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The Paper Nautilus

1887 –

1972

     For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
     Writers entrapped by
     teatime fame and by
commuters’ comforts? Not for these
     the paper nautilus
     constructs her thin glass shell.

     Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
     white outside and smooth-
     edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
     maker of it guards it
     day and night; she scarcely

     eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
     arms, for she is in
     a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ramshorn-cradled freight
     is hid but is not crushed.
     As Hercules, bitten

     by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
     the intensively
     watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,—
     leaving its wasp-nest flaws
     of white on white, and close-

     laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
     A Parthenon horse,
     round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
     is the only fortress
     strong enough to trust to.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 30, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Born in 1887, Marianne Moore wrote with the freedom characteristic of the other Modernist poets, often incorporating quotes from other sources into the text, yet her use of language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise

Themes

About this Poem

“The Paper Nautilus” is anthologized in The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (Faber and Faber, 1923). In her article, “Two Kinds of Vision in Marianne Moore,” published by John Hopkins University Press, A. K. Weatherhead wrote, “The principle, implicit throughout Marianne Moore’s work, that attention must be paid to details and that truth and feeling must be based on the perception of them is clearly embodied in ‘The Paper Nautilus.’ […] These ‘intensively watched’ details give rise to the conclusion that ‘love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.’ […] The scrutinized details which produce the moral judgment also express personal feelings. The paper nautilus is in a sense the poet herself who, working indeed with paper, constructs a form, a part of herself, in which to foster and deliver her ideas. These ‘coming from / the shell free it when they are freed’ and leave evidence of the love and care that had encompassed them. In such a way the poem expresses with extreme reticence the complex of personal feelings, conflicting senses of freedom, and deprivation, that attend the poetic act.”

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   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
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         if it must, these things are important not because a

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My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,

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

Marianne Moore

1921

Poems

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The Paper Nautilus

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