By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Ice, desert, mountains, lakes, railroad tracks, flowers, junk, freedom, silence, sorrow, and gain all pound together, making the soul feel like terrain crossed by difficult motion.
The verified page keeps the poem's rough spellings and pressure intact. Its emotional force comes from contradictory landscapes and from the repeated sense of being crossed, stopped, and finished.
'The Pounding Soul' treats the soul as terrain pounded by opposing weathers: 'Pounding the soul; or ice,, desolute / Blamed in the hot desert, shuned wildly / against the slope, mountains and lakes, / after all sight, just drift.' Desire arrives as a fixed line - 'I see her as a railroad track / Any flower against the rail / Stopping the mind from traveling' - so love both halts and grounds the wandering. The middle yields a wrung paradox, 'Growing the bad good,' alongside 'The wild eyes,' 'the junk in the sock,' and 'The freedom that crosses you.' The close sets 'Your place among time and tears' against a hard-won finish: 'Silence saught with sorrow / as well as with the gain / that says it is done.' Kept spellings 'desolute,' 'shuned,' and 'saught' are preserved.