Silence

My father used to say
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat –
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth –
they sometimes enjoy solitude
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “‘Make my house your inn.’’’
Inns are not residences.

Silence, by the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was first published in 1924, in the Dial, the magazine Moore herself would later edit. Readers could be forgiven for taking it as an anecdote about her own father, perhaps showing the formative part he played in her character. But Moore’s parents had separated before she was born, after what her Wikipedia entry describes as her father’s “psychotic episode”. According to Moore’s own notes, (quoted by Heather Cass White in New Collected Poems, this week’s source text) the poem springs from a conversation with Miss AM Homans, the professor emeritus of Hygiene at Wellesley College. Homans was remembering her own father’s words: “My father used to say, ‘superior people never make long visits, then people are not so glad when you’ve gone.’ She added, ‘When I am visiting, I like to go about by myself. I never had to be shown Longfellow’s grave nor the glass flowers at Harvard.”

Moore’s initial reshaping of Mr Homans’s remarks as the basis of a monologue is a neat piece of editing. The grave and the glass flowers can be seen as emblems of death which connect to the characterisation of “superior people” as “self-reliant like the cat – / that takes its prey to privacy”. Moore’s speaker, still “my father”, lingers over his image as a poet might, just long enough to reclaim it for a vividly Moore-like animal portrait. The speaker’s sympathies may waver towards the limp-tailed mouse. Could the father be involuntarily suggesting that a so-called superior person is merely comparable with the prey-hoarding cat? Perhaps the independent seeker of culture is not superior in wanting to devour her experience privately, simply exhibiting a different form of consumerism from people who need to be shown the sights.

The discussion moves on quickly, though, and the father’s thoughts seem to take a different turn. Admittedly “they sometimes enjoy solitude” adds rather little to the description of “superior people”, but the next two lines suggest his eye has moved to a more sympathetic angle. Someone who “can be robbed of speech / by speech which has delighted them” might denote an ideal listener, or reader. Those two finely shaped lines might translate “speech” to “poetry which has delighted them” – specifically, modernist poetry with its emphasis on fidelity to the ordinary, living voice. That the father who is the poem’s speaker might be a character close to the poet’s ideal of the father she didn’t know seems hinted when he goes on, “the deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint”. The concession in favour of “restraint” could be a permissive nod towards a certain kind of writing, which, like Moore’s, knows the uses of restraint.

In the penultimate line, the narrator’s wily intervention (“Nor was he insincere in saying”) enables the father to return to his initial topic: how people should conduct themselves as houseguests. Moore’s notes are useful again. “Make my house your inn” apparently quotes a biography of Edmund Burke in which Burke addresses “a stranger with whom he had fallen into conversation in a bookshop”. If the sentiment seems an uncharacteristically generous flourish for the speaker in the poem, Moore justifies it with the final crisp reminder, perhaps not entirely true, or not true of all inns, “Inns are not residences”.

Without claiming 14 non-metrical lines as a sonnet, I’d say the structure is probably not an accident. Silence is a poem about the value of limits. Limits on speech, emotional expression and the length of visits acquire an enhanced artistic value. The father might initially seem wearisomely snobbish in his reference to “superior people” but by the end of the poem Moore has extended and complicated his thoughts persuasively. A man built of words, he owes his character not only to remarks by Miss Homans and Edmund Burke, but to several essential qualities in his creator’s poetic self-invention.