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

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

Black in blazonry means prudence; and niger, unpropitious. Might hematite- black incurved compact horns on a bison have significance? The soot brown tail-tuft on a kind of lion-

tail; what would that express? ("Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish" 61)

Moore's questions suggest her desire to interrogate the ultimate meaning behind the animal's appearance, and, by implication, behind the surface of nature itself. Like the knight in the field, the buffalo has protective devices, shields to aid the bison in the struggle for existence. Do the shapes and colors of the bison's "armor," Moore wonders, offer a discernible code, as in heraldry, to the moral or divine character of nature? Do the bison's hematite-black horns indicate the prudence or the propitiousness of nature's "order?" Moore's questions flirt with the idea that nature constitutes a legible sign system of the divine mind. However, Moore couches her sense of American nature as moral cipher in distinctly tentative terms. She uses the words "might" and "would" to frame her questions, leaves them unanswered, and shifts the ground of her inquiry in the stanzas that follow away from the notion of the bison as a divine emblem to the question of the bison's lineage. Moore plays on the fact that the purpose of heraldry is not only to display a readable account of a knight's moral qualities but also to trace and record his genealogy. If the bison's "armor" can say nothing definite about nature's moral essence, it can, from the scientific perspective of the naturalist, say something about the animal's evolutionary history. Matters of spirit give way to matters of science.

As the poem unfolds, the American bison's adaptive weapons point Moore toward questions of the Darwinian pedigree of his bovine relations and what such pedigrees reveal about the state of the civilized world. The question that drives Moore's poem is not the divine order of nature but the order that man hath wrought upon nature in the apparent absence of a discernible divinity. The questions about the divine significance of the bison's shape that go unanswered at the beginning of the poem leave a kind of spiritual vacuum. In a modern post-Darwinian world lacking "proof" of nature's divinity, man, armed with the tools of science and technology, assumes the place vacated by the creating hand of God. How have such creatures changed since prehistoric times and what do the changes reveal about the modern world?

The modern ox does not look like the Augsburg ox's portrait. Yes, the great extinct wild Aurochs was a beast to paint, with stripe and six- foot horn-spread - decreased to Siamese-cat-

Brown Swiss size, or zebu shape with white plush dewlap and warm-blooded hump; to red- skinned Hereford or to piebald Holstein. (62)

Following Darwin's lead, Moore makes it clear that, in her view, the history of the animal's subjugation to "human notions" has not been a completely happy one. In the beginning, the ox was wild, free, and impressively aggressive - "the great extinct wild Aurochs" that once roamed in large herds over prehistoric Britain and Europe. In his article "The Smithfield Cattle Show," a key source for Moore's poem, naturalist W. P. Pycraft describes the gigantic aurochs (Bos premigenisus) as the stuff of legend. "Caesar (De Bello Gallico)," Pycraft reminds his readers, "asserted that in stature they were but little inferior to elephants and that they spare neither man nor beasts when they see them" (996). Recalling her vision of the American bison, Moore admires the aurochs for his adaptive weaponry - the daunting "six-/foot horn-spread" that allows the wild ox to protect himself from human capture. "Yes,/" she states, breaking her line at the affirmative to stress her approval, the aurochs was an animal worthy of a portrait - a "beast/to paint." Ending her line with the word "beast," Moore applauds the aurochs's savage disposition at the same time that she laments its eventual subjection. Moore rhymes "beast" with "decreased." The breeds of modern domestic ox, fashioned by human will, pale in comparison with their enormous and ferocious ancestor. Human control leads inevitably to the wild thing's diminishment.