Throughout her work, she subverts the conventional Romantic trope of world-as-woman by insisting upon the indeterminate nature of nature--now female, now male, now ungendered other. As Moore says in sentence four, “the ocean … / advances as usual.” Also, as in “The Fish,” the construction of the wave occurs syntactically and is formally implied rather than directly stated; it is embodied in those lines and clauses that make direct reference to the sea. How does one make up for such unintentional, natural desecration? She said simply, “I like to describe things.”. She was 84 years old. HISTORICAL CONTEXT In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. All the action occurs in an ethereal, surrealistic kind of slow motion, a movement suggested both by the undulations of the sea world and by the rhythm of the lines themselves, which operate in a peculiar and repeated cycloid pattern. And for Moore, the proper rendering of this matter seems to have required a new and slightly different reenactment of its wave-ness, along with others of its recurrent actions, each time she came to it. Encyclopedia.com. Certainly Moore's own treatment of the sea in "A Grave" offers mute testimony to the possibility of his reading (note there "the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave" and "men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave"). The Modern American Poetry Site is a comprehensive learning environment and scholarly forum for the study of modern and contemporary American poetry. Yet the great rock persists; it lives in the sea, that which "cannot revive its youth." An old Negro with white hair was sitting underneath it reading the ‘Congregational Record’ and I asked him the name – Jerusalem Thorn. It does endure. Abbott, Craig S., Marianne Moore: A Descriptive Bibliography, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. According to Stapleton, “The Fish” is notable “for intensity in the use of color.” Stapleton, however, insists that it cannot be considered a “complex” poem. What makes it different from [Marianne] Moore’s animal poems is its interst in the difficulties of locating and accepting such energies. It is full of a sense of infringement, violation, and injury; it is also resigned. In this stanza, Moore focuses on the sea, pointing out the vulnerability of barnacles. Bishop seems also to have been always conscious that the women she was writing to was not only "the World’s Greatest Living Observer" (a title Bishop used in her contribution to the Marianne Moore issue of A Quarterly Review of Literature, 1948) but one of its greatest describers as well – and therefore the most qualified judge of Bishop’s own descriptive achievements.