"We Call Them the Brave"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 2, Chapter 13, “The Fallen Sun” (p. 314).
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
“Anything worth having is worth fighting for.”
Source: Heaven, Texas
“We Call Them the Brave
who likely were reluctant to be brave.”
"We Call Them the Brave" (the title of this poem is also obviously meant to be read as its first line, though set apart)
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Remembrance Rock (1948), Ch. 2, p. 7
Context: A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
Context: They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?
1990s, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), p. 88, Epilogue
