Julia Noble, “‘Transmuting Verdure into Onyx’: Language, Prismatic Color, and Gemstone Imagery in Marianne Moore’s ‘An Octopus.’”
Please join us on Tuesday, October 7th, from 6-8 pm in the Humanities Center Boardroom for our first event of the quarter, a workshop with our own Julia Noble titled “‘Transmuting Verdure into Onyx’: Language, Prismatic Color, and Gemstone Imagery of Marianne Moore’s ‘An Octopus.’” Tasha Eccles (Ph.D Candidate in English) will be responding.
Julia Noble is a fourth-year PhD student in English who works on British Romantic poetry. Please contact Mary at mkim6 [at] stanford.edu (mkim6[at]stanford[dot]edu) for the pre-circulated paper and optional recommended readings (Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Moore’s “An Octopus”).
About the materials, Julia writes:
Perfectly transparent, with glistening planes uniting in one tapered end, refracting white light into a spectrum of colors, the crystal prism is uniquely suited to represent the naturalized metaphor of light for language, knowledge, and ultimately truth. “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” one of Moore’s most important poetic manifestos, situates the modern day poet’s endeavor within the long historical timeline beginning with Eden, and visualizes the original unity of word and meaning -- and consequently our direct access to truth -- as the “incandescen[t]” light refracted by a crystal prism, now irrevocably lost. Several critics have noted the symbolic importance of the crystal prism in Moore’s poetics and epistemology, yet none (as far as I know) have actually analyzed the ubiquitous gemstone imagery in Moore’s poetry. In this essay I examine how actual gemstones function in her poems, to trace the imaginative transformation that makes them so richly suggestive.
As well as developing the paper itself, Julia is interested in further exploring the concepts of the essay -- especially poetry and philosophy, knowledge, imaginative fictions in poetry, and mineral imagery-- as part of the foundation for her incipient thesis on Romantic poetry (Moore's "An Octopus" is also, among other things, a rewriting of Shelley's "Mont Blanc").