I thrill to Marianne Moore’s animal poems, and I wish I’d discovered “The Pangolin” before including a pangolin character in one of my Christmas pageants a few years ago. (“My tongue is longer than my body! Wanna see?”)
However, Grasshopper, today’s lesson comes from Moore’s “The Buffalo” (1934), which has the unusually humorous line and stanza break
...Siamese-cat-
brown
It kinda slinks like a Siamese, doesn’t it? Here’s a longer excerpt.
But there’s more. When I read the poem aloud I have to linger slightly on that final hyphenated syllable, neither pausing as one would after a stanza with terminal punctuation nor racing right along as I might were there no stanza break, but rather stretching out the “a” of “cat” just the way, come to think of it, a cat stretches. Cats are deliberate and slow, then suddenly fast– stalkers and pouncers all– and here is one all wrapped up in a description of a color–which, by the way, is about an ox, not a cat. The ox is like a cat in such-and-such a way, and the syntax is like a cat too. Compression obsession! If her mind worked that fast in real time, I think she must have had trouble getting the left shoe on the left foot.
This instant feels like Moore the Genius. Mind you, her hyphen-and-leading strategy can look precious or affected in locations to which I quiver less sympathetically, which could be a failure of imagination or intelligence on my part.
In the same piece we have
...a kind of lion-
tail
and
...zebu-
shape
Well, as you see.