Page 228
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Grace, bicycles, Pascal figures, science, humor, and wanderlust fuse into a portrait of the son's calling, where the individual is measured against all things.
"Bike oh bikes" makes affection for the machine sound nearly liturgical, while Pascal figures and stars move that affection into the realm of number and pattern. Science does not oppose the son's art here; it studies what his stride and practice already know. The final turn privileges humor because wanderlust without humor would harden into mere discipline.
This page presses the son's individuality into universal terms, 'his individual is / is equal to all things / This is his grace / This is his place.' The bicycle becomes an emblem of thought and motion together, 'Bike oh bikes as he could walk / Pascal figures, signs and stars / in the brain of a bicycle,' a machine that stores 'his art' within 'The movement of great silence.' Science is drawn alongside rather than against him, taking 'his stalwart stride, with guts, / a birthright,, his companions,' and the poem closes by naming what outlasts all of it, 'the most important part, / which is his wanderlust.'