The Marianne Moore poem

Silence

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's 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 your inn."
Inns are not residences.


Marianne Moore

*
The "father" in the poem was made-up; she never met her father, who was institutionalized shortly before her birth. Her grandfather died when she was a little girl. She and her mother moved around the country many times.
*
Ted Hughes, long-time Poet Laureate of England, was the husband of poet Sylvia Plath. Once, they met Marianne Moore, at which time Moore was an old person. Hughes later complained in a book that Moore was rude to Sylvia. This was in a book that he wrote after Sylvia's death; I read a couple by him, and don't remember which one contained this anecdote.
*
Hughes wrote a whole book of poems about Sylvia, after her death. A couple of generations have blamed him for her suicide, and the poems seemed to be both defensive and therapeutic. After reading about her life and personality, and reading both their poems, I was sort of surprised that both of them didn't commit suicide while they were married.