In “Efforts of Affection,” an essay recounting her long friendship with Marianne Moore (1887–1972), the poet Elizabeth Bishop describes Moore’s poems as “miracles of language and construction … quite different from anyone else’s in the world.” These poems, with their complicated syllabic patternings, often feel jagged and uneasy in the mind’s ear — but at the same time, curiously awake, alive with an intensity of observation. This early poem, published in 1909, draws (as Moore’s work often did) on her interest in animals and the natural world. More metrical than her later poems, “A Jellyfish” nevertheless seems to subvert its own inclinations toward any prosodic comfort zone, moving abruptly from trimeter to dimeter lines, as well as in and out of rhyme. This movement echoes the elusive fluidity of the jellyfish, which the speaker strangely assumes that the reader would want to touch.

A Jellyfish 
by Marianne Moore 

Visible, invisible, 
A fluctuating charm, 
An amber-colored amethyst 
Inhabits it; your arm 
Approaches, and 
It opens and 
It closes; 
You have meant 
To catch it, 
And it shrivels; 
You abandon 
Your intent— 
It opens, and it 
Closes and you 
Reach for it — 
The blue 
Surrounding it 
Grows cloudy, and 
It floats away 
From you. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.