A Jelly-Fish

“A Jelly-Fish” is a short poem by Marianne Moore (1887-1972), one of the foremost poets in the modernist movement emerging in the early part of the 20th century. The poem was written very early in the poet’s career when she was in her valedictory year at Bryn Mawr College, and it was first published in the Spring 1909 edition of the college journal, The Lantern. In its brevity and the concentration of its imagery, it contains strong echoes of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who was a powerful influence on the young Moore. However, although Moore was yet to encounter the modernist and imagist work of other writers such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, “A Jelly-Fish” contains elements of the fragmentary, disjointed verse style that was poetry’s equivalent of the cubist paintings of Picasso.

Moore would go on to interrogate the role of poetry in an industrialized, consumerist society: “I too dislike it,” the opening words of her 1919 poem simply entitled “Poetry,” say everything about her fierce conviction that poetry needed to be viewed with skepticism, especially when it settled for tired tropes. “A Jelly-Fish,” written 10 years earlier when she was an unknown college student, is far less directly polemical—but, in addition to being about the creature of the title, it comments on the nature of the poetic endeavor. The theme of the sea and its creatures is one to which Moore returns in later poems such as “The Fish” and “The Paper Nautilus.” Metrically, too, it bears the earmarks of her finest work that have led to her reputation as one of the foremost technicians in modern American poetry; Moore is revered equally by her contemporaries and by late 20th-century poets such as John Ashbery and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Poet Biography

Marianne Moore was born in 1887 in St Louis, Missouri, sharing a birthplace with her modernist contemporary T.S. Eliot, born the following year. Moore’s parents were already separated by the time of her birth, and her father, an engineer, had experienced mental health crises causing him to sever his right hand. In these circumstances, Moore’s mother, Mary, was something of a pioneer as a single working mother with two children—Moore had an elder brother, Warner, who would later become a Presbyterian minister. In 1903, the family relocated from the Midwest to the small town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Moore’s mother had been offered a job teaching in a girls’ private school.

This was a critical move for Moore, as it led to her studying political science and history at the all-female Bryn Mawr college from 1905-1909. There, Moore met the poet Hilda Doolittle (also known as H.D.), became active in the suffrage movement, and published her first poems in the college journal. “A Jelly-Fish” was written when Moore was in her final year at Bryn Mawr, and it shows that at only 22, Moore had already developed a distinct vision and poetic style. Following her graduation, Moore took a teaching position at a technical and business school in nearby Carlisle. In this period, her poems were published in journals such as The Others and The Egoist, attracting the attention of leading lights in the modernist movement. In 1916, she moved with her mother to New Jersey, and two years later they moved again to Greenwich Village. Moore grew close to others within the modernist circle, but she was unhappy when, in 1921, H.D. and her British novelist husband published a selection of her poems without her editorial consent.

In 1924, Moore’s collection of self-selected poems, Observations, came out, including the acclaimed longer poems “Marriage” and “An Octopus.” The following year, she attained editorship of the influential modernist journal The Dial, a role she held until 1929. Moore’s prose writing on other poets frequently appeared in The Dial, including her reviews of collections by Pound and Eliot. In the 1930s, as she continued to publish her own verse (The Pangolin and Other Verse, 1936), she was a key mentor to the young poet Elizabeth Bishop, who describes Moore’s striking dress-sense in the poem “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”: “With the pointed toe of each black shoe / trailing a sapphire highlight, / with a black capeful of butterfly wings […] / On the broad black brim of your hat.” As this suggests, Moore had become an iconic figure, whose New York celebrity status grew as she aged. With her interests in baseball and boxing (one photograph shows her pitching first ball at the Yankees stadium; another has her spindly figure standing alongside Mohammed Ali), she was quite at ease with popular American culture, in stark contrast to figures like Eliot and Pound.

Moore remained rooted in New York, caring for her increasingly dependent mother until Mary died in 1947. In 1951, her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, followed by the Bollingen Prize in 1953. Her drastic revisions to some of her early poems in 1967’s Complete Poems were not popular with readers, as many felt she had gone too far in the pursuit of minimalism. Moore died in 1972 in New York, and her reputation as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century grew in the years following her death.

Poem Text

Visible, invisible,

A fluctuating charm,

An amber-colored amethyst

Inhabits it; your arm

Approaches, and

It opens and

It closes;

You have meant

To catch it,

And it shrivels;

You abandon

Your intent—

It opens, and it

Closes and you

Reach for it—

The blue

Surrounding it

Grows cloudy, and

It floats away

From you.

Moore, Marianne. “A Jelly-Fish.” 1909. Poets.org.

Summary

In the first four lines, the poem describes the titular jellyfish in a number of ways, each emphasizing its elusive, jewel-like quality. In the second part of Line 4, the poem then introduces a “You” (Line 4) who reaches out an arm towards the jellyfish, seemingly with the intention of touching it. At this, the creature first pulses in movement, then shrinks in on itself as if to deny the possibility of being approached. The “you” of the poem then gives up the idea of touching the jellyfish, at which point the jellyfish opens and closes again, giving fresh encouragement that it might be caught and spurring a second attempt to “reach for it” (Line 15). In response, the creature is provoked to further movement, taking itself definitively away from the ‘you’ who, by the end of the poem, remains unidentified and seems to be a universal figure rather than a specific person.