The Road to Paradise: First Notes on Marianne Moore's "An Octopus"

Abstract

traveler to Seattle who arrives on an overcast day sees a somber but beautiful Puget Sound to the west. To the east, he sees the hills of the city surrounding Lakes Washington and Union, and beyond them to the southeast, nothing at all: a gray wall like any rainy vista in the lowland parts of the country. When the skies clear, however, from that wall of nothingness, the mountain comes out, as the natives say, as if it were a sun. vast, snowy bulk seems to arise from the sea and in its utter hugeness dominates everything east of the Pacific. effect is startling, awesome, unforgettable. Indians called it Tacoma, The Mountain who is God; the English, Mt. Rainier. point of access to its peak, a meadow perched on the side of the great Nisqually Glacier, is called Paradise. Marianne Moore traveled to Paradise Park in July 1922 when she spent two days on the mountain. An Octopus is the record of that trip and of a second journey to the Northwest made the following summer; the poem also includes some of the sights seen on both trips along the route from New York through the Canadian Rockies to Washington. In the following pages, I will sketch the biographical circumstances for the poem, through them examine the method of composition and the poem's organization, and then focus on one major set of images: Mt. Rainier and the references to Greece.' I will consider the first extant