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Poems of Marianne Moore

by Marianne Moore

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Radical

Tapering
to a point, conserving everything,
  this carrot is predefined to be thick.
    The world is
    but a circumstance, a mis-
      erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition,
      imagination, outgrowth,

nutriment,
with everything crammed belligerent-
  ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon-
  opoly—
  a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the
    secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat
    to the color of the set-

ting sun and
stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand-
  ing still and turning to look back at it—
    as much as
    to say my happiest moment has
      been funereal in comparison with this, the con-
      ditions of life pre-

determined
slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For
  it? Dismiss
  agrarian lore; it tells him this:
    that which it is impossible to force, it is
    impossible to hinder.

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