16 pages • 32 minutes read
Marianne MooreA Jelly-Fish
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1909A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Humankind Versus Nature
In its simplest terms, “A Jelly-Fish” portrays an uneasy encounter between the human and the natural world. The acquisitive human figure desires to grasp a creature that refuses to be caught and ultimately proves elusive. Lines such as “It opens, and it / Closes and you / Reach for it” (Lines 13-15) imply that the human finds the creature frustrating, even tantalizing in its refusal to be captured. This curious encounter finds necessary context in the first decade of the 20th century, when increasingly it seemed that modern human society, with the help of technology, aimed to conquer the natural world. This aspiration was evident, for example, in the polar expeditions, in which intrepid explorers such as Scott and Oates died in their obsessive pursuit. Moore seems to be commenting on the psychology of such an obsession: The jellyfish is likely poisonous, yet the “you” of the poem still reaches for it. The poet has an ambiguous position on this human desire to subdue nature. However, in a later poem, “The Fish,” she writes of the “marks of abuse” made on a marine cliff by human interference: “dynamite grooves, burns and / hatchet strokes”. Sean Murphy highlights these two poems as complementary, proposing Moore is an unlikely progenitor of the ecological movement (Murphy, Sean. “Poetry Spotlight: ‘A Jelly-Fish’ and ‘The Fish’ by Marianne Moore,” Pulitzer, 2021). While “A Jelly-Fish” is less obviously environmental in its tone, its naturalist subject matter and its precise observation contrast with an early modernist tendency to reject naturalism as the unwanted trappings of the poetry of the past.
Subjectivity and Problematized Vision
The act of vision or perception is central to “A Jelly-Fish,” the centrality made apparent from the poem’s opening line: “Visible, invisible” (Line 1). This seems at first a contradiction—how can a thing be both visible and invisible?– but in the case of the jellyfish, this is possible due to the creature’s natural translucency, the light reflected through the surrounding water, and the creature’s ability to expand and contract. The poet’s chosen image—a jellyfish—is deliberate, highlighting the impossibility of a fixed image when what we see is a matter of subjectivity. However, the poem is honest about this subjectivity and thus marks the poet as a precursor of the imagist movement, of which Ezra Pound’s two-line poem “At a Station of the Metro” is the most famous example: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / petals on a wet black bough.” Pound was an admirer of Japanese Haiku, and he wanted precise images to suggest connections made in the human mind without stating an allegorical meaning; in his 1918 essay, “In Retrospect,” Pound states that such an image “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Similarly, Moore renders the jellyfish such that its movements suggest a deeper meaning, though nowhere in the poem is this meaning explicit. Where Moore differs from Pound, and where she can even be seen as more radical, is in her suggestion of problems in the act of looking itself. Her poem’s observer is not content with mere observation; they must reach out and try to touch or capture, just as an advertisement influences its viewers to become consumers.
The Artistic Search for Form
While form is an aspect of a poem’s construction, in the case of “A Jelly-Fish,” it is also a theme. In presenting a creature that can contract in on itself whenever a hand comes near, the poem asks the question: What is form? Where does form become formlessness? These were critical themes in the modernist project, which above all concerned inventing new forms that could deal with and make sense of the modern age. Thus, in the 1922 novel Ulysses, James Joyce developed a radical stream of consciousness style, but he used the plot of Homer’s Odyssey to give form to his account of a day in the life of an ordinary Dubliner. Thirteen years earlier, when “A Jelly-Fish” was written, writers and artists across the world were only just beginning the search for new forms that could match the technologically driven modern age. Sometimes this took on a wild, frenzied quality, as in the 1909 Manifesto of Futurism by the Italian artist and poet, Filippo Marinetti: “We want to sing the man at the wheel […] [W]e must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible!” Marinetti, like several other leading modernists including Pound, was a fascist in favor of military conquest. Fascism was the dark side of modernism’s desire for new and rigorous formal structures—yet Moore was never in this camp, and, in its unreliable, pulsing nature, “A Jelly-Fish” can be read as a counter to the fascist desire for dictatorial manifestos and rigid forms: “You have meant / To catch it” (Lines 8-9). The poem comments on the human desire to control nature and may also critique the desperate artistic search for a strict form.
