In nearly all transformations of syllabics, deletion disturbs the stanzas into free verse. That process is physically evident in typescripts of "To a Snail" and "A Grave."

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In "A Grave," Moore begins with a meditation on the impossibility of seeing the sea, when a "Man looking into the sea" takes "the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself." Moore calls attention to two difficulties here: the problem of seeing "through" a man, including a man's viewpoint, and the related problem of establishing herself as a centered speaker when she cannot stand "in the middle of this." Moore's depiction of the sea, correspondingly emphasizes its opacity over its translucency and its surface activities over its symbolic meanings.

Re-Seeing the Sea: Marianne Moore’s "A Grave"  as a Woman Writer’s Re-Vision.

That "nor was he insincere" marvelously fixes a prevailing tone defining the emotional burdens that demand a daughter's Modernist refusal of all of the old representational securities. Facing a father who so willfully manipulates the powers that language confers, the daughter's primary task is to appropriate those powers to her own mode of restraint, which must grapple with the task of fixing him and freeing herself. Such needs, however, also bring extreme risks.

I would like here to look at Moore's poem "Silence" as a remark on its own methods and on Moore's use of quotation as prosodic device in general. . . .

Moore's poem "Silence" reveals most clearly the politics of form that may inhere in quoting, and speech-act theory provides perhaps the clearest description of its functions, for while the words Moore quotes may be identical to those previously used, the speech-act is inevitably different. To repeat J. G. A.

It is against this backdrop of ambiguous beauty that Moore constructs her far more frequent positive portraits of feminine figures. One of the strongest of these is, not surprisingly, the mothers, almost all of them in animal form, who appear in Moore's poems of the thirties and forties after her early interest in the male artists as subjects had abated. Moore lived with her mother all her life until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947, and this was a mother of uncommon intellectual gifts and all-too-common possessiveness.

Although most of "Bird-Witted" is told from the vantage of the birds' nest, Moore briefly breaks the ongoing present of her narrative to include a vision of "the remote / unenergetic sun- / lit air before / the brood was here." Like the presence of the piebald cat, the thought of the brood's previous and utter absence creates a pall. The small aside gives a dusky center to the poem, as powerful as the unspeakable truths of sexuality and kinship central to many of Faulkner's fiction.

In "Bird-Witted" Moore continues to explore the tensions of innocence and fallenness, but in a more playful vein. The subject of innocence has a biographical origin. She described the birds outside her window—and compared herself to them—in great detail in two letters, one to Warner, and another to Bryher. The letters were typical of her daily accounts of things, where she represented natural phenomena in terms of both nature, as when she compared the birds to penguins, and culture, as in the figure of the tone of a broken carriage-spring.

If "Bird-Witted" depends for its meaning on a conventional narrative sequence and the contrast between the quick instinctive bird and the slow, intellectual cat, "The Paper Nautilus" is unified through its central symbol, a chambered nautilus shell, and an opposition between inner and outer. The poem, in fact, was written as a gift to Elizabeth Bishop in return for her gift to Moore of an actual nautilus shell.