Moore’s allusions are often recessive, if tactful, critiques – so, for instance, in ‘These Various Scalpels’ –

Those 
various sounds, consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes 
          struck from thin glasses successively at random –
                    the inflection disguised –

recall perhaps the sound of the Dracula vampires’ laugh – ‘It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand’. Her poem’s esses hiss.

Bram Stoker’s heroes record their journals in shorthand or on wax-coated phonographs. Stoker published Dracula when Moore was ten years old.

In 1921, the year Pound wrote his letter, Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, reviewed Moore’s book in symposium. She disliked Moore’s ‘geometrical verse-designs – stanza forms which impose themselves arbitrarily’. She disliked how Moore used ‘the first syllable of the word accident as a whole line to rhyme with lack’ and ended ‘a stanza in a split infinitive, or in the middle of the swift word very’.

Moore’s ‘geometrical verse-designs’ satisfy the eye, that is true. But Moore makes, simultaneously, symmetrical structures of sound, which go precariously far out and yet return to themselves, repeatedly. ‘One by one, in two’s, in three’s’ – each sound has an equal part, and, in part rhymes and unaccented rhymes, its sounds sound close together and then farther apart, in the manner of a spiral. So, in ‘The Hero’ –

Where the ground is sour; where there are
weeds of beanstalk height,
snakes’ hypodermic teeth, or
the wind brings the ‘scarebabe voice’
from the neglected yew set with
the semi-precious cat’s eyes of the owl.

Inside the poem, there is a spiral of soft outbreath vowel sounds –

ere           ow     our         ere      ere are

                                 or
                                            oi

                                                       ow

Against and within this spiral, Moore fits another spiral of teeth-baring i and ee sounds. Each sound has its mascot: the poem’s owl-like whoo sounds come up against the teeth of the snake. Moore might have been thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnet 94, ‘They that have powre to hurt, and will doe none’ – a sonnet of ten-syllable lines, except for the extra syllables that heaven’s graces and faces bring. It alike has weeds and sourness and dignity; it alike sets its resounding o sounds in conflict with cold ees and esses; it alike measures the difference between what someone is and seems and sees and knows. People sometimes speak of syllabic poetry as though it were mathematical – geometrical, arbitrary – but, as someone counting apples is thinking of apples, not numbers, so someone counting syllables is thinking not of numbers but of tongue movements and the feel of sound and breath.

Syllabic verse finds a democratic equality of syllables. The syllables’ equality is intriguing: ‘the paper nautilus’ makes for as many tongue-movements as ‘constructs her thin glass shell’. This perpetually varying ratio between sounds and the images that they raise can occasion a stringent interest in single-syllable words, or, in any single syllable; and a feeling for all the separate sounds. This is one source of Moore’s intensity: the poems can turn at any point – as, accident’s first syllable makes ‘a whole line to rhyme with lack’. Moore is also lavish: as in ‘perishable’, ‘discommodity’, ‘unantlered’, ‘fritillary’ – and out of all these she makes her long, short, almost-tipping, rebalancing sound symmetries.

‘Elizabeth Bishop is an aristocrat,’ Moore said, about the nickels in a bowl on the Moores’ bookshelf, saved for subway fare. ‘She takes the money!’¹

That a line-break might break a word into sounds is acceptable to a stenographer. Moore learned stenography at the Commercial School in Carlisle.² Her brother Warner wrote to her: ‘Baltimore may be “a sleepy town” but it’s not for stenographers’. Stenography’s floating crooked, hooked or wriggly lines – pen sketches of a worm undertaking callisthenics – signify sound, syllable by syllable: immediate speech. Moore – as stenographer – was trained not to see the gapped pictures which written words make, but to hear the sounds of the words one after another together – as the needle of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph never lifts from the lamp-blacked paper, and its ‘trace is a kind of reptile, the coils of which follow all the modulations or inflections –’. Moore said, ‘I do for the most part hear the number of syllables, not count them’.³

Isaac Pitman created Pitman shorthand – or, phonography. His brother Jacob is buried in Rookwood Necropolis, Sydney, under a phonetic epitaph –

Syllabic forms work inside Moore’s poem’s many voices the way ‘parabolic concentric curves’ work inside the structure of a bird’s nest: they are principles of construction; they leave the nest’s heterogeneous materials conjoined but not amalgamated. Moore liked prose. She liked ‘the accuracy of the vernacular’. She liked how the syntax of a sentence can track the workings out of thought – its caveats, hesitations, leaps. Perhaps, too, she liked the fact that a prose writer was no descendant of the seer. ‘No, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry,’ they said to Yeats.

At thirteen, Moore might have read Philadelphia’s newspaper The Defender: ‘Photography of sounds has reached a point said to establish the fact that there is no such thing as absolute silence. The machine used is so sensitive that it records the lightest current of air – and distant noises’ – the machine being not the record of a single voice but a register of the never-silent world. Some poets’ line-breaks bring the voice up against silence. Moore was, said her mother, ‘speechless’ while she wrote. But, not silence but talk is at the back of Moore’s poems: unhurried talk, patient, trying to get at the ethical value of a thing, attuned to those nerve-end distinctions that only experts feel, and keeping alert against the violence of casual judgement. She admired Henry James, who said that these things are not simple: there is something hindering – massy, and maze-like – in people, and in between people; and it is reverent to be life-like about it. ‘What I miss in Robert [McAlmon],’ Moore wrote to H. D. ‘is a lack of reverence toward mystery – a failure to understand human dignity’.⁴ Feeling, in the end, is attentiveness; and she would rather have illustrated than declared the possession of it.