It is the mark of genius […] an eye for resemblances
Aristotle, Poetics
This week’s post is a close-reading of a poem that, as far as I can tell, no critic has ever really read closely. It began one night this summer when I couldn’t sleep. Picking up Marianne Moore’s Selected Poems, I decided to find a poem I hadn’t paid attention to before. Half an hour of night reading later and I was marvelling at how, as you turn it over in your mind, Moore’s poetry opens up its meanings like a series of secret doors — doors that eventually turn out also to be mirrors, reflecting your journey.
The poem is “Old Amusement Park” (1964), subtitled “(Before it became LaGuardia airport)”. The subtitle establishes a double-focus: the New York airport and the old amusement park at North Beach. But I haven’t found any critical interpretation of the poem which goes beyond repeating this binary, and I think this is to miss the poem’s real subject, which is how, imaginatively, these two places merge. Donald Hall’s summary from his study Marianne Moore: the Cage and the Animal (1970) is typical:
“Old Amusement Park” imagines the area that is now LaGuardia Airport before the airport was built. The land was an amusement park and Miss Moore describes its relaxed, holiday atmosphere to an imaginary hard-pressed traveller. The old park was a place where “the triumph is reflective / and confusion, retroactive.” Its modern inhabitant can make no such pleasant claim.
I’m not sure what Hall means here, and I’m not sure he knows either. The quoted words — which are the poem’s last lines — were what hooked me into re-reading, trying to understand what Moore was saying about triumph and confusion, the reflective and the retroactive (not a word you often hear in poems, and especially not as the final off-rhyme). Moore is a poet who picks her words with a magnifying glass and a pin. Can these words simply be paraphrased as a “pleasant claim” about the past? I think we need to make the phrasing of Moore’s subtitle — “before it became” — more literally.
Let’s go back to the start. Here’s the first stanza:
What’s arresting here is the immediate and intense modulation of sound — so rapid that it’s hard to concentrate on the meaning of what is being said. The poem opens with what the Germans call a “punch-rhyme” (“Hurry, worry”), which then pararhymes into “unwary”, setting up the couplet rhyme with “vary”. This itself is a hurrying, worrying run of words. The visitor in the middle is Hall’s “imaginary hard-pressed traveller”. But there is something odder at the end too: “bat-blind”. The poet seems to be suggesting that the traveller may become so “hard-pressed” that they won’t see what’s in front of them. To be bat-blind is to fly about in the dark — but also, to navigate by echo. And this suggests a double reading: the “unwary / visitor” is also Moore’s reader, hurrying and worrying through the sonorous riddle of the poem. “The bat, / holding on upside down or in quest of something to / eat” is the first of many examples of instinctive behaviour in Moore’s famous poem “Poetry” — another is “the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea”. So perhaps becoming bat-like is not such a bad thing when reading a poem.
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