Poems (Marianne Moore)/RADICAL

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4498546Poems — RADICALMarianne Moore
RADICAL
Tapering
to a point, conserving everything,
this carrot is predestined to be thick.
  The world is
  but a circumstance, a mis-
   erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition,
   imagination, outgrowth,

nutriment,
with everything crammed belligerent-
ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon-
  opoly—
  a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the
   secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat
   to the color of the set-

ting sun and
stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand-
ing still and turning to look back at it—
  as much as
  to say my happiest moment has
   been funereal in comparison with this, the con-
   ditions of life pre-

determined
slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For
it? Dismiss
  agrarian lore; it tells him this:
  that which it is impossible to force, it is
   impossible to hinder.