by JOHN GODFREY SAXE I MAY, I MIGHT, I MUST by MARIANNE MOORE |
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