By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The repeated 'This' lines build a compact litany of exhaustion, isolation, and disintegration.
The poem is almost chant-like. Its force comes from how each phrase piles onto the next until collapse feels structural.
'Lose Not, Lost Not' is an anaphoric litany built almost entirely on the demonstrative 'This', each line naming a separate dread and refusing to resolve them. The images veer from the intimate to the criminal without transition - 'This child birth absolutely alone', 'This sameness when surrounded', 'This bandit at a small store', 'This holdup in the abstract' - so private and public catastrophe blur. The emotional core arrives in 'This weakness in the bones of love' and 'This shouting to be left alone', paired against a triad of decline: 'This gain of style', 'This loss of manner', 'This courage gone'. The closing turn loosens the grammar - 'These things we think of / Of going up and down, / and coming apart' - letting the catalog dissolve into the disintegration it describes. Source spellings 'feaver' and 'birth' (as 'child birth') are preserved.