Entry 371 — My New Mathemaku, Updated
Updated, but probably not finished, although I consider the dividend set:
Now to my pluraphrase of this poem I have to add that the dividend is a quotation from Wallace Stevens’s “On the Dump,” one of my all-time favorite poems, so brings that poem’s concern with the nature of metaphor, (sensual) fascination with the seasons and the final essence of existence to it. It’s another fresh expression, too, because still a shock to most minds, and certainly unexpected in this poem. It also provides the poem, I think, with a unifying principle, the idea of language’s being on the precipice or “soon” to (“:”) bring one to the the making, at least to me, enough sense for a poem.
Incidentally, one thing a pluraphrase should do that I neglected to mention is determine a poem’s level of archetypality. Mine seems to me, with “the the” now in it, to do that at the highest level with the search for the meaning of existence. Stars are archetypal. The struggle to express oneself seems to me moderately archetypal.