The Pangolin and Other Verse was published by The Brendin Publishing Company (London) in 1936 in a limited edition of 120 copies, with decorations by George Plank. It is a slim collection of five poems, but the title poem — “The Pangolin” — is among Moore’s finest achievements: a detailed description of the armored anteater that becomes a meditation on grace, form, art, and what it means to be “Another armored animal.”
The Title Poem
“The Pangolin” runs to approximately 100 lines and demonstrates Moore’s method at its most characteristic and most powerful. She begins with precise natural history — the pangolin’s scales, its nocturnal habits, its method of curling into a ball for protection, its long tongue, its ability to climb — drawn from scientific sources that Moore cites in her notes.
But the description accumulates into something more than natural history. The pangolin’s armor becomes a metaphor for art (both protective and beautiful); its graceful movement becomes a meditation on “grace” in multiple senses (physical, theological, aesthetic); and the poem’s final movement compares the pangolin to man — “Another armored animal” who also needs protection against the world.
The formal structure is vintage Moore: syllabic verse in complex stanza patterns, with rhymes placed according to syllable count rather than stress. The effect is of prose that happens to be organized with extraordinary precision — readable as natural speech yet architecturally intricate.
The Other Poems
The collection also includes four other poems from the mid-1930s, including “Virginia Britannia” — a meditation on Jamestown and the founding of the American South that weaves natural history, colonial history, and racial history into Moore’s characteristic collage.
Collecting The Pangolin
First edition (The Brendin Publishing Company, London, 1936): Limited to 120 copies. Decorated paper wrappers with George Plank designs.
Identification points:
- The Brendin Publishing Company imprint
- Limited edition of 120 copies stated
- Decorations by George Plank
- Small format
Market values: Fine copies bring $2,000–$5,000. With only 120 copies printed, this is one of the scarcest Moore first editions.
Signed copies: Extremely rare from this limited edition — $5,000+.
The title poem’s subsequent appearance in What Are Years (1941) and Collected Poems (1951) made it widely available, but the original Brendin edition — with Plank’s decorations and the intimacy of a 120-copy edition — remains the definitive first appearance and a prize for Moore collectors.