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

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

Despite the depth of Moore's curiosity about the earth's creatures, scholars have yet to fully acknowledge Moore's intellectual involvement in the contemporary debates afoot in the fields of natural history and evolutionary biology. While indebted, in part, to seventeenth-century bestiaries and Protestant "observations," Moore's poems are equally the product of her twentieth-century post-Darwinian education and the scientific "observations" of the naturalists she admired and emulated. The very animal and vegetable subjects of many of the poems that critics deem Moore's most thoroughgoing efforts to create religious emblems in the Protestant tradition - the pigeon, the pangolin, the echidna, the ostrich, the rose, and the ape that Moore deems her "cousin" - are, in fact, animals and plants of particular interest to naturalists engaged in the study of organic evolution. In many of her poems, Moore's explorations of the emblematic or moral associations of her animals and plants rest side by side with her discussions of their Darwinian origins and evolutionary descent. Such juxtapositions speak to Moore's keen awareness of a scientific tradition that saw no need to ascribe moral impetus to natural forms or processes - a tradition, beholden to T. H. Huxley's reading of Darwin, that took God's spirit out of nature altogether. Shaken by Darwin's undeniable biological relation between man and ape, Huxley looked into the realm of autolectic nature and perceived a dark, brutal, and chaotic jungle driven only by the forces of competition and unbridled instinct. In such a Godless universe, Huxley asserted, it was man's duty, by virtue of his rational powers, to step in and direct the "cosmic process." Exerting a moral check on nature, man must make the Darwinian jungle into a garden (Huxley's favorite metaphor) and bring nature's slovenly wickedness under human control. As he wrote in the prolegomena to Evolution and Ethics, the human "administrator" of nature should

look to the establishment of an earthly paradise, a true garden of Eden in which all things should work together towards the well-being of the gardeners: within which the cosmic process, the coarse struggle for existence of the state of nature, should be abolished; in which that state should be replaced by a state of art; where every plant and every lower animal should be adapted to human wants, and would perish if human supervision and protection were withdrawn; where men themselves should have been selected, with a view to their efficiency as organs for the performance of the functions of a perfected society. (77-78)

Huxley envisioned civilized man as the consummate husbandman. All of nature, all animals and plants, should be domesticated and shaped to suit civilized man's superior creative will.

Moore's diaries indicate that she encountered Huxley's ideas about the domestication of nature in works by numerous authors, both popular and scientific, throughout the course of her voluminous reading. In 1916, Moore read N. C. Macnamara's Instinct and Intelligence (1915), a book ostensibly intended to aid in the proper education of British children.(5) "Educationists of the present time," Macnamara declares in his preface, "appear to exaggerate the importance of training the intellect, and are apt to overlook the fact that each individual possesses certain instinctive qualities which to a large extent determine his behavior throughout life" (v). Drawing on Huxley's interpretations of Darwin, Macnamara argued that the human mind, the product not of God's special creation but of organic evolution, was merely a malleable material organ - a collection of ganglia governed by inherited animal instinct. In the absence of the notion of a God-given soul, it became the job of parents and educationists to train a child as one would train "the lower animals."