Observations’ Index

Inaccessible for many years outside of the 1924 and then the corrected 1925 edition of Observations, Marianne Moore’s idiosyncratic index to her first book (leaving out the 1921 Poems published without her authorization) is now readily available in three editions of her work: Robin Schulze’s 2002 facsimile edition of Moore’s early work, including Observations; Linda Leavell’s 2016 edition of Observations; and Heather White’s 2017 edition of New Collected Poems. Readers who had never seen the original may have been familiar with the convenient index (organized alphabetically by title and first line) to the long-standard Moore text, the Penguin Collected Poems – still regrettably available in any used bookstore – would be sure to notice more of an authorial than editorial hand in its composition. There is no comment on the index that I am aware of in the original reviews of Moore’s work, perhaps because readers were engaged enough and likely overwhelmed by the intricate arrays of detail in the poems; or perhaps a glance at the index reassured some readers that someone – an editor? the author? – had perceived a sense of order and provided a thematic and topical guide.

We can be sure that Louis Zukofsky noticed and kept it in mind as he composed the delightful “Index to Names and Objects” to A, the long poem that he started in 1928 and completed in 1974. Nonetheless, while Moore’s “Notes” drew critical attention, the “Index” went unremarked, and it has continued that way, apart from some passing observations and more recently an enjoyable article by Rebecca Bradburn in a scholarly journal called The Indexer, which reassured me that I was not wrong to think that readers and reviewers remained silent on the matter. Nor does anything in Moore’s published letters provide any sense of her decision to include an index or the process of building it. There is one hint of her interest in the possibility in a 1921 letter in which she thanks Bryher for an “exquisite” book of the poems of Henri de Régnier, the French Symbolist poet, “with its flowered cover, sheafs of wheat and remarkable little index.” The editors of the letters suggest that the book is probably de Régnier’s 1921 Vestigia flammae, but the likelihood is higher that it is the 1921 edition (the twentieth!) of his 1900 book Les Médailles d’Argile, which opens with the much-discussed (by Amy Lowell in 1915 and others) poem “J’ai feint que des Dieux m’aient parlé” that René Taupin revealed in 1929 had been an influence on Ezra Pound’s “The Return.”

The imagery that Moore goes on to describe in the letter corresponds not only to imagery in the poem and other poems in the book but also to the caduceus with serpents printed on its title page. However, at 252 pages and roughly 5” by 7”, can this be the “tiny” book Moore describes? And is its unremarkable table of contents, placed at the back of the book as is standard for French publications, anything like “a remarkable index”? It seems fitting to me that it is seemingly impossible to trace Moore’s reference back to an object: I feel that this has to be the book she is talking about, but also that it cannot be this book. And in my wishfulness I think there must a book of poems, lost in an archive somewhere, and apparently not at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, that contains “the remarkable” – perhaps Borgesian – “index” that inspired Moore to create her own extraordinary index that so manifestly, because of its largely unknown principles of inclusion, cannot be intended simply for use.

Some hopeful readers, though they were clearly reduced to silence along with their contemporaries, may have sought to detect in the index a hint of a poet’s arcane symbolism (“Hermes,” “Merlin,” the hieroglyphic “ibis,” the symbolic “chrysalis” or the symbolist “Swans,” although with the latter the plural and capitalized noun misrepresents the one “swan” it points to on page 35). Later and more experienced readers of Moore might think to see the projection of an imaginative universe of recurrent words and images (for example, “Swans” looks forward to “No Swan So Fine” and the two entries for “bat” look forward to the bat of “Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain”; even the “beau with the muff ” – on which more below – may look forward to the “grandmother’s muff ” of “Half-Deity”). At times, though rarely, there is metaphorical or thematic emphasis, as when two different appearances of “collision” – “of knowledge” and “of orchids” – get one entry. (Then “orchids, collision of ” gets a separate entry while “knowledge” has an entry unrelated to “collision.”) One clear principle is that all the titles of the poems will appear (though I have not confirmed it); another is that most of the titles will appear several times in redundant variation.

My sometime favorite is “HE WROTE THE HISTORY BOOK,” which reappears one entry later as “HISTORY BOOK, see HE,” with its emphatic masculine pronoun. Then why is “FOOL, A, A FOUL THING, A DISTRESSFUL LUNATIC” not followed almost immediately by “FOUL THING, see FOOL,” since we can also find the title under “DISTRESSFUL LUNATIC, see FOOL” and “LUNATIC, see FOOL”? (Right above “LUNATIC” is the Thoreauvian or Coleridgean “loon.”) I would find that redundancy satisfying, though my desire is unreasonable and the index as it is surely suffices, though I don’t doubt it could have assumed innumerable other forms. Quietly drawing attention to the process of indexing is the title “PICKING AND CHOOSING,” which appears first as “CHOOSING, PICKING AND,” which invites us to consider other procedures of desiring selection, emphasizing also that to choose and to pick are not synonymous and other overlapping concepts, like opting, are to be considered; and looking back at the title we could begin to think that there is more opposition between PICKING and CHOOSING than there is synonymy: a more nuanced sense of CHOOSING may imply moral profundity (see “feeling 55, 97,” 113) and the challenge of finitude than PICKING does, which could follow more playful and less risk-fraught procedures (choosing one over another versus picking one of many). “FEAR IS HOPE” is uttered in a different rhetorical register when the syntax is inverted in “HOPE, FEAR IS,” one of a few phrases in the index that is a grammatical statement (other examples are “I envy nobody” under “Compleat Angler” and “envy nobody,” an imperative that gets its own entry). Poem titles that begin with “IN” or “TO” are listed at least twice, once with and once without the preposition (and then of course they are further subdivided by nouns).

This division and recombination of phrases happens only once among the non-titular entries, and it is one of my favorite redundancies: “Adventures in Bolivia” reappears as “Bolivia, Adventures in,” referring to a 1922 book – one certainly not known to many of Moore’s contemporaneous readers – by C. H. Prodgers, whose name is also indexed. These are among the many hyperspecific references one can’t imagine anyone looking up, such as “four o’clock, 78” – another favorite – and “pulled, 20,” unless the purpose of the index were to remind you of every stray detail (which it isn’t because it doesn’t and the index does not fail in achieving its unidentified purpose). But the idiosyncratic and hyperspecific items – “learned scenery, 72” – are side-by-side with generic ones, like “bears,” and those in between the specific and the generic, like “chipmunk, nine-striped” and “bear, tailed” – misalphabetized to come after the hyperspecific “beau with muff.” Though when we look to the poem with the tailed bear it is actually “the long-tailed bear,” certainly more specific than the tailed bear, since all bears have at least a vestigial tail, or at least a tailless bear must be more rare than a tailed one, which is perhaps why Moore implicitly corrects Prodgers in her poem (for which see UNICORNS, SEA, or SEA UNICORNS AND LAND UNICORNS but not UNICORNS, LAND or LAND UNICORNS or you will not find it). According to Prodgers, who cites Rowland Ward, who also appears in the index though not every name does, the tailed bear is only found in Ecuador – which gets its own entry as “Ecquador” in the uncorrected 1924 index. But why would it not be entered as “bear, tame and concessive”? Could not the two entries involving beavers just below the bears have been combined into the one common term, “beaver”? No, because one principle is that singular and plural nouns get separate entries (cf. “butterfly,” “butterflies,” and “orchid,” “orchids”; but also cf. “Swans” for one swan) I am happy they weren’t, since I do like to read “beavers, thoughtful,” and their thoughtfulness would appear to be a precondition of them being “beavers making drains,” which for a moment I can think is what Rimbaud’s beavers were building after the flood.

Sometimes the index includes and excludes simultaneously: “Blake, W., 96” leaves out his appearance on page 98. In the end, exclusion reigns, however, and not only because some of Moore’s sources in the notes are left blank – as in the “someone writes of ” on page 98 – and therefore not indexed (“the queen full of jewels,” the counterpart of “the beau with the muff,” is included in a note on page 99 but the source is left blank and this queen, who readers eventually learned from Patricia Willis is Queen Anne, is, like the source, excluded from the index; but sometimes the blanks seem conscientiously to mean “Ibid.,” as with the one following the note on W. R. Gordon on page 102). I’m quite sure that none of the people or places in the Whitmanian list of “People’s Surroundings” appears in the index, though that capacious poem has over 30 items indexed, including “pugs,” “dromios,” and “Utah.” There is a giddy delight in the process of picking and choosing, including and excluding. Like a poem, it engages interest and desire; once set in motion by reading, the circulation of words and phrases is dizzyingly expansive and contractive. If you read long enough in Moore’s work, I think, every experience of a formal principle in operation is given a name, and the index substantiates the notion of “conscientuous inconsistency.”