A Jelly-Fish

In its simplest terms, “A Jelly-Fish” portrays an uneasy encounter between the human and the natural world. The acquisitive human figure desires to grasp a creature that refuses to be caught and ultimately proves elusive. Lines such as “It opens, and it / Closes and you / Reach for it” (Lines 13-15) imply that the human finds the creature frustrating, even tantalizing in its refusal to be captured. This curious encounter finds necessary context in the first decade of the 20th century, when increasingly it seemed that modern human society, with the help of technology, aimed to conquer the natural world. This aspiration was evident, for example, in the polar expeditions, in which intrepid explorers such as Scott and Oates died in their obsessive pursuit. Moore seems to be commenting on the psychology of such an obsession: The jellyfish is likely poisonous, yet the “you” of the poem still reaches for it. The poet has an ambiguous position on this human desire to subdue nature. However, in a later poem, “The Fish,” she writes of the “marks of abuse” made on a marine cliff by human interference: “dynamite grooves, burns and / hatchet strokes”.