The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing by Marianne Moore

First published: 1944, in Nevertheless

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

“The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” is a poem of six six-line stanzas. As in most of Marianne Moore’s verse, the line length varies in a regular pattern repeated in each stanza. Here the syllable counts vary as follows: 6, 5, 4, 6, 7, 9. That is, the first line of each stanza is six syllables, the second five, and so forth. A subtle rhyme scheme typical of Moore is also repeated in each stanza: abaccd. Moore’s use of indentation further gives this poem a distinctive shape on the page. Lines 1, 3, and 6 of each stanza appear flush left; line 2 is indented somewhat, and lines 4 and 5 are indented equally but a bit more than line 2. In spite of these typographic variations, the poem is composed of eight complete and grammatical sentences (with Moore using the capital letter only at the beginning of a sentence).

As the title announces, this brief poem is an exploration of the mind, perhaps an attempt at definition. The poem presents a variety of similes and metaphors for the mind and its functions of observation, memory, and emotional balance. Forms of the title word “enchantment” appear three times, revealing different senses in which Moore relates the mind to magical attraction and delight. In the title, the mind itself is “enchanting,” that is, capable of enchanting others. In the opening line of the poem, however, the mind has become “an enchanted thing,” a subtle shift that indicates the mind’s susceptibility to the powers of things outside it that it observes. In the fourth stanza, the mind is described as “a power of strong enchantment,” because it is “truly unequivocal.” It is clear that we are operating in a difficult and abstract linguistic environment in reading this poetic attempt to fix in words the shifting experiences of consciousness and memory.

Moore’s abstractions, however, are almost always combined with closely observed details of the concrete world, and this is true of the metaphors of this poem. The mind is variously compared to the “glaze on a/ katydid-wing,” a German pianist performing a work by Domenico Scarlatti, the beak and the feathers of the kiwi (a flightless New Zealand bird), a gyroscope, and the shining of an iridescent dove’s neck in the sunlight. None of these are obvious metaphors, to put it mildly. They all point to Moore’s penchant for precision: her interest in the details and quirks of specific animals, or the particularities of an individual musician’s rendering of a composer’s work. That the fall of a gyroscope serves as an image for the abstract quality of being “unequivocal” epitomizes Moore’s desire to link the abstract to physical detail.

The various metaphors suggest the mind’s power of observation as it notes the minute subdivisions upon the katydid’s wing or the shining of a dove’s neck feathers in the sunlight. The poem also specifically points to other qualities of the mind. The mind has a certain clumsiness, “feeling its way as though blind,/ [it] walks along with its eyes on the ground.” Memory gives mind both hearing and sight, here revealed through the direct metonomies of “ear” and “eye.” The mind is capable of correcting for the heart’s excessive emotion: “It tears off the veil . . ./ the mist the heart wears.” Above all, perhaps, the mind is gloriously inconsistent (a word Moore remarkably works twice into her brief lines). Through all these qualities, Moore celebrates the quirkiness and particularity of the mind engaged in perception, memory, and thought. Unlike the tyrannical Herod, who kept true to his oath and beheaded John the Baptist, the mind can change, and that metamorphic quality is celebrated by Moore in the poem’s final lines: “it’s/ not a Herod’s oath that cannot change.”

Forms and Devices

Moore’s talent for the unusual but illuminating metaphor is apparent in the metaphoric range of this poem, and the very abstractness of the central subject, the mind, forces the poet into figurative language. “Mind” is as much a process as a concrete entity, but Moore’s insistent use of the pronoun “it” (ten times) and the very word “thing” in the title works against this abstraction. The tension of the poem lies in this effort to pin down abstraction with precision.

A consideration of mind is perforce a consideration of language, which shapes thought, memory, and emotion. Moore’s poems are always fascinating explorations of sound and diction within her distinctive poetic form. The reference to “Gieseking playing Scarlatti” is probably as appealing to Moore for its sound as for the actual concert she recalls (which, she reports elsewhere, she attended at the Brooklyn Academy in the 1930’s). Similarly, Moore uses both “Apteryx” and “kiwi” as synonyms for the same New Zealand bird. The hard p, t, r, and x sounds of the word resonate nicely with Gieseking and Scarlatti of the previous line, while the exotic “kiwi” is paired with the sounds of w, f, and h in a stanza including “rain-shawl,” “haired feathers,” “feeling,” “way,” “though,” “walks,” and “with.”

Moore’s orchestration of sounds is apparent in her often surprising rhymes as well: sun/legion, the/Scarlatti, submits/it’s. Some of the rhymes specifically reinforce the poem’s themes: most notably, mind/blind, which suggests the limitations of perception, but also heart/apart, which points to the tension between thought and emotion, and unequivocal/fall, which ironically defines trueness and certainty in terms of the inevitable “fall” of the turning gyroscope. Moore’s skill in manipulating her strict syllabic line lengths also lends to the subtle brilliance of the poem. One five-syllable line is filled simply by the key word, “inconsistencies,” while that word makes up one of three terms in a tongue-twisting nine-syllable line: “it’s conscientious inconsistencies.” The look of the poem on the page (as well as its syllabic formality) reminds one that this is a work from the age of the typewriter. Like her contemporary William Carlos Williams, Moore composed and revised on a typewriter, and the machine shapes the look of her “manuscripts”—appropriately enough for the machine age in which Moore and Williams grew to adulthood.

The particular surviving manuscript of this poem (part of the Rosenbach collection) is notable for the drawing of a shoe-polish container lid upon it. It is Kiwi brand polish, and the lid reproduces the odd little animal replete with his “rain-shawl/ of haired feathers.” This drawing should remind the reader of the care Moore took in gathering her materials from a variety of sources, bestiaries, atlases, anthropological studies, illustrated magazines, accounts of baseball games, and advertisements. As much as Moore’s poems are elaborate organizations of words and sounds, they also reveal her fascination with accurately observed particularities. “Apteryx” appeals not only because of its sound, but because of its origin in the Greek word for wing (thus echoing the katydid-wing of the previous stanza). The image of the “apteryx-awl” comments on the kiwi’s odd beak—long, narrow, and pointed. Its eyes are on the ground, one suspects, in search of food, but it is important to Moore that that posture should be natural for the bird if the comparison is to work.

Bibliography

Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Hadas, Pamela White. Marianne Moore: Poet of Affection. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1977.

Joyce, Elisabeth W. Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.

Miller, Christine. Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Molesworth, Charles. Marianne Moore: A Literary Life. New York: Atheneum, 1990.

Stamy, Cynthia. Marianne Moore and China: Orientalism and a Writing of America. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Stapleton, Laurence. Marianne Moore: The Poet’s Advance. 1978. Reprint. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Tomlinson, Charles, ed. Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Willis, Patricia C., ed. Marianne Moore. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999.