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Peace of heaven, make us free

Remembering Presbyterian poet Marianne Moore on the Feb. 5 anniversary of her death in 1972

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February 5, 2025

McKenna Britton | Presbyterian Historical Society

Presbyterian News Service

Marianne Moore (1887-1972), a triple-crowned queen of poetry and tricorne hat wearer, is remembered by many.

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Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church
Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, New York; postcard, n.d.[Pearl ID: islandora:14267]

There are those who pull her story to the present through the reading of her words, all those lines of rhythm, all those phrases and ideas that earned her three laurels: the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Prize. But there are also those who remember how she stood and sang in her pew at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York, those who find, within her poems, echoes of moments shared during worship.

This week marks 53 years since Moore’s passing and the subsequent funeral at her home church that was attended by 200 mourners. Though I’d penned an essay about Marianne in 2022, posted on the PHS blog for Women’s History Month, I was unaware of this anniversary, and ignorant of many of the details of her life. But thanks to Edward Moran, a member of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, I am now a converted Moore-ophile.

Moran is also a member of the archiving team at Marianne’s Brooklyn church, which recently sent the church’s membership rolls to the Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) to be digitized and preserved. Over the past four years, he’s written weekly articles for the church newsletter, which is where our conversation began, with Moran forwarding me a newsletter reflecting on Moore’s funeral at LAPC. Because Moran became a member of LAPC in 1976, just four years after Marianne’s passing,  he did not have the chance to know her personally — but through the memories of her family members, friends, and fellow congregants, and through his own studies of her life and work, he’s gotten to know her well. “I’ve been thinking and reading about her for more than 50 years,” Moran mentioned to me during our correspondence.

Moran was an editor of Charles Molesworth’s “Marianne Moore: A Literary Life,” published in 1991. He counts among his acquaintances Patricia Willis, the original curator of the Moore collection at the Rosenbach Museum, and Grace Schulman, editor of “Moore’s Collected Poems” — both of whom were present at the centennial celebration of Moore’s birth in 1987, hosted at Lafayette Avenue. Moran, a writer in his own right, has also penned several poems directly inspired by Moore’s life and work. What follows has been contributed to this article directly by Moran.

In an essay she wrote in the 1960s, poet Marianne Moore recalled how her Missouri-based minister-grandfather, the Rev. John Riddle Warner, had often talked of his desire to come to Brooklyn sometime to hear Dr. Cuyler preach in the Lafayette Avenue [Presbyterian] Church (LAPC). For 30 years, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, one of the most celebrated clergymen of his day, had pastored that church, arguably the largest Presbyterian congregation in the country.

Marianne Moore herself had been born in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis, in her grandfather’s manse. Rev. Warner had earlier been pastor of the Presbyterian church in Gettysburg, where his wife died of typhus while nursing the wounded during the battle in 1863. The Rev John Riddle Warner never made it to Brooklyn, but Marianne Moore and her mother Mary Warner Moore joined the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church on Palm Sunday, April 14, 1935 — a day known as Black Sunday because a massive dust storm had blown east from Missouri, darkening the skies even in Brooklyn.

Perhaps these facts inspired some of the imagery in Marianne’s great “peace” poem,  “In Distrust of Merits”, that she wrote during World War II and read at a meeting of the Women’s Association at LAPC in 1944:

“O quiet form upon the dust, I cannot 
look and yet I must. If these great patient 
dyings — all these agonies 
and wound bearings and blood shed — 
can teach us how to live, these 
dyings were not wasted…”

The poem’s final couplet was inscribed on the cover of the program for her funeral, which took place at LAPC on February 8, 1972:

Beauty is everlasting
And dust is for a time.

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Marianne Moore and the Rev. Dr. George Litch Knight
Marianne Moore with the Rev. Dr. George Litch Knight, pastor of Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. (Photo by Esther Bubley, 1963)

Private funeral services were conducted at LAPC by Marianne Moore’s brother, the Rev. John Warner Moore, a Presbyterian naval chaplain who had arranged for his sister and mother to move to an apartment in Brooklyn when he was stationed nearby at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The public service that followed was led by the Rev. George Litch Knight, LAPC’s pastor from 1957 to 1989, who said: “Her[s] was a complex personality, but through it ran a thread of faith that can be traced through innumerable letters; notes jotted on little scraps of paper and handed to me at the close of church services; and by inscriptions on the flyleaves of books.” He quoted one of them: “The loneliness of doing right is one of the mysteries of a Christian life.”

Dr. Knight, a noted hymnologist who had been editor of The Hymn, published by the Hymn Society of America, encouraged Marianne Moore to write a hymn text of her own, which was recently discovered in her archives and published in Grace Schulman’s edition of Moore’s poetry. Set to the triumphant music of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the words echo the sentiments expressed in “In Distrust of Merits”:

“Word that trembles with the glory
Of self-conquest, mend, control.
Thirst for quickening compassion,
Grow till craving make us whole.

Power of God, alive with glory,
Unselfish-love as majesty.
Make us one, submerging hatred:
Peace of heaven, make us free.”

Other poems by Marianne Moore bear witness to her deep Presbyterian faith and her connections with LAPC. “The Steeple-Jack” was inspired in part by the church’s steeple, which she could view from her bedroom window a block away. The steeple had to be removed in 1932 due to damage from the construction of a subway line under Lafayette Avenue. She concluded the poem with the lines:

“It could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church
while he is gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope.”

Hope — something we all reach for, every moment of every day. How wonderful to find it within a church’s sanctuary, surrounded by friends and acquaintances. This week, we remember to reach for hope, and always stay true to ourselves, in honor of the marvelous Marianne Moore.

Read on for an excerpt from Edward Moran’s poem, “Marianne Moore Grows Up””

“II. Palm Sunday, 1935:  Marianne Moore and  her Mother

Join the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Fading with the morning and the tempest of hosannas

a blessed blowout dust storm east from Kansas

shearing umbrellas and tree-canopies down to bits,

to Oz and maybe back, shredded to the ribs,

and then raining the ribbed sprouts

furling Missouri soil back upon its roots

east to eden, to the place of the "savage's romance"

and the confluence of great rivers, greater tents.

The sky was darkened in New York, as damped fire,

reported some lookers, and as Brooklyn came to prayer

and old John Underwood was helped into his pew at last

the sun bore a trace halo of plowed-back dust

from its long tearing trail across

the fruited plain, as though the Indians changed course,

got soul, were ashamed no more, faced their pursuers.

Or like bread upon the waters, or plows upon the furrows

or like a typist dragging the carriage back a line

boustrophedon,  to redeem a key struck in vain:

such the explanation of this west-to-east reversal

in the prevailing arcs of scythe-describing circle.
She knew earth's loosening, she and her mother both,

thinking on ancestral trek from simple truth,

as he who warned his flock of riddles, like the angry God

who flecked sinners and the just alike in sod.

Stripped of his Swedish gold, James Thorpe

might have thought of Charlie, or not, or what running meant

or how palms are burnt to ash for next year's Lent.

but here, in church of hard Knox, with Calvins on

dust is a soul swirling in a shaft of sun.

a mote in my father's eye, I his son.”

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Topics: Presbyterian Historical Society