Sunday/Moore

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was a modernist poet best known for her ironic precision, reticence and vast web of friendships with twentieth-century poets, from W. H. Auden to Elizabeth Bishop.
“Saint Jerome and his Lion”, first published in the TLS in the same year, is in many ways a perfect distillation of Moore’s idiosyncratic style. The first stanza begins by framing the painting of the poem’s title, an unfinished work by Leonardo da Vinci. But even more interesting to the speaker than the figure of Jerome “versed in language” is the background: “that hermitage of walls / half gone” parallels the barrenness of Jerome’s hermit life with the unfinished, “half gone” state of the painting’s composition. The poem then widens its gaze, moving from the painting’s “joint frame” to the story of how the “vindicated beast and / saint somehow became twinned”. As the story goes, Jerome healed a lion by removing a “desert thorn” from its paw. The poem’s teetering balance between serious contemplation and playful entertainment is, as Moore’s biographer Linda Leavell puts it, the product of her rising celebrity during the 50s; she was a “performer – appearing in person or in print to fulfill her campy, colonial-patriot role as unofficial poet laureate”. But here, Moore is much more than “a poet bristling with notable facts”, as R. P. Blackmur described her. The sly allusion in the closing lines to “Lion Haile Selassie” – the Ethiopian emperor who passionately advocated for collective peace following Italy’s chemical attacks on his country during the Second World War – makes the poem political and radical. The lion becomes not only a “symbol of sovereignty” (it appears on the United Kingdom’s coat of arms), but a reminder of inherent interconnectedness – whether by “astronomy – / or pale paint”. (tls)

Saint Jerome and his Lion


Leonardo da Vinci’s
Saint Jerome and his lion
in that hermitage
of walls half gone,
share sanctuary of a sage—
joint frame for impassioned ingenious
Jerome versed in language
and for a lion like the one on the skin of which
Hercules’ club made no impression.


The beast, received as a guest,
although some monks fled—
with its paw dressed
that a desert thorn had made red—
stayed as guard of the monastery ass . . .
which vanished, having fed
its guard, Jerome assumed. The guest then, like an ass,
was made carry wood and did not resist,


but before long, recognized
the ass and consigned
its terrorized
thieves’ whole camel train to chagrinned
Saint Jerome. The vindicated beast and
saint somehow became twinned;
and now, since they behaved and also looked alike,
their lionship seems officialized.


Pacific yet passionate—
for if not both, how
could he be great?
Jerome—reduced by what he’d been through—
with tapering waist no matter what he ate,
left us the Vulgate. That in Leo,
the Nile’s rise grew food that checked famine, made
lion’s-mouth-fountains appropriate,


if not universally,
at least not obscure.
Here, though hardly a summary, astronomy—
or pale paint—makes the golden pair
in Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch seem
sun-dyed. Blaze on, picture,
saint, beast; and Lion Haile Selassie, with household
lions as symbol of sovereignty.


MARIANNE MOORE (1959)