Poems (Marianne Moore)/IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR
IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR
not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the fineness of early civilization art but by virtue of its originality, with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia- tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band of incandescence that was color, keep its stripe: it also is one of
those things into which much that is peculiar can be read; complexity is not a crime but carry it to the point of murki- ness and nothing is plain. A complexity moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting it-
self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a- bout as if to bewilder with the dismal fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has been—at the antipodes from the init- ial great truths. "Part of it was crawling, part of it was about to crawl, the rest was torpid in its lair." In the short legged, fit-ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiæ—we have the classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. Know that it will be there when it says: "I shall be there when the wave has gone by."