December 18, 1943

is an enchanted thing     like the glaze on a katydid-wing         subdivided by sun         till the nettings are legion. Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;

like the apteryx-awl     as a beak, or the kiwi’s rain-shawl         of haired feathers, the mind         feeling its way as though blind, walks along with its eyes on the ground.

It has memory’s ear     that can hear without having to hear.         Like the gyroscope’s fall,         truly unequivocal because trued by regnant certainty,

it is a power of     strong enchantment. It is like the dove-         neck animated by         sun; it is memory’s eye; it’s conscientious inconsistency.

It tears off the veil, tears     the temptation, the mist the heart wears,         from its eyes—if the heart         has a face; it takes apart dejection. It’s fire in the dove-neck’s

iridescence; in the     inconsistencies of Scarlatti.         Unconfusion submits         its confusion to proof; it’s not a Herod’s oath that cannot change.

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) wrote eleven essays and seven poems for The Nation between 1936 and 1952. Moore’s biographer, Linda Leavell, indicates that she stopped contributing out of solidarity with her friend, ousted literary editor Margaret Marshall, but also because she disliked The Nation’s criticism of Eisenhower’s “honest, auspicious, genuinely devoted speeches.”