My semester has ended (all but the grading), and I return to one of the poems my students and I looked at back in the opening days of February: Marianne Moore’s “To a Snail.” (Before you proceed with the rest of this article, go read the poem. It’s a mere twelve lines.)

As in most of Moore’s work, there’s so much that can be said, because so much is packed in to the work. The link, above, includes some brief and insightful remarks on the poem by Carol Rumens, which I encourage you to read through. Rumens economically limns several of the poem’s language choices and themes, but she doesn’t touch on the ending, “the curious phenomenon of [the snail’s] occipital horn.” So I’ll say a few words about it.

I’m surprised every time I come back to that ending, by the pleasure of saying the phrase “occipital horn” out loud and marking the sound of that phrase with my ear, and by contemplating its curious meanings. The “occipital” lobe in a mammal’s brain is the place where visual processing takes place. The snail’s horn, therefore—at least in Moore’s naming of it—is both processing center and organ of visual perception. (At the end of the horn is the snail’s eye.) What makes the phenomenon of that horn even more “curious” is that it extends out from the compactness of the snail’s body—it literally sees and thinks beyond its substance, or the majority of its substance, like a plumb line extending from a ship’s bow. The snail can also contract the horn, as snails do when endangered, something my cruel boyhood self discovered first-hand by experiment.

When reading “To a Snail” as a poem about poetry—since any work of art can be read in part about what that form of art is and means—we can apply the notion of the horn’s “contractility” to Moore’s cageyness about identifying the sources of the quotations she uses in much of her poetry. She may want us, the readers, to pull in, thus limiting our vision when we consider her work. She writes about grudgingly including the sources of her poems’ quotations so as not to be accused of plagiarism: “I was just trying to be honorable and not to steal things.”

I get the sense that, being a poet and thus a “materialist of language” (term I borrow from Terry Eagleton), the quotations, by being detached from their sources, and without any immediately identifiable footnotes, become simply part of the material unearthed from the Western tradition that any one poem might demand, original contexts be damned. Like Elizabeth Bishop’s sense of historical knowledge, it is “flowing and flown.” Moore’s long poem “Marriage,” which in places reads almost like a found poem, seems to underscore this point. Without the ability to limit what we perceive, to withdraw our horns, so to speak, and simply look at the poem comprised of the sentences before us, and not what some of its (borrowed) language points to, we may be able to account for more of the poem’s allusional history while losing the “first grace of style,” compression. Even if “To a Snail” is about what poetry can do—and also about style, modesty, virtue, and so on—it is in the end a poem written in celebration of a particular creature.

The remarkable vulnerability of that creature is underscored at the ending, the syntax of which is reversed in the poem’s last half-sentence. Parallel construction, in the words of freshman composition staple Diana Hacker, represents a “balance” that makes ideas “easier to grasp.” The goal of the tactic is to give a sentence rhetorical elegance and unity of purpose. If the ending of “To a Snail” was to follow traditional parallel construction, it would read like this:

in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn,
“a knowledge of principles.”

Instead, Moore’s violation allows her to end the poem on the phrase “occipital horn.” It makes the poem’s last half-sentence almost mimetic, sticking out of the poem’s compressed syntax, like the horn does from the snail’s body.

I seemed to be saying, earlier, that the ability to contract, or limit, our perceptions helps us to read the poem on its terms rather than ours. I think that’s true. I also think the poem, both in how it was written by Moore and as a consequence of our spending time with it, is an exercise in the proper use of the organs of perception, which are released to their full length when we need to move. To see and then to contemplate what one sees, to embody the “curious phenomenon” of perception and thought, and to therefore head in the right direction, requires an extension out from the safety of one’s shell. It is dangerous and necessary work. It keeps a body alive.