Obviously barring some world-wide disaster, Brazil is going to push and be pushed into industrialization. For the time being however, it is still one country where human-man, poor as he may be, is still more important than producing-man or consuming-man or political-man.
Everyone who visits Brazil agrees that ordinary, average Brazilians are a wonderful people: cheerful, sweet-tempered, witty, and patient — incredibly patient. To see them standing in line for hours, literally for hours, in lines folded back on themselves two or three times the length of a city block, — only to get aboard a broken-down, recklessly-driven bus and return to their tiny suburban houses, where, these days, as like as not, the street has not been repaired, nor the garbage collected, and there may even be no water — is to wonder at their patience. It seems that there should be a revolution every month or so. They have never had the government they deserve, and one wonders how long it will be before they get it.
ESSAYS, REVIEWS, AND TRIBUTES
As We Like It
Miss Moore and the Delight of Imitation
As far as I know, Miss Marianne Moore is The World’s Greatest Living Observer. The English language is fortunate in occasionally falling heir to such feats of description, say, as this, of lightning:
Flashes lacing two clouds above or the cloud and the earth started upon the eyes in live veins of rincing or riddling liquid white, inched and jagged as if it were the shivering of a bright riband string which had once been kept bound round a blade and danced back into its pleatings.
Or this:
Drops of rain hanging on nails etc. seen with only the lower rim lighted like nails (of fingers).
But they are prose and by Hopkins, and he is dead. Of course Hopkins occasionally did introduce instances of equally startling accuracy into his poetry with such lines as,
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard apple …
Or, to quote something approaching nearer Miss Moore’s special provinces, the
Star-eyed strawberry breasted
Throstle …
and the famous
rose-moles all in stipple upon trout …
But Miss Moore has bettered these over and over again, and keeps right on doing it.
The firs stand in a procession, each with an
emerald turkey-foot at the top …
the blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water-spiders …
The East with its
snails, its emotional
shorthand …
Peter, her immortal cat, with his
small tufts of fronds
or katydid legs above each eye.
and
the shadbones regularly set about his mouth, to droop or rise in unison like the porcupine’s quills …
The swan
with flamingo-colored, maple
leaflike feet.
and the lizard,
stiff,
and somewhat heavy, like fresh putty on the hand.
These things make even our greatest poet, when he attempts something like them, appear full of preconceived notions and over-sentimental. A wounded deer has been abandoned by his “velvet friends.” And Shakespeare is supposed to have been familiar with deer.
The wretched animal heav’d forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting, and the big round tears
Cours’d one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase …
As You Like It
I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous. Even the best trompe-l’oeil paintings lack it, but I have experienced it in listening to the noise made by a four year old child who could imitate exactly the sound of the water running out of his bath. Long, fine, thorough passages of descriptive prose fail to produce it, but sometimes animal or bird masks at the Museums of Natural History give one (as the dances that once went with them might have been able to do) the same immediacy of identification one feels on reading about Miss Moore’s
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying that you have a badger
or the butterfly that
flies off
diminishing like wreckage on the sea,
rising and falling easily.
Does it come simply from her gift of being able to give herself up entirely to the object under contemplation, to feel in all sincerity how it is to be it? From whatever this pleasure may be derived, it is certainly one of the greatest the work of Miss Moore gives us.
Sometimes in her poetry such instances “go on” so that there seems almost to be a compulsion to this kind of imitation. The poems seem to say, “These things exist to be loved and honored and we must,” and perhaps the sense of duty shows through a little plainly.
Did he not moralize this spectacle?
O yes, into a thousand similes.
As You Like It
And although the tone is frequently light or ironic the total effect is of such a ritualistic solemnity that I feel in reading her one should constantly bear in mind the secondary and frequently sombre meaning of the title of her first book: Observations.
Miss Moore and Edgar Allan Poe
In the poem “Elephants,” after five stanzas of beautiful description of the elephant and his mahout, Miss Moore suddenly breaks off and remarks in rhetorical disgust,
As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at
much unease
thereby giving dramatic expression to one of the problems of descriptive poetry, although actually she has only used “as if” once, so far. It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things, even though there seems to be no help for it. But it may be noticed that although full of similes, and such brilliant ones that she should never feel the necessity of complaining, she uses metaphor rather sparingly and obliquely. In Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” he points out that it is not until the last two stanzas of “The Raven” that he permits himself the use of any metaphorical expression:
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
and
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor.
and then says that such expressions “dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated.” He has already stressed the importance of avoiding “the excess of the suggested meaning,” and said that metaphor is a device that must be very carefully employed. Miss Moore does employ it carefully and it is one of the qualities that gives her poetry its steady aura of both reserve and having possibly more meanings, in reserve. Another result is that the metaphor, when used, carries a long way, reverberating like her “pulsation of lighthouse and noise of bell-buoys.…”