Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, June 24th, 2024.

Today's poem is by Marianne Moore, and it's called Silence.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

Silence.

My father used to say,

Superior people never make long visits,

have to be shown Longfellow's grave

nor the glass flowers at Harvard.

Self-reliant like the cat

that takes its prey to privacy,

the mouses limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth.

They sometimes enjoy solitude and can be robbed of speech by speech which has delighted them.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

Not in silence, but restraint.

Nor was he insincere in saying make my house you're in

inns are not residences

this is a tight little poem that moves through several thoughts pretty quickly.

The first thing it does is introduce a speaker, which, though the poem does not reveal this or suggested, in fact it suggests the opposite, apparently the father in question was real, a real person, but not Moore's own father, rather the father of a friend.

And this is his reported speech, his reported proverbial sayings.

Superior people never make long visits.

And so first we get the picture of a kind of man.

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