A Jelly-Fish

While Moore is known as a quintessentially modernist poet, “A Jelly-Fish” is one of her earliest poems and is a vivid bridge between her great 19th-century influence, Dickinson, and the radical modernist style she would later adopt. The poem’s formal features, which typify Dickinson, include the short line length, use of caesura, and rhyme. In terms of content, Dickinson’s poems also used animals to symbolize a desired state of unity with nature, and a counterpoint to implied human or humanmade faults, as in: “Civilization – spurns – the Leopard! / Was the Leopard – bold? / Deserts never rebuked her Satin / Ethiop her gold.” As these lines show, however, Moore’s tone is, in other ways, entirely different, refusing to anthropomorphize the jellyfish and instead merely describing, with extreme precision, how it appears to an unidentified human observer whose only characteristic is their desire to reach out for the creature. The uncertain status of this observer places the poem as a forerunner of modernism. While behind “The Leopard” lies Dickinson the poet, expressing her convictions about female oppression and spiritual longing, Moore’s “you” seems to exist only in relation to the creature observed; this “you” occupies a dubious position in the moral universe of the poem.