Summary
A man is standing and looking at the sea, blocking the poet’s view. It is only human nature to stand in the middle of things, but the sea cannot be stood in the middle of; it is just a grave.
The fir trees stand in a procession, reserved and repressed. They are unlike the sea, which is a “collector,” and will always return a greedy look.
Others have worn that same greedy look, but they have since been worn away to bones; even the fish no longer care to investigate them. Men continue to lower their nets in the sea, but do not understand that they are “desecrating a grave.” They confidently row away, the blades of their oars seeming to ignore the fact of death.
Wrinkles along the edges of the foamy waves reveal themselves; the sea moves in and out of the seaweed. Birds fly and call, a tortoise climbs on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. The ocean flows like usual, obscuring the fact that it is a place in which “dropped things are bound to sink” and twist and turn with neither “volition nor / consciousness.”
Analysis
“A Grave” is one of Moore’s early works, with versions of the poem dating back to 1916. The final poem was published in Poems (1921) and Observations (1924). It is one of her many poems that deals with the sea, but it is perhaps the only one rooted in an actual moment in her life. She and her mother were at the beach and a man moved in front of them, blocking their view of the ocean. When Moore said something, her mother commented that it is human nature to stand in the middle of things.
That sentiment opens the poem; the poet says that man takes the view of the sea for himself, but others have a right to it as well. She acknowledges that it is human nature to try to "get in the middle of things," and thus hog the capacity to view for oneself; but instead of then turning her attention to the beauty of the sea as we might expect her to do, she says bluntly that it is “a well excavated grave.” She uses the word again when discussing the men who dip their nets into the sea and then row away, saying that they are unaware that they are “desecrating a grave.” The sea is also a “collector,” which Moore follows up with an image of indifferent fish swimming around the bones of those who have met their watery death. The sea has a “rapacious look,” and, in the last stanza, is a place where things sink or twist and turn in the current. These disconcerting images are contrasted with the lovelier, luminous images of the wrinkles on top of foamy waves and birds and tortoises cawing and clambering; along with the familiar noises of lighthouses and bell buoys, readers are lulled into placid and pleasurable contemplation of the sea before Moore reminds them of the sea’s murderous intent.
Critics have focused on Moore’s vision and perception; indeed, the poem does have a particular way of getting to the sea, and one that stops well short of actually describing it. Nancy Sullivan explains that perspective is the “aspect of the poetic process that touches not merely on the writing of a poem but on that delicate transference from poet to person.” In terms of “A Grave,” Moore begins by stating essentially that what a man thinks he can do and what he actually can do are different. Man misunderstands time and space, which is reinforced by the poet’s moving from the edge of the sea (like the edge of a grave) to a stately line of firs. It is clear that the “you” Moore is talking to would not be seeing the exact same thing as she does; as Sullivan writes, “here the poet asserts what the philosopher has suggested: neither life nor reality are forever. Each point of view of any aspect of the world differs from individual to individual.” What to do about this, then? One must acknowledge that there is no archetypal seascape and each person’s vision is valuable. Moore’s description of the tops of the trees as turkey feet is not less vivid for its idiosyncrasy. All associations and images evoked in the poet’s mind are valid. Sullivan writes that the poem ends on a note of suspense, “nibbling around the edges of a more liberated concept of space in the context of a fairly orthodox view of time and place.”
Similarly, A.K. Weatherhed contrasts the “bird’s-eye-view” and the “close-up view” of much of Moore’s poetry. The views play off each other, but ultimately Moore suggests that the bird’s-eye-view is more prone to being misleading and sentimentalizing things while the close-up-view is more accurate and conducive to understanding the truth of things. The man in “A Grave” attempts to have a bird’s-eye-view, lording over the sea and blocking the view of others. In contrast, Moore turns her poetic vision to minute details like the “the wrinkles [that] progress among themselves in a phalanx” or the tops of the fir trees “each with an emerald turkey / foot at the top.”
Moore’s vantage point behind the man means that she literally cannot see the sea, but she knows that as a poet she cannot fully “see” it anyway. The sea is sublime: it can never be completely grasped or accurately described, and as mentioned before, one person sees something and another person sees something else. Moore chooses to, as critic Jeanne Heuving notes, “emphasize [the sea’s] opacity over its translucency over its symbolic meanings.” The tops of the waves, the animals, the buoys and lighthouses are synecdochal details that act as entry-points to the boundlessness of the sea. At the end of the poem Moore chooses to remain literal in her conception of the sea and death rather than falling prey to the Romantic tendency to try to control nature or learn something profound about oneself through contemplation of it.
Finally, “A Grave” is notable for its evocation, however subtle, of a female poet’s frustration with the male dominance of her field. Critic Jeredith Merrin begins by looking at her early versions of the poem, which more closely resembled male Romantic poetic voices. Over time, though, Moore revised her work and shed the superfluities. In her correspondence with Ezra Pound about the revised work she displays some “female anxiety” but “also displays remarkable independence and self-assurance,” Merrin discerns. Moore appreciates Pound’s insights, but ultimately refuses to change the order of the last words “volition and consciousness.”
The very first word of the poem—”Man”—can be read as one man or mankind in general. Either way, Man is not Woman; here, he blocks the female poet's view, literally and metaphorically. He is blithely ignorant and his fate is to be one of the drowned men whose bones the fish are no longer interested in. He is just one of the “dropped things” and is ultimately disempowered. Merrin notes that Moore’s sea is not only a grave but is also “Nature’s and Woman’s ally.” This can be seen in the imagery and the language, as there is heavy sibilance in the poem; “consciousness” is the final hiss at Man.
Merrin notes (quoting another scholar, Margaret Homans) that the Romantic period was all about the self, and the “other” was always represented as female whether it was nature, a human woman, or some other desired thing. Moore’s finished “A Grave” is a “continuation of [the Romantic] tradition and a devastating commentary on it.” She takes the tropes of Romantic poetry like consciousness and unconsciousness, willfulness and will-lessness, and redistributes them among Man, Woman, Nature, and Poet. Moore’s sea has a “fresh air of irrepressible ‘otherness’” due to the poet's employment of metaphor to “expose the pathetic fallaciousness of the Romantic poet’s pretension.”
