Page 3
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page places the title back into a landscape of farms, fences, drains, canyons, and mud, grounding the collection in rough rural motion.
The poem works by dragging the grand or shocking title back through ordinary terrain. Fences, drains, mud, and canyons make this feel like a geography of damage rather than a purely symbolic poem.
A gentler lyric set 'Along the farms and fences' where the speakers 'wonder still as mud,' and the women take wild names - 'Butterfly, and wing, the Sunflower.' Pride in the unspoiled land surfaces in 'The trees have not been fallen, / and they have not been topped' and in eyes 'as blue as infinity can get,' while the closing 'women sometime speak of the lowness of Heaven' grounds the divine in this rough country - a tender counterweight to the title's violence, with 'hemispheare' kept as written.