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A Fool, A Foul Thing, A Distressful Lunatic

1887 –

1972

With webs of cool
     Chain mail and his stout heart, is not the gander
   Mocked, and ignorantly designated yet,
To play the fool?
       “Egyptian vultures clean as cherubim,
       All ivory and jet,” are they most foul?
And nature’s child,
    That most precocious water bird, the loon—why
    Is he foremost in the madman’s alphabet;
Why is he styled
    In folly’s catalogue, distressful lunatic?

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

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More by this poet

Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

Marianne Moore

1920

Silence

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,

Marianne Moore

1924

The Fish

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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A Fool, A Foul Thing, A Distressful Lunatic

More by this poet

Poetry

Silence

The Fish

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