By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker tests temptation, movement, and stopping against a final way out, then commits to going as far as possible between two ends and the middle.
The questions come in a stripped sequence, as if the poem is trying to determine whether any action was deliberate or merely drift. Glory and wonder are both withheld, leaving only the possibility of trouble being lost. The closing line is the strongest one, because it imagines endurance not as escape from contradiction but as motion directly through it.
The possibility of trouble being lost: neither glory nor wonder; did I tempt or take apart? 'I will go as far as I can get / against to ends against the middle.' The end-against-the-middle gambit made formal.