Page 75
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Diana becomes the most overwhelming beauty the speaker has known, a woman seen across the world and back whose presence exhausts money, direction, hell, and even the language of enough.
This is the most lavish of the Diana poems, letting admiration spill into stars, mountains, bars, and navigation by the southern cross and Nortj star. The speaker wants possession and surrender at the same time, which is why the poem keeps swerving between devotion and fatigue. Looking up to her in the circle bar gives the ending a specific human setting that makes the praise feel earned rather than ornamental.
The most lavish 'Diana' lets praise spill into a single breathless paragraph -- 'I have never seen anything better, not around the / world, but across it and back' -- where her 'tall / and so direct... eyes', 'the taste of devine', and navigation by 'southern / cross and Nortj star' mix with fatigue, since 'running out of hell can / make a good soul tired'. The grand language is finally grounded in a plain setting: 'I looked up to her / in a circle bar and knew that this is the best looking / women I have ever seen'.