There is a kind of knowledge that cannot be taught by the turning of pages or the recitation of facts. It must be undergone—lived, felt, and seen. Marianne Moore’s poem The Fish offers such a journey. In the tradition of the scientific artist, Moore does not merely describe the ocean; she invites us to perceive it as an organism of meaning—layered, ancient, and alive. In one episode of Poetry in America—a public television series that celebrates poetry—scientists and poets, divers and conservationists come together to celebrate her poem, each drawn into the poem’s shifting currents, much as one is drawn into the unknown when descending beneath the surface of the sea.
In Moore’s hands, language becomes an instrument as precise as a microscope and as daring as a submarine. Her images—“sun split like spun glass," "pink rice grains,” “ink spattered jellyfish, crabs like green lilies"—are not indulgent metaphors, but observations sharpened by a biologist’s eye and refined by an artist’s discipline. She is not writing about fish; she is writing through them, about forces of resilience and erosion, of violence and beauty, of war and wonder.
To read The Fish is to take part in an experiment in perception. One must wade—slowly, carefully—into the black jade of the poem, into a modernist structure that mimics the wave, the reef, the reef’s decay. And in this process, we are changed. Our senses, like our moral instruments, are reawakened. Observation becomes a moral act.
This is poetry not as ornament, but as calibration: a means to see the world clearly, and, perhaps, to preserve it. In Moore’s refracted vision, we discover not only a damaged ocean, but also the power to imagine it healed. That power, as this reading reveals, lies in the rigor of attention—and in the courage to feel.
Watch the full episode here.
The Fish
Marianne Moore
1887 –1972
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
