By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem treats love as stripped of sorrow and glory while the speaker remains drawn toward an impossible person whose beauty, laughter, and returning flight keep pulling him back.
Its tension comes from contradiction: ugly body and beautiful brain, wanting and impossibility, running away and coming back in. The handwritten correction on `sorrow` matters because the page's opening negations set the emotional terms for the desire that follows.
The poem opens by denying both grief and triumph in love - 'There is not a sorrow of love / There is not a glory either' - and proceeds from 'Knowing nothing' while 'Trying to make an epagram.' Its split image is the heart of it: 'Listening to the beautiful brain / Ugly in the body,' desire fixed on 'The one that is impossible / Who runs away from rain, / Comes back in, / then laugh's again.' The final address - 'Catch my eye / and my sir' - lands oddly on 'sir' where one might expect sin, a slippage the transcript preserves rather than smooths.