Thirst and Patience
1987; University of Iowa; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.17077/0021-065x.3578
ISSN2330-0361
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoHER THIRST, PERHAPS, began in childhood, and patience too, pas sionate seed. After all, getting there was an equal gift, crossing to the island?Monhegan Island, Maine?those summers which slowly turned the last century geared down and disappeared into this one, and the island, ten miles off shore, kept its own beauty lightly, sleepily. idea came from her mother?Mary Warner Moore?for whatever reason: to get her children, Warner and Marianne, out of the heat of Carlisle, Penn sylvania; to witness herself?landlocked, Missouri bred, her husband lost, institutionalized?what was coolly, lushly visible. Here was the island's sweating, raw board ice house, and the pond beside it, cut and harvested every winter since 1874, going nearly lagoon in summer, languid, dizzy with birds. Here was Lobster Cove, desolate, wet and dangerous (No one has ever been saved who fell overboard or from rocks the village pamphlets warn), and the thick high woods beyond, solemn with pine. Enough for children, certainly. Enough finally to make Mary Warner Moore come whisper close to building a here, settling permanently. Later, in 1933, it was Marianne Moore herself who would recall those days when she and her mother reached the island by a sail boat called Effort, arriving at low tide, which to say, midnight, hobbling over stones. . . by lantern-light to the gabled attic room in a fisherman's cot tage.1 Now crossing eighty, ninety years beyond those summers, it enough to put such reverie against the chill sea air. And there, eider ducks in stiff flying formation skimming the waves, and seals on sudden out croppings of rock, stilled by sun. Our boat takes its long hour to get there, progressing, Marianne Moore wrote of such boats, white and rigid if in / a grove,2 to this island where imagination became a place for her to loot and redream, most urgently to see. Impossible, finally, to judge the weight of such memory, this island of folktale austerity and strangeness, but we have some evidence. There it is, Moore admitted in The Steeple-Jack, the piece which opens her Com plete Poems with a firm clear color (a sea the purple of the peacock's neck), a careful wonder that recognizes waves as formal the scales / on a fish, or the ornate sugar bowl shaped summer house liked because the source of such elegance is not bravado. Like Ambrose, the student she
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