SOURCE: Merrin, Jeredith. “Re-seeing the Sea: Marianne Moore's ‘A Grave’ as a Revision of the Tradition.”In An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition, pp. 66-80. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Merrin offers a critical assessment of Moore's poem, “A Grave.”

“Man looking into the sea” begins Marianne Moore's first published version of “A Grave” (“A Graveyard,” The Dial, July 1921). This version as well as another, earlier version, which was resurrected and printed by Ezra Pound in Milan in 1932, are both in turn revisions of Moore's unpublished “A Graveyard in the Middle of the Sea,” produced between September 1916 and September 1918. The Dial poem itself was slightly revised before appearing in final form in her 1924 book, Observations.¹ All versions are obsessed with looking and the return of a look, with seeing and seeing again. The pun on sea...