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To Military Progress

Marianne Moore

1887 –

1972

You use your mind
Like a millstone to grind
Chaff.
You polish it
And with your warped wit
Laugh

At your torso,
Prostrate where the crow
Falls
On such faint hearts
As its god imparts,
Calls

And claps its wings
Till the tumult brings
More
Black minute-men
To revive again,
War

At little cost.
They cry for the lost
Head
And seek their prize
Till the evening sky’s
Red

From Observations (The Dial Press, 1924) by Marianne Moore. This poem is in the public domain.

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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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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To Military Progress

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