“The Mind is an Enchanting Thing”

November 15 — It’s the birthday of poet Marianne Moore, born in Kirkwood, Missouri (1887). She studied history, law, and politics at Bryn Mawr College, and though she didn’t major in science, she took some courses in biology and developed an appreciation for animals as well as an almost scientific precision in her use of language.
She started publishing her poems professionally in 1915, moved to New York City in 1918, and became friends with other poets, such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot.
She became something of a character among the literati of New York, appearing at parties in a black cape and tricorn hat. She favored the tricorn because it concealed the defects of her head, which she claimed resembled a hop-toad’s.
She was a great fan of sports, and wrote the liner notes for Cassius Clay’s spoken-word album, “I Am the Greatest!” (1963). She threw out the first pitch for the Yankees’ 1968 season, and soon after had the first of a series of strokes that would eventually claim her life in 1972. She once told a New York Times interviewer:
“I never knew anyone with a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do. I seldom say them in a manner I like. Each poem I think will be the last. But something always comes up and catches my fancy.”
The Mind is an Enchanting Thing
is an enchanted thing
like the glaze on a
katydid-wing
subdivided by sun
till the nettings are legion.
Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;
like the apteryx-awl
as a beak, or the
kiwi’s rain-shawl
of haired feathers, the mind
feeling its way as though blind,
walks with its eyes on the ground.
It has memory’s ear
that can hear without
having to hear.
Like the gyroscope’s fall,
truly unequivocal
because trued by regnant certainty,
it is a power of
strong enchantment. It
is like the dove-
neck animated by
sun; it is memory’s eye;
it’s conscientious inconsistency.
It tears off the veil; tears
the temptation, the
mist the heart wears,
from its eyes — if the heart
has a face; it takes apart
dejection. It’s fire in the dove-neck’s
iridescence; in the
inconsistencies
of Scarlatti.
Unconfusion submits
its confusion to proof; it’s
not a Herod’s oath that cannot change. The Poems of Marianne Moore