Marianne Moore's "Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish" and the poetry of the natural world

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Robin G. Schulze

In the pages of her editor's "Comment" in The Dial for August 1927, Marianne Moore paused to ruminate about, of all things, snakes. "The usefulness, companionableness, and gentleness of snakes," she began, "is sometimes alluded to in print by scientists and by amateurs."

Needless to say, we dissent from the serpent as deity; and enlightenment is preferable to superstition when plagues are to be combated - army-worms, locusts, a mouse army, tree or vegetable blights, diseases of cattle, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, and floods. Destruction such as was experienced by us in western states and in Florida the past winter, from tornadoes and from the Mississippi in the spring, could not have been more portentously afflicting or more usefully admonitory had we believed ourselves to have been preyed upon by an aquatic serpent or by a wind god. (Complete Prose 187)

Moore's comments appear to bespeak an internal conflict. Initially, Moore approaches her subject from the pose of a rational skeptic. "Needless to say," she insists, that "we dissent from the serpent as deity." Her emphatic phrase, "Needless to say," places her firmly on the side of the enlightened scientists who prefer to rely on technology rather than superstitious ceremony to solve the pesky problems - locusts, mice, and vegetable blights - that nature doles out. No sooner has Moore uttered her preference for "enlightenment," however, than she invokes images of the destructive powers of nature that extend well beyond the reach or control of technological know-how: earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes. Such natural disasters, Moore states, are "usefully admonitory." Even though rational science insists that nature is not a collection of powerful gods, floods and tornadoes warn us to check our arrogant assumption that nature, however void of vengeful spirits, is comfortably controllable. Qualifying her own scientific pose, Moore turns back to the serpent and professes her admiration for those less-skeptical cultures that once viewed nature with reverence, wonder, and a healthy dose of dread.

A certain ritual of awe - animistic and animalistic - need not, however, be effaced from our literary consciousness. The serpent as a motive in art, as an idea, as beauty, is surely not beneath us, as we see it . . . in the turtle zoomorphs, feathered serpent columns, and coiled rattlesnakes of Yucatan; in the silver-white snakes, "chameleon lizards," and stone dragons of Northern Siam. Guarding the temple of Cha-Heng in Nan, the hundred yard long pair of blue-green-yellow painted monsters - with reared head and flowing, skin-like rise of body - are, one infers from Reginald le May's description and partial photograph, majestic worms. Nor does the mythologic war between serpent and elephant seem disproportionate when one examines a stone dragon which guards rice fields in Northern Siam from raiding herds of elephants. As Edward Topsell has said in his Historie of Serpents, "Among all the kinds of serpents there is none comparable to the Dragon," and the fact of variants seemed to Aldrovanus, no detraction. "Dragons there are in Ethiopia ten fathoms long" and there are little ones. In an old letter to the public we read: "Thirty miles from London, this present month of August, 1614" - and the news is attested by two men and by a Widow Woman dwelling near Faygate - there lives a serpent "or dragon as some call it," "reputed to be nine feet, or rather more, in length. It is likewise discovered to have large feet, but the eye may be there deceived" and "two great bunches" "as some think will in time grow to wings; but God, I hope, will defend the poor people in the neighborhood, that he shall be destroyed before he grow so fledged. Farewell. By A. R. He that would send better news, if he had it." (187-88)

Engaging the mythology of the serpent, Moore's thoughts move from the companionable snake to the mysterious dragon, from a gentle creature to a fierce myth, from an image of nature's utility to an implication of nature's might, from the rational present to the imaginative past. Moore the scientist makes way for Moore the poet and a poetic sense of nature alive with imagined creatures. Those who filled their woods with dragons, she suggests, participated in an animistic "ritual of awe" that implied a wary respect for nature's depths. Having professed her poetic appreciation for ancient animism, however, Moore changes hats once more and ends her ruminations with yet another twist.

The death of our own two carnivorous dragons - brought last year from the Island of Komodo - was an evil of the opposite sort: punitive possibly; in any case a victory, making emphatic to us our irrelevance to such creatures as these, and compulsorily our mere right to snakes in stone and story. (188)

Moore's final comment has the effect of a carefully prepared punch line. Turning her attention from imagined to actual "dragons," monitor lizards from the Island of Komodo captured and exported to the Central Park Zoo, Moore implies that our modern lack of superstition, rather than bring us closer to gentle and companionable creatures, in fact does nature no good. Where the unskeptical folk of the Renaissance, like A. R. and the Faygate widow, believed themselves preyed upon by powerful forces beyond their comprehension, modern scientists seem to think that all of physical nature can be understood, captured, and controlled. Ironically, Moore suggests, we are far more effective at slaying dragons in the modern world than our dragon-fearing ancestors ever were. The modern mind has no respect for nature's integrity and arrogantly assumes an ownership of all creatures that proves deadly. Moore reads the demise of the dragons as a "victory" for the natural world, the ultimate assertion of nature's independence in the face of human desires.