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Pamela White Hadas A poem that deserves special attention as an expression of style and being is " The Pangolin. " The pangolin is " the night miniature artist engineer, " " Leonardo Da Vinci's replica. " The invocation of Leonardo is important in terms of Marianne Moores work in general. Toward the end of her career she devoted two poems to Leonardo one a description of his picture of St. Jerome and the lion, which asserts the necessity of communion between beast and saint, between protective animal and writer-artist; and the other, about Leonardo himself, called " An Expedient Leonardo Da Vinci sand a Query, " the query being Leonardo's own alleged last words, " Tell me if anything at all has been done? " If Leonardo, as this poem tells us, " peerless, venerated by all... succumbed to dejection, " what about Marianne Moores " night miniature artist engineer, " his " replica" ? What does the pangolin, and what does the pangolin-poet, do to keep from " capsizing in disheartenment? " First of all, he trusts his artichoke-like armor and his exploration nature. The pangolin is Da Vinci's replica because in Marianne Moores poem he is capable of, or representative of, both natural and supernatural wonder.

He is a wonder. He is a master of dream " who endures exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night, " returning before sunrise; stepping in the moonlight, on the moonlight peculiarly, that the outside edges of his hands may bear the weight and save the claws for digging. He is both in the moonlight and on it; he has control. The outside of his " hands" bear the weight of his progress, while the inside, the claws that are aggressive, are saved for work in depth.

He has a scientists and an artists intuitions for the instrumentality of his own body. The artist explores within the moonlight; the scientist-engineer keeps on top of it. The pangolin may be on unfamiliar ground, but knows what he needs to find there; he has ways of dealing with both the unfamiliarity and the need. He hisses at danger, he does not fight. His is a sound of moral disapproval; his technique is humble retreat.

He is found " serpentined" about a tree, with the healthy and bodily-expressive consciousness of evil that rightly belongs to a night artist. The pangolins armor is partly the armor of his art, his grace. It is, like the " thin glass shell" of the paper nautilus, fragile though hard, like a " wrought-iron vine. " He is covered, delicately enough, with " flattened sword- / edged leaf points" ; compact, he is like a " furled fringed frill" on the hat-brim of an iron bust. But his grace is more than that of the wrought-iron artwork that he resembles. " To explain grace requires / a curious hand, " the poet says. " Grace" is more than a gift for precision and an appropriateness of movement.

To explain grace, or as background to such an explanation, Marianne Moore asks a curious question. [Hadas here quotes lines 62 - 73 ] It is difficult to see exactly what Marianne Moore is trying to say here, and what its relationship to the pangolin is. The statement-question itself is highly armored in stone and complexity, yet we may try to state the meaning more clearly for ourselves, thus: If the world, or grace, is not eternal, why would artist-monks work to invent temporal meanings and applications of grace? The answer is that the world and its consequent " grace" is eternal, and the way to eternal grace is to be found through its temporal expressions kindness, manners, use of art. If eternal grace could not be found through temporal grace, the monks would not have bothered to think of specific applications of it that could be adopted by ordinary men. The pangolins kind of grace, natural animal grace as opposed to the supernatural grace that monks understand, needs to be translated into ordinary human terms in order to serve a temporal and practical purpose. The beast and saint, both needing translation from habitats of mystery into clearings of action, have a rare wisdom about the world deserving of that translation.

In the image of the artist-monks in their cold stone-decorated retreat (the " gathered to rest" suggesting death and eternity), one feels the tension between inside and outside, between death and life, between the intuition of eternity and the need for a practicality that can only be temporal and external. The same dichotomy is expressed by the pangolins wrought-iron and stone-swallowing body, which is probably what suggested the image of the church with its retreating souls and strange gargoyles. We also find in this image the combined presence of the artists inspiration, that eternal thing that made him choose ingeniously to express himself in stone in the first place, and the scientific construction, the architectural technique that made the artistic expression feasible. We are back to the idea of Leonardo and his own curious hand, explaining " grace" equally through artistic inspiration and practical engineering. The pangolin has a soul, " a meaning always missed by the externals" (" He Digesteth Harde You" ), and a body that in its graceful practicality expresses soul. He can roll himself " into a ball that has / power to defy all effort to unroll it; strongly installed, neat head for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in feet. " In other words, he makes a perfect circle of himself, a defensive or a sleeping habit that is a symbol of eternity.

But in motion and time he has obvious and useful appendages, unlike eternity. " The giant- pangolin- / tail, graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like / an elephants trunk with special skin / is not lost on this ant-and-stone-swallowing unendurable artichoke. " This is a masculine counterpart to his expression of himself as a rolled-up ball, his feminine and retreating form. In his feminine form, the pangolins " head" is inside, " on neck not breaking off" castration impossible. When he is feeling safe enough to venture out and is on an aggressive ant-hunt, he is vigilant; at these times " the giant-pangolin- / tail... is not lost on [him]. " We find in the image of monks and cathedral a combination of feminine and masculine, of inspiration and technique, " low stone seats" guarded by " ingenious roof supports. " We find " a monk and monk and monk" (homunculus? ) passively sitting or lying dead within a womb whose external expression is erect, actively thrusting at the sky and at eternity.

These passive monks have slaved to provide external expressions of grace without themselves needing recourse to external action. They are in retreat as the pangolin curled-up is in retreat. There may be no way of knowing how consciously Marianne Moore used this imagery of the circle and tail, monks and edifice, stone and living creature. But to my mind, a passion for armor is a passion to be both femininely withdrawn and protected and masculinely exploration and aggressive, to be equipped for all exigencies of mind and body. One wants to be directed outward, to conquer truth and time, to penetrate the mysteries of the world, but in this there is always the danger of being cut off suddenly, killed, castrated, silenced. On the other hand, one wants to be curled within oneself, safe and passive; but in this position there is no hope of penetrating, or of being penetrated either there is only a self-sealed mystery.

True grace may be seen as a balance between the two, a proper rhythm of alternation between external and internal, armor and soul, masculine and feminine, temporal and eternal. This the pangolin has, this the world at large has with its sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence! This sudden outburst from the soul of " The Pangolin, " the poem, the artist, comes as a surprise. It has the splendor of naturalness, of natural duality and rhythm that leaves room for epiphany and that cannot be spoiled by an un spontaneous humanity. The poem is about the particular habits and individual excellence of the pangolin, but it is also about the condition of man, as the pangolin has " certain postures of a man. " [Hadas here quotes lines 77 - 81, 87 - 93 ] How are we to fit these things together? If, as we may suspect, grace the idea of it, or the curious explanation of itis at the center of the poem, at the eternal center between the alternations of sun and moon, day and night, man and beast, then grace is also the concept which informs these sudden and random observations.

Given temporarily (" beneath sun and moon" ) man slaves (as the monks slaved) to choose the best way to act, and acting, as we have seen, is the only way of externalizing the eternal-internal concept of grace. So man writes, an activity peculiar to him; it is his own excellence and most graceful endowment, as ant- and stone-swallowing is to the pangolin, and thus he expresses his choice. His writing is obscurely funny, but moral; he cannot be damned for his intentions (of not liking to be like or to like some objectionable likeness of his). His unconscious wit, certainly a form of grace, allows him to discover coincident humor in an erroneously written error. The " he" in the last stanza of the poem may seem ambiguous, but I believe it refers to man alone, albeit, a pangolin-modeled one. The pangolin in his night foraging's and dependence on moonlight may be seen as the night-soul that corresponds to mans day-soul.

The pangolin may be regarded as the poets dream curious one, curious enough for any bestiary combining beast, moon, and night, with religious and sexual imagery. This energy is carried over into the " alternating blaze" of day, with its own wit, fear, and strength in adversity. [Hadas here quotes lines 99 - 111 ] This is a rare combination of humor and religious awe. We have on one hand the lowly textbook definition of " mammal" one kind of link between pangolin and man which, purely scientific, cannot be overlooked. We have this mammals personal attitude toward life, into which he goes " cowering forth " with considerable apprehension, " the prey of fear. " Each has an armor and each has an excellence, but each has a fear of curtailment also. Each must be able to " install" himself strongly, curl into a ball or become pure soul, enlightened alternately by the eternal spheres of moon and sun. It is not " funny" but deeply humorous, this relation of low technique with such high aspiration, lowly mammal with man. " The Pangolin" may not be a perfectly realized poem.

It does not succeed in avoiding a self-indulgent obscurity (fallacy of imitative form? ), yet it is magnificent in its ambition to " explain" grace. The poem tells a story of how soul comes into the world, how it comes " cowering forth" to be born, and also how it is borne once it has arrived. The pangolin is at home in a " nest / of rocks closed with earth from inside, which he can thus darken" ; he is born from this womb like place into the moonlight where he expresses the strangest of earthly beings. He must be uncurled and brought out from his nest to express his particular style of life and his life-given grace. The monk-artists also have made a dark nest for themselves from which their ideas for the outward expressions of grace in mens lives are born. Mans soul is born from such dark, cold, and eternal places.

He is a decision-maker by daylight, a technician, an artist with a sense of humor awaiting the sun, the expression of his soul. In " Sun" Marianne Moore says to the sun, " You are not male or female, but a plan / deep-set within the heart of man" ; and she asks the sun to " be wound in a device of Moorish gorgeousness. " " The Pangolin" is remarkable for its attention to miniature engineering techniques, to the machine-like body, in short, to a highly specialized individuality of both poem and animal. At the same time the poem proposes to be about the soul and eternity. One grows out of the other; they grow together, as beast and man in " Leonardo Da Vinci's" where " astronomy / or pale paint makes the golden pair in Leonardo Da Vinci's sketch seem / sun-dyed. Blaze on, picture, saint, beast. " Beast and man, male and female, light and dark, science and soulful converge and conspire against permanent dejection. This is the answer to Leonardo's query " has anything at all been done? " The pangolin is wound in devices, not of gorgeousness exactly, but in devices that are Moorish with wit and brilliance of analogy.

He expresses his duality as " night miniature artist engineer" ; he is a communication of self. This is what has been done, and all that can be done. from Marianne Moore: Poet of Affection. Copyright? 1977 by Syracuse UP. Jeredith Merrin In her poems about amphibious creatures (these include the salamander, the chameleon, the dragon, and the basilisk), Moore once again elaborates on a physical trait that has for her the same symbolic value it has for Browne, who writes in his Religio: We are only that amphibious piece between a corporate and spiritual essence, that middle frame that linke's those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature. thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there bee but one [world] to the sense, there are two to reason; the one visible; the other invisible.

For Moore, who reminds us in a 1965 Harpers Bazaar piece that " alpha" means " both, " amphibious ness becomes a metaphor for mainland in " The Pangolin, " of course, she follows Browne in using that noun generically uniquely double position in creation. Because he is a creature like others, man inhabits the visible world with its " divers elements" ; because he is the rational creature, he also inhabits that other, invisible world. just as she evokes the human capacity for spiritual endurance by describing erect objects or animals, Moore at times evokes humankind's dual nature by describing amphibious animals. From An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. Copyright? 1990 by Jeredith Merrin.

Grace Schulman In " The Pangolin" (1936) the anteater of the title is the focal center of the poets thoughts, affording the means by which she works through to a new definition of man. Although the animals exemplary virtues are given in the poem (it is nonaggressive, graceful, a model of exactness), they are presented in a form that approximates thought. The poem opens with a sentence fragment whose disjointedness signifies reflection: " Another armored animal scale lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity. " The device of self-correction is used to introduce observations about the closing sense organs (" the closing earrings / or bare ear" ). There are contradictions, too, in the imagery that is used to present these organs (" contracting nose and eye apertures / impenetrably close able" ). The device of self-correction is also fused with the metamorphic image of the moon. In the second stanza the anteater is described as a night creature, " stepping in the moonlight, / on the moonlight peculiarly" that it may preserve the strength of its claws and wear only the outer edges of its hands.

Repetition is fused with metamorphic imagery in the heightened exclamation ending stanza three: Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence! In a subtle way the poet is working through to the idea that the pangolin, a night creature, is not a seeing animal. The true subject of this poem is man as a seeing being. The emphasis on man becomes apparent in the penultimate stanza, with its shift in tone: " Bedizened or stark / naked, man, the self, the being we call human. " When man is described as being unafraid yet fearing (" Not afraid of anything is he / and then goes cowering forth" ), we recall that the pangolin is " fearful yet to be feared. " The pangolin, for all its virtues, is hampered by consistency; man, on the other hand, is characterized by contradictions and opposites, and this very inconsistency is his greatness. He is consistent only with the " formula" : " warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs that is a mammal. " In the final lines the emergent vision of man is accompanied by a metamorphic image of the sun, in which the poet adverts to its power to generate energy that produces change: The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, " Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul. " The poetic rightness of this passage is in the way the language enacts the fusion of the experiential aspect of things and the inner vision, and this fusion is supported by the poets adherence to the actual progression of thought.

The poem moves from idea to radiant image in a process that Freud tells us is characteristic of the unconscious: in nearly all dreams, he writes, thoughts are transformed into visual images. Further, the union of man and anteater suggests that dream technique of combining two or more persons so that a new image emerges. As Freud states: In composition, where this is extended to persons, the dream-image contains features which are peculiar to one or the other of the persons concerned but not common to them; so that the combination of these features leads to the appearance of a new unity, a composite figure. The poet has created a new human image by means of the form that imitates consciousness.

Aside from the approximation of thought and of economy which characterize the unconscious as well as poetic speech, the use of these devices enables the poet to contemplate man while ostensibly focusing on the animal. The transformation of thought to visual image and the use of composite dream persons are further aids to this process. In addition, the poet assimilates the mental process of referring back to previous images and transforming them. The concluding passage quoted above, depicting man, recalls the description of the pangolin in its like images used in opposite ways.

Man is " curtailed" (limited), a word whose etymology meaning (tail cut) contains a pun: man, being tailless, is inferior to the pangolin in that he lacks the animals graceful tail, used as a tool. Further, man is " extinguished, " recalling in an inverse way the pangolins impenetrable armor. Man is " thwarted by dusk, " calling back the pangolins solitary trips at night. One of the most striking effects of this passage, though, is the way in which techniques of the unconscious are used not only as form but as theme, contributing to the concluding picture of man.

Man thrives on change (" the alternating blaze" ) and on repetition (" and new and new and new" ), and on the struggle between alternating images. We recall that the pangolin is compelled to shut out " sun and moon and day and night, " leaving his nest only after nightfall. Man, on the other hand, finding strength in the very intensity of his frustration, lives on fluctuation and light. Mans limitations, then, are his potential excellence: The blazing, alternating image of the sun, and the transformation of day and night give us the rhythm of tragedy as well as of consciousness.

From Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Copyright? 1986 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Sister Bennett Quinn, O.

S. F. " The Artist as Armored Animal: Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell" " The Pangolin, " in Randall Jarrell's opinion, ranked above all Marianne Moores other poems, even " Spenser's Ireland, " that unforgettable hymn to the country of his own great-grandmother, and her equally lilting tribute to the mind as an enchanting thing. To ask why leads to the " educated guess" that he was attracted, increasingly, because of her spiritual analysis of his own species in terms of this armored animal (he was less emphatic about its excellence when writing about What are Years in 1942 than when reviewing the 1952 Collected Poems). As much a pacifist at heart as Robert Lowell, he admired Moores portrait of the scaly anteater as a peaceable creature, choosing defense rather than aggression; rolling into a ball almost impossible to disentangle, excreting an ill-smelling fluid from the tail area in a crisis, dropping from tree to safer earth with a bounce, thanks to the intricately devised scales capable of preventing injury. Most of Marianne Moores time at Bryn Mawr, according to an interview with Donald Hall, was spent in the biology laboratory; she tells him that she " found the biology courses minor, major, and histology exhilarating. " She would have been well-acquainted with Linnaeus, who first classified the pangolin (1758) as Pholidota (" scaled animals" ), its specific name derived from the Malayan word Going, meaning a bolster or cylindrical cushion (sometimes the synonym roller is used, recalling the mammals trick of escape). So important to her was this denizen of the African/Asian forests that the handsome 1936 collection of her verse arranged by H.

D. and illustrated by Carlisle's George Plank not only took the animal as title but placed " The Pangolin" in the most prominent place, last. Renowned as she was for zoo-visiting, it is unlikely that she knew the pangolin any more directly than through books: The difficulty of feeding these animals in captivity makes them one of the greatest of rarities in zoological gardens. So it is that everyone in the Western Hemisphere, to see them alive, must, like Mohammed, go to the less mobile object, in this case not the mountain, but the mantis.

So writes Robert T. Hatt in the article on pangolins which Miss Moore lists in her Notes, its reading a sign of her continued zest for biology. Randall Jarrell too was a science major in undergraduate days at Vanderbilt and would have found fascinating the mantis method of food-gathering, in which the ribbon-like tongue (sometimes almost two feet long) flickers out as often as 160 times a minute to scoop up as many as 30, 000 ant-victims a day. He would have been intrigued by Hatt's metaphorical account: The long, thin tongue can dart in and out with snake-like rapidity and, twisting in among the galleries of an ant colony, it picks up and draws back into the ant-chute mouth all the animals it touches.

Enormous salivary glands furnish an abundant supply of a thick, sticky substance to the surface of the tongue, which holds the insects captive. Not at all a gregarious individual, Jarrell perhaps saw in the pangolin, solitary denizen of the night, a figure of the artist, his imagination intrigued by Miss Moores picture of the modest anteater going his own way through the warm landscapes of his habitat, walking so carefully on the moonlight in the moonlight that he might have been some wild thing in one of the Sendak books for children. The moonlight suffusing " The Pangolin" might well have been for him the moonlight bathing the " little house in the woods" in Greensboro, the first (and the last) piece of property he ever owned, its simple environs shielding him from the competition he sometimes encountered in academic sites like Princeton. Heartily would he have seconded her " The cure for loneliness is solitude, " an aphorism from the essay " If I Were Sixteen Today. " In their fastidious artistry both Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell were armored animals.

What the second says about the first in that appropriately named review " Her Shield" applies to him too: Sometimes Miss Moore writes about armour [he uses the spelling of the English edition, The Pangolin and Other Poems] and wears it, the most delicately chased, live-seeming scale-armour anybody ever put together, armour hammered and of fern seed, woven from the silk of invisible cloaks This " live-seeming" armor recalls that of Achilles, furnished him by Love, fashioned on Olympus. As critic, Jarrell feels it is constructed of quotation, ambiguity, irony, all of which characterize his own stylistic protection as does the difficulty for which he praises Miss Moore. It is no wonder they were drawn to the world of fables and fairy tales, where invulnerability is common, a predilection witnessed to in her case by an adaptation two years before Jarrell's death of Charles Perraults Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella: A Retelling of Three Classic Fairy Tales. Most of those who have written books on Marianne Moore have commented on the attention her bestiaries give to protection.

Donald Hall, after referring to her admiration for armored animals as " a professionals respect for another professional" says: " One suspects that next to being a dragon who can become invisible. Miss Moore would like best to be a pangolin" (94). Bernard F. Engle names his second chapter " The Armored Self: Selected Poems" and the third " Armor for Use: Middle Period Poems. " Ten years before the review of Collected Poems referred to above, Jarrell had this to say: It would be stupid not to see Miss Moore in all her protective creatures" another armored animal, " she once reflects or confesses... " The Pangolin" may be her best poem; it is certainly one of the most moving, honest, and haunting poems that anyone has written in our century. One more resemblance between the two poets is the ear, highly developed in both, as it is in the pangolin, who can hear a sound five miles away. Jarrell trained his ear for music to be sensitive beyond belief, to the point that in his last years, including the final trip to Europe with Mary, opera, ballet, symphonies had become for him a passion, a facet of his genius urgently calling for scholarly attention.

As for Marianne Moore, her skill in balancing rhyme, assonance, other sound-structure elements creates what Jarrell lauds as " a texture that will withstand any amount of rereading; a restraint and delicacy that make many more powerful poems seem obvious. " " The Pangolin" begins with three words involving the broad a (ah), " Another armored animal, " followed by Moores favorite punctuation mark, the dash; the triple repetition results in music as well as emphasis. The poem is well-paired with " The Paper Nautilus, " which it always precedes in her arrangements (both creatures guardians of the treasure of self, the second also of offspring), though from the opening of " The Pangolin" : one might expect it would follow " The Paper Nautilus. " From the outset of the poem on the scaly anteater, Wallace Stevens " realm of resemblance" takes over; it prevails throughout. The strange mammal is likened to the cone of a spruce tree, then to an artichoke, similarities noted by one of her sources, Robert T. Hatt: " It has indeed a leafy appearance that has caused visitors to my office, when seeing a curled up skin fresh from the field, to inquire whether the object was an artichoke or a pine cone. " That the artichoke is the edible flower-head of a thistle-like plant makes its properties a gentle reinforcement of the armor imagery. As Moore elaborates the armor figure, she explains why for the pangolin armor is not something extra but rather a protection, among other uses to safeguard its ears, described by Hatt as a defense against angry ants through " the reduction of the ear conch to a small fold of thickened skin above the ear. " One can visualize Marianne in the Hudson Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library between reviews of silent movie fiction (her special charge), pouring over the pangolin article and fastening upon such an interesting detail as in his next sentence: " Not only may eyes be covered but even the ears and nostrils are capable of complete closure, " then devising her own scrupulous design of pangolin armor: But for him the closing ear-ridge or bare ear lacking even this small [to rhyme with scale, eminence and similarly safe central] contracting nose and eye apertures impenetrably close able, are not, Although ordinarily gizzard is a term reserved for the portion of a birds stomach where its food is ground, the scaly anteaters stomach, according to Hatt, is " a gizzard-like organ in which operate strong muscular grinding forces aided by pebbles picked up by the pangolin, " in Moore the " grit-equipped gizzard. " The naturalist goes on to explore the action of these muscles: " Lacking teeth, the pangolin, as it were, stones its prey to death in the same manner that birds grind hard seeds in their gizzards, and the crocodiles triturate meats too hastily swallowed. " He ridicules one researcher who proposed the theory that the pangolin lives entirely on mineral substances, " a suggestion that would be difficult to equal for absurdity, " one of the " simpletons" spoken of in the poem.

Scientist Theodore H. Eaton depicts the pangolin as shy, looking for food only at night, the " night miniature artist engineer" of Marianne Moore a factor which may well have saved it from extermination, since its tasty flesh is highly prized by natives of the regions where it dwells. Moores comment on its food (which she defines as ants, excluding cockroaches) corresponds with Hatt's remark that although the mammal is " not above picking up an occasional beetle or even a worm, such digressions are not an indication of an omnivorous diet. " Actually the pangolin is the worlds only creature living on ants, the others (misnamed anteaters) preferring the less ferocious termites. Using who instead of which, Marianne Moore subtly builds up (among other ways) her subject into a kind of human hero " who endures / exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night. " These nocturnal efforts appear poetic as exquisitely expressed by stepping " peculiarly that the outside/ edges of his hands [not paws] may bear the weight and save/ the claws/ for digging. " The gait is pictured thus by Hatt: " As most others of its group, the giant pangolin walks on its knuckles and the sides of its feet. Thus the claws are kept sharp for digging. " With her penchant for economical metaphor and precision, Miss Moore likens the mantis to a snake, through a participle: " Serpentined. " Herbert Langs photograph accompanying the Hatt essay bears out her impression: it shows the odd creature wrapped around the trunk reptile-like as it descends to the ground. Not all forms are terrestrial: the African black-bellied pangolin and the silky anteater live exclusively in trees, while the collared anteater spends at least part of his time arboreal ly.

Randall Jarrell in the Kenyon Review piece of the early 1940 s indirectly connects Moores metaphorical gifts with Midas golden touch: She not only can, but has to, make poetry out of everything and anything: she is like Midas, or Mozart purposely choosing unpromising themes, or like the princess whom a wizard forces to manufacture sheets out of nettles if the princess were herself the wizard. The concise metaphor recording how the creature winds himself around a tree-trunk if endangered, in non-violent opposition to an aggressor, is indicative of how this poet can make sheets out of nettles. Both Marianne and her father appreciated silence, e. g. " The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence, " from the lyric named " Silence" ; from his habits the pangolin too seems to appreciate it. Hatt writes: " The pangolins are silent animals and are not known to produce any noise through the mouth other than a hiss, " a sentence which the poem transforms into " he draws away from danger un pugnaciously, /with no sound but a harmless hiss, " Moore adding as a complication of the image " keeping/ the fragile grace" of the wrought-iron vine done by Thomas of Leighton Buzzard; this Westminster Abbey artifact she had probably observed while in London with her mother. She continues by delineating a response to aggression suggestive of the hedge-hogs stratagem when attacked: in Ernest P.

Walkers Mammals of the World this appears as " they [the pangolins] are rather timid animals and if overtaken before they can reach the burrow, they curl into a tight ball, the armored limbs and tail protecting the soft under parts. " Hatt also includes this trick: Like those other creatures with flexible dorsal armor, the armadillo, the hedgehog, and the pill-bug, the mantis, when put on the defensive, curls up into a ball, keeping the plates on the outside and the soft under-surfaces unexposed. Because of its thick tail and the protruding scales, the pangolins simulation of a ball is less perfect than that of an armadillo. Cuddled up in this way, the anteaters are almost impregnable according to Marianne Moore, " ... strongly installed, neat/ head for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in feet. " The lyric continues with a sentence beginning " Nevertheless, " title for her 1944 volume, and here introducing the idea that this " ball" behavior is unnecessary, since the overlapping scales are sting-proof; besides, the pangolin has the resource of retreating underground into a " nest / of rocks" (italics mine), a metaphor underscoring the bird allusion of gizzard and developing further the pacific quality of the animal. As Moore went along in her poetic career, her bestiary became more and more a collection of good animals, allegorical parallels of the types of persons she and Randall valued, a change about which Jarrell says: " Because so much of our own world is evil, she has transformed the animal kingdom, that amoral realm, into a realm of good... " yet somehow the pangolin lyric shows that " the world is not good and evil, but good-and-evil, " like the parabolic field where cockle grows amidst the wheat.

The nest-refuge Moore particularizes with " closed with earth from the inside, " a phenomenon expressed by naturalist Walker as " The terrestrial forms generally close their burrough with dirt when they are inside. " Having brought her emblem-animal to this vantage point, Marianne Moore flings the poem forward like a banner, in verse which Jarrell acclaims as Old Testament in its exaltation: Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendour which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence! The sun has one glory, that of day, and the moon another, that of night, just as each man and each beast has a unique radiance, what Hopkins would call an insane. Granddaughter and sister of ministers, she turned naturally to psalmody such as this, just as Jarrell, native of the Bible Belt, turned again and again to his boyhood copy of the Scriptures. The fourth stanza begins with a caption out of Hatt's account, placed there below Herbert Langs photograph of the African pangolin, " Fearful, Yet To Be Feared, " a description which is expanded as " Pangolins are not aggressive, but the giant species can do great damage with their massive axe-edged tails. " Though never eager for hostile encounters, the pangolin is no coward: with the wizardry that Jarrell commends, Marianne Moore studies this passage from Hatt: It is to be marveled at that the pangolins have the courage to feed on a column of driver ants, but we have the authority of Herbert Lang that they will do this. Most other animals, and a few nimble birds are notable exceptions, flee from these hordes that are capable of overcoming animals of large size. The armor-clad scaly anteaters, in spite of their success among the ants, are not invulnerable to attack, and when the ants do succeed in swarming over an individual, the scales are set violently quivering...

and transforms it thus: the armored ant-eater met by the driver-ant does not turn back, but engulfs what he can, the flattened sword- edged leaf points on the tail and artichoke set leg-and body-plates quivering violently when it retaliates and swarms on him. Here she added two new metaphors for the scales: sword-edge and leaf. Marianne Moore by the time she composed " The Pangolin" had behind her the good part of a lifetime of noticing connections, connections as important to her as to Robert Penn Warren when he developed his interpretation of " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, " relying for theme on the sacramentality of the universe. As a summary of her use of these, Jarrell writes: " She shows that everything is related to everything else; no one has compared successfully more disparate objects. " How she could conceive of the live " ball" about to drop to the ground as the furled ornament on the hat of a matador as represented by the sculptor Gargallo is remarkable, but then it was she who would one day inquire of Donald Hall in the Paris Review interview: " Didnt Aristotle say that it is the mark of a poet to see resemblances between apparently incongruous things? " The poem at this stage heightens the man / pangolin identification, the aspect of the work which gives it its most lasting significance, by elaborating on the functions of the tail " graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or axe, " prop suggesting a cane.

Richard G. Van Gelder in Geology of Mammals calls attention to how from time to time the tail permits a biped, tail-supported gait; in the same vein, Hartman notes that likeness to man in one of the sevens species of Pholidota (Tamandua) is so marked that it is nicknamed " Dominus vobis cum" because it resembles a priest at the altar when it stands upright with its arms outstretched. Since some of these animals are six or eight feet long, the human counterpart is not far-fetched. The Twayne volume on Marianne Moore by Bernard F. Engle regards " The Pangolin" " her fullest statement on relationships among the animal, human, and spiritual kingdoms, " declaring that her real subject is the nature of man, " that animal for whom no physical armoring is adequate. " The peaceful disposition of the pangolin receives further stress in this fifth stanza through its being termed " not aggressive, " its progress the " frictionless creep of a thing/ made graceful by adversities. " Much has been made of the grace motif in Moores work. Elizabeth Phillips calls grace the focal theme of " The Pangolin. " Praising the animal when regarded as artifact Phillips speaks of the need for more than the efficient working of parts (Williams machine made of words, energized by art): " The natural ease of his movements, however, is only one kind of grace, rather a limited and cautious kind.

To explain grace requires more than that. " The " more" means an advance to supernatural grace as understood by this authors minister-grand-father and Navy chaplain- brother Warren, indeed by all the Moore family. Such is the connotation of grace drawn in by the lines in the lyric on that anonymous glory of the Middle Ages the carving monks did based on the Book of the Creatures (they and other artists), high up above cathedral worshippers, in a freedom from vanity explicated here by the confident clause " If all that which is at all were not forever" ; indeed, to tourists today it does seem as if what is represented is forever, those creatures on the stone mullions which still branch out across the vaulted temples. In stanza seven Moore, through a lavish series of metaphors (after praising the quietness of the pangolin by comparing it to that first of all machines the sailboat) calls man the kin of wasp and spider and pangolin, carrying on the same trades and yet set apart by a sense of humor. Laughter has been called the differentiating feature of homo sapiens.

Her praise mounts, including even praise for contradictions (" unemotional, and all emotion! " ) and emphasizing once more modesty and courage. About the last virtue Donald Hall comments in Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal, " Courage, an inward hardening of the spirit to adversity, is mans best and only protection. " Yet if the pangolin is courageous it is also cautious, a " humble animal, " as Jarrell terms Miss Moore herself. It is almost impossible for Moore readers to think of the conclusion of " The Pangolin" apart from Make It New by the authors friend Ezra Pound, a motto Pound says was lettered in gold on the bathtub of a Chinese emperor. The poem ends " ... anew each day; and new and new and new, " referring to the sun " that comes into and steadies my soul. " In respect to man, sharing the spotlight with the pangolin in this lyric, what Elizabeth Phillips says sums up her focus-as-grace idea: " Ridiculous as he is, he has a soul, and it can be steadied. " What Randall Jarrell asserts in closing " Her Shield" is just as true of his own " The Old and the New Masters" he uses the words of Marianne Moores best poetry to say of it that it " comes into and steadies the soul" so that the reader feels himself " a life prisoner, but reconciled. " Moores regard for Jarrell comes through in her letters: " I cannot think of anyone who gives me more incentive than Randall Jarrell, as I read about him or think about him. " Despite his youthful parody of her, " The Country Was, " his deep appreciation of her verse and character was beyond question, the first revealed in his statement reviewing Nevertheless that she wrote better poetry than any other woman alive.

Evaluating Predilections, he asserts that this prose collection, like her other works, is " purely and individually and imaginatively faithful to the truth as she sees it. " Like Flannery OConnor, as Elizabeth Phillips points out, life to her is a comic vision, one she passionately cares about: " The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and admit that we do. " She feels for the " pangolin, " frustrated as he is by the fact that " We live in time so little time" and yet facing each new day with the hope of the Psalmist, " Sing a new song unto the Lord! " If man appears ridiculous through overdress or nakedness (Lears " poor, forked animal" ), even so no amount of vileness will cancel out his excellence: " a little lower than the angels, " he is brother of the Son. If he must leave half the flowers unpicked, he wins a kind of survival through his web of bridges built from bluff to bluff and leaves behind not only the miracle of paper (an achievement greater than the wasps) but scrawling's upon it that excite and inspire, that " can make one/ breathe faster and make one erected. " Not accidentally does " Armour's Undermining Modesty" appear at the end of Collected Poems, its final phrase " the imperishable wish, " at the heart of which seems a longing for someone/Someone to love the poet " best of all, " the wish of the child in Sendaks Where the Wild Things Are. Those who live in todays world, where affirmation often seems absent, can meditate on Marianne Moores pangolin as it humbly advances toward dawn. From Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet. Ed. Patricia Willis.

Copyright? 1990 by the National Poetry Foundation, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Please consult the original book for footnotes and sources for this essay. Charles Molesworth Moores artistry reaches a peak with " The Pangolin, " in large part because it shows her ability to merge inner values and outer surfaces with playful ingenuity and yet serious intent. From the poems opening phrase" Another armoured animal" we hear that tone of surety that results when an artist has come to know fully her material and to have seen that it fully serves her thematic aims.

In some ways " The Pangolin" is the most positive, self-possessed poem of the book which shares its title. But its tensions and ironies are present, and they reverberate with the knowledge of the preceding four poems. By using animal grace as the ostensible subject in all five poems, Moore skillfully mediates between the concern with civic virtue and the complexities of the artistic vocation. Many modernist poems and poets are notable for their separation of the artistic and civil realms, and Moore herself has often been discussed as if she had little or no interest in public matters outside of manners and decorum.

Her concern with decorum, however, as well as her concern with perceptual accuracy and artistic responsiveness, have a moral dimension that is fulfilled on a public scale. Too often, I think, Moores concern with armoring and armored animals has been taken to suggest something like hermeticism, as if the armor were equivalent to the monks walls in his cell. But armor was designed to allow people to go into the world, not avoid it. And so, I think, Moore understood it. The pangolin is a nocturnal, isolated animal, stealthy and seldom seen, but its solitariness is in the service of genuine virtues: patience, skill, the wise use of strength. These virtues have social consequences in the human realm, and so what the pangolin emblematize's through its poetic representation is a didactically important awareness for existing in the human world.

The witty equation between pangolin and artist gets a playful introduction in the poems opening stanza: This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped get- zero, the night miniature artist- engineer, is Leonardo's indubitable son? Im- pressure animal and toiler, of whom we seldom hear. The pedigree, as it were, is a conditioned one, for the pause after " is" indicates not only hesitation but an awareness of the implausible nature of the identification with Leonardo even if its only through paternal lineage. (The " is" is also highlighted by the comic rhyme with the jutting " get" of two lines previous. ) Note, too, how Moore first locates her metaphoric frame in the world of nature, with the artichoke, before turning to the world of culture with Leonardo. The pangolin is not only a dreamy artist figure, but an " artist-engineer, " a creature who masters its environment by purposive activity. This constitutes one connection with the explorer figure of " Virginia Britannia, " and while we " seldom hear" of the pangolin, in contrast to John Smiths self-publicizing, the animal has some of the explorers inconsistency, for it is later described as " Fearful yet to be feared. " Having begun the identification of animal and artist with her usual tentative touch, Moore is freed to explore the pangolins habits in a way that can easily be read as an allegory of the moon-struck romantic artist, even down to his propensity to have his activity and character imaged forth as yet another art form while he explores the world on his own aesthetic terms. We enjoy several levels of identification when he: endures exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night returning before sunrise; stepping in the moonlight, on the moonlight peculiarly, that the out- side edges of his hands may bear the weight and save the claws for digging.

Serpentined about the tree, he draws away from danger un pugnaciously, with no sound but a harmless hiss; keep- ing the fragile grace of the Thomas- of Leighton-Buzzard Westminster Abbey wrought iron vine, or rolls himself into a ball that has power to defy all effort to unroll it. Again, a pause after the first moonlight suggests Moore is about to lift the level of suspended disbelief needed to tease out the implications of the animals grace. The economy of the animal / artist is what is perhaps most striking, how he saves his claws for digging, how he allows only a " harmless hiss" to express his fear and disregard, and how, like the durably wrought ironwork of the Abbeys tomb, his fragility is in part illusory. It is no wonder that Moore can end a stanza with a peroration in which the ability to live and even prosper in alternating states can be the distinctive mark of both man and animal.

The lines recall one of Moores favorite authors, Sir Thomas Browne, and his desire to live in " divided and distinguished worlds" : Sun and moon & day and night & man and beast each with a sale- dour which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence! Here Moore echoes not only Hamlets awareness of mans divided nature but also her own phrase from another poem: " lifes faulty excellence. " This stanza ending also anticipates the poems closing lines, where the sun is addressed as an " alternating blaze. " Again, Moore may have Stevens " Sunday Morning" in mind, with its concern that humanness is inextricably tied up with alternation, and that any single unchanging state would be insipid. But it is also her sense of fallen ness, the particular texture of human virtue its excellencies and its limitations that is richly conveyed in the poems structure. It is directly to mans character that Moore turns in the poems last three stanzas, not altogether abandoning the allegorical framework of animal grace, but emboldened enough to speak directly in a way that is altogether rather unique in her poetry. Though she draws an industrious picture of where " Beneath sun and moon, man slave[s]/to make his life more sweet, " Moore is wry enough to point out that he " leaves half the / flowers worth having. " She goes on to emblematize various human traits through the agencies of animal graces, until she presents him as " capsizing in / / disheartenment. " Drawing back from this near-tragic sense, Moore resorts to some grammatical complexity and mingles it with some Cummings-like typographical wit in order to leaven the themes piecemeal presentation before the finale: Bedizened or stark naked, man, the self, the being so-called human, writing- master to this world, griffons a dark Like does not like like that is obnoxious'; and writes error [sic] with four rs. Among animals, one has a sense of humor.

Again, commentary might exfoliate endlessly here, starting with the slight echo from King Lear to the way that last wry sentence does and does not include man among the animals. But it is important to note that now man is the " writing-master, " and so literature has a didactic function that links the aesthetic with the ethical. In this one instance, what is written is gnomic, since the verb " griffons" suggests that the sentiment expressed is both heraldic and hybrid. In either case, the note of dislike and the obnoxious reminds us of our fallen ness, and the fact that the species, simply by being a set of " like" creatures, does not guarantee peace for itself. (Moore had earlier said, in her array of animal emblems of human traits, that man was " in fighting, mechanic ked / like the pangolin. " Perhaps she had Leonardo's many militaristic " inventions" in mind. ) The final stanza is a marvel of structural subtlety, as it refers equally to the pangolin and man, an equivocation made possible by the closing lines of the penultimate stanza.

The equivocation perhaps turns wittiest with the lines " Consistent with the / formula warm blood, no gills, /two pairs of hands and a few hairs that / is a mammal; there he sits in his / own habitat. " Part of the humor here is the way the Dickinson-like use of riddle is called on to question the " formula" about mammalian identity, a very touchy point in biology. The pangolin might easily be taken for a reptile, but his features fit the mammalian formula sufficiently, even though they also allow him to be described in a way that applies with almost equal accuracy to humans. (Luckily we have one pair of hands and one of feet. ) George Planks drawing at the start of the poem shows a pangolin in a tree under the moon; the drawing at the end of the poem shows a man, clasping his face in his hands under a blazing sun. Even more than the merging of the horse and the butterfly in " Half Deity, " here the identification of the two main subjects of the poem is very much to the point of the poems argument. As Moore says earlier in the poem, " To explain grace requires / a curious hand. " We might even speculate that she was using " curious" here in both its seventeenth century sense of finely and intricately wrought as well as the modern sense of desiring knowledge.

In either case, the identification of man and pangolin is indeed curious. <


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