What is Progress to Flight?

Progress is to move forward or onward in space or time. Flight is the action or process of flying through the air.

Progress is imperative in flight, it is the very movement of flight.

What is Diligence to Magic?

Diligence is a careful and persistent work or effort. Magic is the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight

by Marianne Moore

With an elephant to ride upon—”with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,”
she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes. Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose
in the shape of an elephant; she clambered up and chose
to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows
that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows
of aesthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those
tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose
them ephemera, and I have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows
which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios.

Marianne Moore (1887- 1972)

The life and career of Marianne Moore read like the who’s who of American poetry in the 20th Century.

She was an American Modernist poet and contemporary of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. Her poetry was well received by her fellow poets who had famously discerning tastes.

She later became an encouraging influence for younger aspiring poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.