Marianne Moore didn’t make it easy on us. She revised her poems, and often the later versions are radically different from and vastly inferior to the original.Thanks to the latest scholarship, I have learned that the text of “The Student” that I selected for The Oxford Book of American Poetry is weaker (and shorter) than an unrevised version that the poet wished to suppress.
Here are two versions of “The Past is the Present” by Marianne Moore.
The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web. What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncrasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore’s poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem –– and it is certainly not as good a poem.
The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between “as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse” and “as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.”
The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore’s personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase “I was goaded into doing by XY” implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what “This man” (or “the teacher”) said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks “a sort of heightened consciousness.” The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word “occasion” in line four, obliging us to understand how the epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.
From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. — DL
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed
Verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
his identical words:
“Hebrew poetry is
prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.” Ecstasy
affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.”
– Marianne Moore
corrupt / alternative version found on the web:
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said – and I think I repeat his exact words –
“Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness.” Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.
– Marianne Moore
from the achive; first posted February 2, 2018. Ian Probstein notes that “There are two more versions: 1) with a different spacing is in Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (The Macmillan Co/ The Viking Press [1967], 1981) and in the Academy of American Poets, which is a completely different text https://poets.org/poem/past-present“
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Author: The Best American Poetry
