The Past Is The Present (Marianne Moore)

 

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete

  and rhyme is outmoded,

    I shall revert to you,

  Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded

      into doing, by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse.

This man said--I think that I repeat

  his identical words:

    "Hebrew poetry is

  prose with a sort of heightened consciousness. 'Ecstasy affords

      the occasion and expediency determines the form.'"

-Marianne Moore

I've been looking into Marianne Moore (1887-1972) again after reading Richard Howard. Though in most ways they're pretty different, both use a syllable-counting scheme in their poetics. (Moore, pretty much always; Howard, frequently.) For example, the first line of each stanza in this has nine syllables. There is a rhyme scheme, though it's not very intrusive: effete/repeat, outmoded/goaded, words/affords, with the last one being only a sight rhyme.

XY is the Rev. Edwin Henry Kellogg, Moore tells us in a note.

Moore was an inveterate rewriter of her poems; this is the first version, published in 1915 and first collected in her book Observations of 1924. There is another version. Her most famous poem, 'Poetry', the one that begins 'I, too, dislike it...' goes from thirty lines in the earliest version to three in the final.