“His Shield”

This chapter explores Marianne Moore’s understudied admiration for Haile Selassie, the last reigning emperor of the Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty. Moore’s archive includes numerous press clippings and literature—spanning four decades—concerning Selassie, the “Lion of Judah,” who became an international celebrity during the mid-twentieth century when, in 1935, shortly after his coronation, fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, which had until then been the only African nation to avoid direct colonization by a European power. Moore’s poetic references toward Selassie in her poems evince the poet’s affirmation of Selassie’s complex efforts to defend Ethiopia’s sovereignty (in particular, his decision to flee the country to better defend it from overseas) as well as her deconstruction of the putative immunity of sovereign power in general. Using the wartime poem “His Shield” as a touchstone for a wider survey of Moore’s published and unpublished writings, this exploration will show that Moore often turned to the motif of amphibious skin as a metaphor for the power to evade capture; a metaphor specifically linked to Moore’s thinking of Black liberation struggles across time, and around the world.