Marianne Moore & Saturn's Perseverance

There is a type of fortitude that entangles. The spider silently spinning her web has it. Or the grape vine, in Marianne Moore's poem, Nevertheless:

“a grape tendril

ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times - so

the bound twig that's under-

gone and over-gone, can't stir.”

This terrifying tenacity suggests the over-dependent relationship between Moore and her mother, Mary. Mary’s invasive presence was described by Alyse Gregory, a family friend: “Mon dieu! What a mother, so large, pale, refined, washed over by the years, but inexorably, permanently, eternally rooted and not to be overlooked, and remorselessly conversational, sentences with no beginning and no end, and no place left to jump in and stop them.” This is the malignant, thirty times knotted fortitude of control.

But in the poem, Moore celebrates fortitude of another kind: her own inherent will that drives her to reach out toward fullness, fruition. (Again, in Alyse Gregory's words, "Only a person of [Marianne's] intellectual robustness could have survived such a mother.")

“... once where

There was a prickly-pear

Leaf clinging to barbed wire, 

a root shot down to grow

in earth two feet below

… victory won’t come

to me unless I go

to it...

The weak overcomes its

menace, the strong over-

comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap

went through that little thread

to make the cherry red!”

There’s something magical in this line, a turn that shifts the reader's perspective. It focuses not on the ripening cherry, but on the persistence of the sap, the effort to leap the gap, push through the little stem, and bring the cherry to ripeness. It’s a more subdued but no less powerful version of Whitman’s “urge, urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world,” the seminal urge to potentiate something. 

Throughout the poem, Moore plays with opposites. The root shoots down to grow, just as victory won’t come unless I go. Toni Morrison uses opposites similarly in the line in Beloved about the way loneliness “makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far off place.” When you read these lines you feel like you’re standing at both ends of a long tunnel. It’s what William James might call “that vertigo of self-contradiction.” Going-and-coming, down-and-growing are tied together in a moment, making the moment bigger; it contains everything because it contains the polarity. 

Where Moore uses the word fortitude, an astrologer might say Saturn. In 1944 when Moore’s book of poetry, Nevertheless, was published, she had Pluto moving across natal Saturn and her North Node in Leo. Moore is digging deep to unlock exuberant self-expression, shooting the gap between her South Node and North Node. It’s only a two-foot gap between the prickly pear leaf and the ground, but the expanse between karmic habit and evolutionary potential is enormous.

Moore’s mother died in 1947 with Pluto conjunct the North Node in Leo. Pluto’s fierce realities give Moore this chance to liberate herself so she can be seen and applauded. Her mother’s cloaking, competitive, small-making influence has ended and Moore is free to move into a persona beloved by a nation.

 Not that the change was instantaneous. Saturn doesn't deal in sudden transformation. After her mother's death, she admitted to friends she didn't feel grown up enough to take care of herself. Her lifeline was her commitment to the arduous task of translating La Fontaine's fables. "Perseverance is my one qualification as a translator," she said.

With similar effort, Moore transformed herself in her 60s from a recluse to a charismatic performer. She disliked crowds, never outgrew her shyness and often had weeks of illness after a public performance or party, yet her determination sparked a magnetism that others responded to powerfully. One observer at a Harvard event said of Moore, "She is five foot three and a half inches tall, weighs less than a hundred pounds, talks in a low mumble while looking at the floor, continually disparages herself while praising others—and they are all terrified of her." William Carlos Williams summed it up this way: "Everyone loved her."

Moore’s biographer Linda Leavell writes that Marianne “spent the first half of her career negotiating the confines of her filial devotion. She learned how to survive and even thrive artistically in that narrow chasm.” In the latter half of her life, although she looked a decade older than her years and was chastised by her brother for her appearance, she blossomed into public life much like the strawberry in her poem:

you've seen a strawberry

that's had a struggle; yet

was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-

fish for the multitude

of seeds.

Sources:

Leavell, Linda. Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore.

Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems.