with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral; with voices - one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept - the
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy
with its equal shores - contriving an epicureanism
from which the grossness has been extracted,
and Greece with its goat and its gourds,
the nest of modified illusions: and France,
the "chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,"
in whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one's object -
substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proofreaders, no silk-worms, no digressions;
the wild man's land; grass-less, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!
The letter a in psalm and calm when
pronounced with the sound of a in candle, is very noticeable, but
why should continents of misapprehension
have to be accounted for by the fact?
Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?
Of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite,
of heat which may appear to be haste,
no conclusions may be drawn.
To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not loooked far enough.
The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment,
the cataclysmic torrent of emotion
compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language,
the books of the man who is able to say,
"I envy nobody but him, and him only,
who catches more fish than
I do" - the flower and fruit of all that noted superiority
if not stumbled upon in America,
must one imagine that it is not there?
It has never been confined to one locality.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It is rare when prose is so good that it rivals poetry. Perhaps that was what Pound meant
when he stated that "poetry should be at least as well-written as prose" at a time when the
dominant prose-writers were Henry James, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.
Moore was the master of a prose style which did indeed rival the felicities of organized
prosody. Her extremely eccentric syllabic matrices suggest that for her--at least as far as
straight prose (which has its own rhythmic and rhetorical rules just as rhyme and syllabic
counting does) went, a rigid form was, a priori, a basic precondition of managing a "denatured"
(poetically dry) sentence style, of "setting it" artificially outside of its essential prosaic context,
into a formal shape that was both visually, and aurally, "poetic." If you can make rhyme
seem natural enough, within the syntax and flow of ordinary speech, there is less and less
resistance to the implied monotony of its recurrence. In this way, at least, poetry can be
made to seem as accessible as elevated conversation, which would seem to be very much
what Moore is striving for, generally, in her poems.
I choose this poem, "England," precisely because it doesn't seem to me to have an over-riding,
complex argument, requiring a finicky deconstruction of terms and ironic twists, but is rather
an evidently simple entertainment, addressed to a question that has interested serious American
novelists (such as James and Wharton) and poets for at least six generations (since the mid-19th
Century): That of the difference between European and American culture (and language),
the forbear and the "descendant", the Mother-tongue and the bastard child.
The enumerations of cliche with which the poem begins are intended to capture (or burlesque)
the familiar characterizations of cultural-intellectual stereo-types which form the foundation
of our habitual senses of these national (Old versus New) differences.
America--"the wild man's land"--is where "American" is spoken "which cats and dogs can read!"
The implied satiric self-deprecation of this pose is not defensive, but prideful. If American
English is regionally various, then it must follow that mere pronunciation cannot be a basis for
determining any inherent superiority between "English" (or British) and American pronuncia-
tions. If the difference between British and American culture is one of type, and not of degree,
then the important observation is that any regional (local), provincial, riparian, in situ civili-
zation has as much integrity as any other. Human beings seem incapable of conducting business
anywhere, over time, without developing complex terms of interaction and traditional codifica-
tion at least as remarkably unique and compelling as any other. "It has never been confined to
one locality" means just that, that the minor differences we may remark between shared
linguistic traditions cannot be the basis for "continents of misapprehension."
The implication of this insistence upon America's cultural integrity ignores the subtle distinctions
employed by writers like James and Wharton, who appear to believe that only Americans'
innocence, purity or boldness can match the nuance and inscrutability of European fastidiousness.
What Moore does manage to do is brilliantly mimic the proposed edifices of thousands-year-old
cultural artifacts, which then are methodically leveled in order to render their essence--
"substance at the core." If decorativeness is what we really think about the supposed superiority
of European culture--and it almost always is, in the end--then that decorativeness is no less
"regional" or "local" than any other. Oceans may separate us, but modern communication and
the familiarity of intercourse make that irrelevant. Continents of misapprehension. Oceans of
difference.
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