Marsden Hartley’s “Fishmonger” is a poem that vibrates with a curious alchemy—an alchemy not of metals, but of celestial fragments, terrestrial flora, and avian essence fused into an aquatic offering of impossible beauty. At first glance, it appears as a whimsical inventory of poetic fabrication: scales from the moon, fins from bluejays’ wings, eyes from damsons. Yet, beneath this lyrical catalog lies a profound meditation on creation, devotion, and the ephemeral interplay between the human and the divine. Written in a period when Hartley was deeply immersed in both modernist experimentation and spiritual yearning, “Fishmonger” emerges not merely as a poem about making a fish, but as a metaphysical gesture—an act of love rendered in the language of mythic transformation.  

Hartley, primarily celebrated as a painter of the early American modernist movement, often blurred the boundaries between visual and verbal art. His poetic output, though less prolific than his canvases, shares the same fervent intensity and symbolic density. Born in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley was shaped by a deeply Protestant upbringing, loss (his mother died when he was eight), and a lifelong sense of marginality—due both to his sexuality and his artistic vision. These biographical currents course through his work, manifesting as a tension between earthly limitation and transcendent aspiration. In “Fishmonger,” this tension finds expression through the poet’s role as artisan and intermediary: he does not merely observe beauty; he constructs it, piece by luminous piece, for another’s contemplation.  

The opening lines establish the poem’s central conceit with startling immediacy: “I have taken scales from off / The cheeks of the moon.” Here, the moon—traditionally a symbol of mystery, femininity, and cyclical renewal—is not merely gazed upon but harvested. The verb “taken” carries a quiet audacity; it suggests agency, even trespass, as if the speaker dares to pluck divine material for human ends. The image of moon-scales evokes both the iridescence of fish and the mythic associations of lunar influence—tides, dreams, madness. Yet Hartley reframes this cosmic element as raw material, domesticated into the service of art. This act of reconfiguration continues with “fins from bluejays’ wings,” where the sky-dwelling bird is transformed into a creature of water. The bluejay, a vivid presence in North American woodlands, symbolizes communication, vibrancy, and sometimes raucous individuality. To repurpose its wings as fins is to enact a kind of elemental transubstantiation: air becomes water, flight becomes swimming, sound becomes silence.  

The poem’s methodology is cumulative and synesthetic. “I have made eyes from damsons in the shadow”—damsons, a type of small plum native to Europe but naturalized in parts of North America, carry connotations of ripeness, decay, and tart sweetness. Placed “in the shadow,” they acquire a melancholic depth, suggesting that even the eyes of this celestial fish are born of darkness as much as light. Similarly, “flushes from the peachlips in the sun” fuse the botanical (peach blossoms or fruit) with the human (“lips”), blurring categories between the organic and the corporeal. This blending is not accidental; it reflects a worldview in which boundaries between entities are porous, and creation is an act of recombinant reverence.  

Crucially, every component is offered not for self-expression but for an unnamed “you.” The repeated phrase “for you” anchors the poem in a relational dynamic, transforming the act of making into an act of love. This “you” remains elusive—perhaps a muse, a divine figure, a lover, or even the reader. The ambiguity is deliberate, allowing the poem to operate on multiple planes: devotional, erotic, and artistic. The fish, “made of heaven,” becomes a vessel of transference, a conduit through which the speaker’s inner world is externalized and gifted. The placement—“Set it swimming on a young October sky”—is especially evocative. October, in the Northern Hemisphere, is a month of transformation: leaves turn, air sharpens, and the world edges toward dormancy. Yet Hartley calls it “young,” imbuing the season with paradoxical vitality. The sky, typically a domain of birds or clouds, now hosts a fish—an inversion that mirrors the poem’s logic of metamorphosis.  

The latter half of the poem shifts from active construction to contemplative observation: “I sit on the bank of the stream and watch / The grasses in amazement / As they turn to ashy gold.” This moment of stillness contrasts with the earlier flurry of making. The speaker, having completed his creation, becomes a witness to natural change. The grasses’ transformation into “ashy gold” evokes both beauty and mortality—the gold of autumn light tinged with the ash of decay. “Amazement” here is not mere surprise but a kind of awe, a recognition of the world’s ceaseless mutability. This transition from maker to seer suggests that true creation requires both intervention and surrender: one must shape, then step back and behold.  

The closing question—“Are the fishes from the rainbow / Still beautiful to you”—introduces a note of vulnerability. After the labor of assembly, after the offering is set afloat in the sky, the speaker wonders if his creation retains its value in the eyes of the beloved. The plural “fishes” expands the scope beyond the single celestial fish previously described; now, the rainbow becomes a source of multiple wonders, echoing biblical and mythological resonances. In Christian tradition, the rainbow is a covenant, a divine promise after flood. In other cultures, it is a bridge between realms or a serpent of light. Hartley’s “fishes from the rainbow” thus carry layered meanings: they are both artifacts of human ingenuity and echoes of sacred symbolism.  

The repetition of “Swimming?” three times at the end—though marred by a typographical glitch in the provided text—functions as an incantation. It is less a question and more a plea, a mantra, a pulse. Each iteration deepens the emotional resonance, as if the speaker is willing the fish to remain alive in the imagination of the beloved. The stuttering repetition mimics the flicker of hope, the fragility of artistic offering in the face of time and indifference. It is a moment of profound human exposure: the creator, having given everything, now waits in uncertainty.  

Historically, “Fishmonger” can be situated within Hartley’s broader engagement with spiritual and aesthetic synthesis during the 1930s and 1940s. Though he never adhered to a single doctrine, Hartley was drawn to mysticism, Native American symbolism, and Christian iconography, often weaving these into his visual and literary work. The poem’s animistic sensibility—where moon, bird, fruit, and grass possess communicable essence—reflects a worldview aligned with both Romantic and Indigenous epistemologies, wherein nature is not inert but animate, generous with its metaphors. This perspective stood in deliberate opposition to the mechanistic rationalism of early twentieth-century modernity. Hartley’s “fishmonger” is thus not a vendor of ordinary wares but a shamanic artisan, trading in sacred fragments.  

Literary devices in the poem operate with quiet mastery. Metaphor is the dominant mode, but it is never static; each image unfolds into another, creating a cascade of associations. Synesthesia abounds: color becomes texture (bluejay’s blue becomes fin), taste becomes sight (peachlips’ flush), shadow becomes form (damsons as eyes). Personification is implicit—the moon has “cheeks,” the grasses “turn” with intentionality—granting the nonhuman world a kind of agency that collaborates with the poet. The tone balances reverence with intimacy; the grandeur of “heaven” is tempered by the specificity of “damsons” and “bluejays,” grounding transcendence in the particularities of place and season.  

Thematically, “Fishmonger” explores the ethics and aesthetics of giving. The speaker does not demand reciprocation; he offers and then watches, waits, wonders. This reflects a poetic philosophy in which art is a form of service, a silent dialogue across the chasm of selfhood. The poem also interrogates the nature of beauty: is it inherent in the object, or does it reside in the perception of the beholder? The repeated question—“Still beautiful to you?”—suggests that beauty is relational, contingent on the gaze of another. In this, Hartley anticipates later phenomenological understandings of aesthetic experience, where meaning emerges in the encounter between subject and object.  

Emotionally, the poem moves from exuberant creation to tender uncertainty. The initial lines thrum with confidence—the “I have” refrain asserts creative power—but this gives way to the humility of watching grasses and questioning efficacy. The emotional arc mirrors the trajectory of many devotional acts: the fervor of making, followed by the quiet anxiety of reception. Yet there is no bitterness, only a sustained openness. This emotional generosity is one of the poem’s most compelling qualities; it invites the reader into its vulnerability without manipulation.  

Comparatively, “Fishmonger” resonates with the works of other modernist poets who sought to reconcile the material and the spiritual. William Carlos Williams, Hartley’s contemporary, also celebrated the particularity of American flora and fauna, but with a more grounded, imagistic precision. Hartley, by contrast, leans into the mythopoetic, allowing his images to float between realms. There is also an echo of Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where the singer creates a world through song that both reflects and transcends the sea. Like Stevens, Hartley presents the artist as a mediator between reality and imagination, though Hartley’s tone is less philosophical and more devotional. Closer still is the ecstatic craftsmanship of William Blake, whose belief in the divine imagination saw the poet as prophet and artisan. Hartley’s fish, like Blake’s tiger, is “fearful” in its beauty precisely because it is made—by human hands, yes, but with materials loaned from the cosmos.  

Philosophically, the poem gestures toward a kind of material theology. The sacred is not distant but embedded in the ordinary: in fruit, in birds, in the changing grass. To “take” these elements is not theft but participation in a larger economy of wonder. This aligns with process philosophy, where reality is understood as dynamic becoming rather than static being. Hartley’s world is one of flux and transformation, where identity is fluid and boundaries are thresholds rather than walls. The fish of heaven is not a fixed symbol but a living offering, “swimming” in the ever-renewing sky of October.  

In conclusion, “Fishmonger” is a testament to poetry’s capacity to transfigure the mundane into the miraculous through attention, love, and linguistic alchemy. Hartley, painter-poet and perpetual seeker, offers not just a fish but a way of seeing: a vision in which every element of the world holds potential for metamorphosis, and every act of creation is an act of devotion. The poem’s quiet power lies in its balance of precision and mystery, its earthy specificity and celestial aspiration. In asking, “Are the fishes… still beautiful to you?” Hartley does more than question aesthetic endurance—he invites us to consider the responsibilities of witness, the fragility of beauty, and the enduring human need to make something luminous from the fragments of our world, and offer it, swimming, into the sky of another’s perception. It is this gesture—bold, tender, and utterly poetic—that secures “Fishmonger” as a luminous artifact in the American modernist canon, a small but radiant testament to the art of giving form to longing.

Philip Bourke Marston’s “Changeless” is a compact but emotionally expansive meditation on one of lyric poetry’s oldest and most difficult questions: what, if anything, can remain faithful in a world governed by alteration, fatigue, separation, and death? The poem begins from an apparently universal observation. Seasons change, winds move, sailors depart, pleasures lose their power, grief itself becomes exhausting, and even the heavenly bodies seem subject to disappearance. Against this broad catalogue of mutability, the speaker places a single declaration of constancy: love, addressed directly to a beloved “sweet,” will not grow weary. The poem’s title is therefore both a promise and a challenge. “Changeless” does not describe the world as the speaker encounters it; rather, it names the desired, perhaps miraculous, quality of devotion that survives the world’s pervasive processes of change.

The poem belongs recognizably to the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of late Victorian poetry. Marston, born in 1850 and blind from early childhood, wrote under conditions of profound personal difficulty, and his life was shadowed by bereavement. He lost people close to him, including a fiancée, and his poetry repeatedly turns toward grief, absence, love, and the hope that emotional attachment may endure where physical life does not. Such biographical knowledge should not reduce “Changeless” to a mere private document; its artistry lies precisely in its transformation of individual sorrow into an argument about human experience. Yet Marston’s history lends force to the poem’s guarded intensity. The speaker does not make an easy claim that love is permanent because the world is benign. He makes it after surveying a world in which every creature, sensation, and condition seems susceptible to weariness.

Victorian readers would have recognized the poem’s concern with instability as more than a personal melancholy. The nineteenth century saw immense social, scientific, industrial, and theological transformations. Old certainties were tested by evolutionary theory, biblical criticism, new technologies, urban growth, and the widening visibility of social inequality. In literature, this atmosphere often produced an acute awareness of transience: the sensation that inherited structures of belief, domestic life, class identity, and religious confidence could no longer be accepted without question. Marston’s poem does not enter those public controversies directly, but it shares the period’s desire to locate an enduring principle amid flux. The speaker’s love becomes a possible answer to a cultural as well as an emotional crisis: if external forms change, can inward fidelity preserve meaning?

The opening image establishes this question with notable delicacy. “The Spring” appears as “a maiden beautiful and pure,” a personification that draws on a long poetic tradition in which spring represents youth, fertility, renewal, and innocence. Yet this maiden does not simply arrive to bless the earth. She “wearies of earth” and leaves the “happy lea.” The phrase is startling because it reverses the conventional emotional logic of spring. Rather than offering a reliable return of vitality, spring itself becomes restless. The season associated with rebirth is presented as capable of departure and dissatisfaction. Marston thereby makes change feel more radical than ordinary seasonal succession. If even spring tires of the earth it renews, the poem suggests, then no relation between lover and beloved, self and world, or creature and home can be assumed to be secure.

The word “lea,” meaning a meadow or open grassland, gives the opening a pastoral brightness. Its happiness is explicitly named, but that happiness is fragile because it is immediately abandoned. This is characteristic of the poem’s emotional method: beauty is invoked only to reveal its vulnerability. Marston does not depict a bleak landscape from the outset. He begins with loveliness—spring, a meadow, the sea, music, sun, moon, stars—and lets weariness enter each scene. The result is more poignant than an unrelievedly dark vision would be, because the poem understands what is at stake in loss. It is not merely pain that ends; delight also loses its power. The speaker grieves not only mortality but the erosion of attraction itself, the unsettling possibility that what once charmed may eventually fail to charm.

The next images develop a pattern of divided affinities. “The stormy winds grow weary of the sea; / The sailor lad grows weary of the shore.” Wind belongs naturally to movement over water, while the sailor’s life might seem inseparable from the shore from which he departs and to which he returns. Yet both relations become unstable. The winds weary of the sea, and the sailor wearies of land. The parallelism is subtly disorienting: sea and shore, mobility and rest, exposure and safety, each fail to provide lasting satisfaction. The sailor is especially resonant in nineteenth-century poetry, where maritime imagery frequently carries associations of adventure, exile, labor, empire, danger, and longing for home. Marston’s sailor is not romanticized as a triumphant voyager. He is simply weary, caught in the human condition of desiring an alternative even when the alternative is the place of refuge.

This attention to dissatisfaction gives “Changeless” a philosophical dimension. The poem recognizes what might be called the restlessness of desire. Human beings often imagine that fulfillment lies elsewhere: the sailor at sea longs for shore, but shore itself cannot permanently satisfy him. This pattern resembles older religious accounts of earthly insufficiency, in which the finite world cannot wholly quiet the soul. It also anticipates more secular accounts of desire as endlessly self-renewing and therefore incapable of final completion. Marston does not turn the insight into abstract doctrine. He conveys it through physical images: land, water, wind, weather, song. His philosophical seriousness is inseparable from sensory concreteness. Poetry is especially powerful here because it permits an idea about impermanence to be felt as a succession of departures.

“Tunes that charmed once fail, sometime, to allure” extends the meditation from nature and travel into art itself. This is an extraordinary moment of self-awareness. A poem about lasting love admits that music, one of the most ancient vehicles of emotion, can lose its enchantment. The claim is not that beauty never matters; the word “charmed” confirms that it once did. But aesthetic experience may be subject to habituation, memory, altered circumstance, or grief. A song can remain unchanged while the listener changes, and the old spell breaks. Marston thus distinguishes constancy of object from constancy of response. It is not enough for a tune to remain available; it must continue to allure. In this distinction lies the poem’s deeper anxiety. The beloved may be loved now, but can affection remain alive rather than becoming a beautiful form emptied of emotional force?

The repeated vocabulary of weariness is the poem’s central verbal device. “Weary” and its variations recur with a pressure that creates more than emphasis. The word becomes an atmosphere, a condition spreading across seasons, landscapes, occupations, emotional states, and even celestial time. Weariness is not identical with dramatic despair. It is quieter and, in some ways, more frightening. Despair may be acute; weariness suggests attrition, the slow diminishment of energy, attention, and desire. It describes the exhaustion produced by duration itself. By making weariness so pervasive, Marston identifies a threat to love that is not merely catastrophe. Love may be endangered by the ordinary passing of days, by repetition, by memory, by the mind’s capacity to become dulled even to what it once treasured.

The poem’s inclusiveness is sharpened in the observation that “Weary we grow of grief, or too much glee; / We weary captive, and we weary free.” These paired opposites are carefully chosen. Grief and joy are conventionally understood as contrary states, but both can exhaust. Captivity and freedom are likewise moral and political opposites, yet neither guarantees immunity from fatigue. The formulation has the aphoristic compression of a proverb, but it resists easy consolation. Human dissatisfaction cannot be solved simply by replacing sorrow with pleasure or imprisonment with liberty. The speaker’s statement does not trivialize suffering by claiming that a captive’s fatigue is equivalent to a free person’s; rather, it insists that weariness is a general human vulnerability that crosses circumstances. Even fortunate conditions cannot abolish the soul’s exposure to change.

There is a particularly Victorian seriousness in this refusal of simple oppositions. Victorian poetry often interrogates the idea that progress—whether technological, moral, political, or personal—will resolve the fundamental difficulties of existence. Marston’s speaker accepts the value of joy and freedom, but he refuses to treat them as permanent cures. The poem therefore has affinities with the elegiac strain in writers such as Alfred Tennyson, who repeatedly confronted loss and the instability of faith, and with the richly sensuous melancholy associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s circle. Marston knew the artistic world shaped by Pre-Raphaelite taste, with its attraction to medievalism, symbolic beauty, intense love, and death-haunted devotion. Yet “Changeless” is less pictorially elaborate than much Pre-Raphaelite verse. Its power comes from concentration: a few elemental images are made to carry a large metaphysical burden.

The assertion “Suns set, moons rise, the stars do not endure” expands the poem’s scale from the human and terrestrial to the cosmic. Sunset and moonrise ordinarily imply recurring natural rhythm; they can be reassuring signs of order. But Marston’s phrasing refuses reassurance. The sun sets, the moon rises, and the stars themselves “do not endure.” The statement may be read literally only in a broad poetic sense, since stars outlast individual human lives by immense spans of time, but literal astronomy is not the point. For human consciousness, even the stars are signs of eventual vanishing. The speaker reaches toward the most seemingly permanent objects available to ordinary sight and subjects them to the same law of transience. The universe is not a stable backdrop against which human change occurs. It too is imagined as perishable.

At this point, the poem could descend into resignation. Instead, its movement changes with the plain, firm statement, “Let this be as it is; — but this I know.” The phrase “Let this be as it is” is not a denial of suffering. It is an act of acknowledgment. The speaker grants the evidence: the world changes, delight falters, bodies die, and separation may prevail. The turn introduced by “but” does not erase that recognition but sets beside it another kind of knowledge. This is crucial to the poem’s emotional maturity. The claim of enduring love is meaningful only because it is not based on blindness to reality. The speaker does not say that love will prevent death or restore lost joy. Love’s constancy is asserted within, rather than outside, the conditions of loss.

The poem’s second movement becomes increasingly personal through the repetition of “Though.” This anaphora creates a sequence of concessions, each darker than the last. “Though life, grown weary, parts at length from me” personifies life itself as a companion who eventually leaves the speaker. Death is not figured primarily as a violent intruder but as a final parting caused by life’s own weariness. The image returns us to the poem’s governing word and gives it ultimate force: even life may tire of sustaining the self. This personification softens neither death nor its loneliness, but it gives the event emotional intelligibility. Death is imagined as abandonment, the departure of that which has accompanied the speaker from the beginning.

The next concession, “Though joy remembered turns to deepest woe,” captures the painful doubleness of memory. Memory is often regarded as a refuge, a means by which lost happiness can remain inwardly present. Marston acknowledges its darker potential. Recalled joy may intensify sorrow because it measures what has vanished. The more beautiful the memory, the more grievous the contrast with present absence. This idea is especially appropriate to a poem of devotion, for love frequently survives through recollection when bodily presence is impossible. Yet memory cannot be uncomplicated consolation. It preserves the beloved, but it also preserves the wound of separation. Marston’s formulation recognizes that grief is not the absence of love; it is often love’s continuation under conditions of irreparable loss.

The phrase “though as one our lives may never be” leaves the precise situation of the lovers open, and this openness contributes to the poem’s universality. The separation may arise from death, social circumstance, distance, unfulfilled union, or a love that cannot become shared life. The wording “as one” suggests not merely marriage or physical proximity but a deeper aspiration toward unity. The speaker anticipates that this aspiration may remain unrealized. This makes the final declaration more complex than a conventional love vow. The speaker is not promising that the lovers will enjoy an unchanging happiness together. He is promising fidelity even if togetherness is denied. Love’s changelessness is therefore not possession; it is persistence of feeling and ethical allegiance despite separation.

The final image, “Through life, in death, where none may reap or sow,” carries the poem into a grave, agricultural stillness. Reaping and sowing are fundamental emblems of earthly time: sowing looks toward a future harvest, while reaping gathers the result of prior labor. To say that in death none may reap or sow is to imagine a realm beyond productivity, growth, seasonality, and ordinary human purpose. The phrase recalls biblical and scriptural cadences, particularly traditions in which earthly labor ceases in the grave and human distinctions are leveled by mortality. Yet Marston does not provide a doctrinally elaborate vision of the afterlife. The afterworld is described negatively, as a place where the familiar cycles of work and cultivation no longer apply. Its very barrenness makes the speaker’s love seem more daring: devotion is imagined as surviving where the usual conditions for action and renewal have disappeared.

“My love, O sweet, shall weary not of thee” is thus the culmination of a carefully prepared argument. The phrase “my love” can mean both the speaker’s feeling and the beloved person, but the grammar makes the intended force clear: the speaker’s love will not tire of its object. The direct address “O sweet” introduces tenderness at the very moment of greatest abstraction. After seasons, winds, celestial bodies, captivity, freedom, life, death, sowing, and reaping, the poem returns to the intimate second person. This movement is emotionally decisive. Vast ideas of change matter because there is someone whom the speaker cannot bear to lose in feeling. The beloved is not described in physical detail, perhaps because the poem’s purpose is not portraiture but vow. The beloved becomes the recipient of language’s most concentrated act of fidelity.

The poem’s formal containment heightens its force. Its first movement gathers examples of universal instability, while its concluding movement narrows toward the speaker’s individual avowal. This progression from general truth to personal commitment resembles the rhetorical movement of a traditional love sonnet, in which an apparent problem is confronted and then answered by a decisive turn of thought. But Marston’s answer remains emotionally credible because the poem does not claim that love abolishes impermanence. It claims only that love may refuse the habit of weariness. The distinction is profound. The speaker cannot control the departure of spring, the motion of winds, the death of stars, the transformations of remembered joy, or the possibility of lifelong separation. What can be claimed is the steadfast orientation of the heart.

Such a claim raises philosophical questions. Is the speaker’s declaration an assertion of metaphysical fact, a religious hope, or an act of will? The poem leaves room for all three readings. Its reference to love continuing “in death” may imply belief that the self and its affections persist beyond mortality. At the same time, the poem’s language is more devotional than theological. It does not describe heaven, reunion, judgment, or divine guarantee. One may therefore read the vow as an ethical choice: the speaker chooses not to let devotion become exhausted, even though the world provides no certainty that such devotion will be rewarded. In this sense, “Changeless” presents love as a form of resistance. It is not resistance to facts, but resistance to the emotional surrender those facts might encourage.

Marston’s blindness also invites, though it should not dictate, reflection on the poem’s striking relation to visual imagery. The sun, moon, stars, spring, sea, and shore are all images with immense visual presence. A blind poet’s use of such images is not paradoxical; literary imagery is never merely visual, and Marston had access to the shared symbolic language of poetry, memory, conversation, reading, and imagination. Indeed, “Changeless” demonstrates how natural imagery can operate through cultural and emotional resonance rather than optical description alone. Spring is not important because of a particular observed color; it is important because it embodies renewal and departure. The stars are not astronomical objects to be scientifically catalogued; they are the ancient human sign of permanence whose apparent stability the poem deliberately unsettles.

The emotional power of “Changeless” comes from its balance of melancholy and affirmation. A lesser poem might simply enumerate disappointments and end in desolation, or else offer an unearned assurance that love conquers every form of suffering. Marston does neither. His speaker recognizes that people can become tired of grief and joy alike, that art may cease to enchant, that freedom may not satisfy, and that memory may turn happiness into pain. The poem’s affirmation is therefore not naïve optimism. It is a vow spoken with full awareness of emotional fragility. This is why the closing promise can move readers so deeply. It does not ask us to deny that love is vulnerable to time; it asks us to recognize the courage involved in loving as though fidelity itself were a form of permanence.

Ultimately, “Changeless” is a poem about the human longing to find one relation that does not submit to the law of diminishing returns. Its world is governed by departure, satiety, and decline, but its speaker refuses to make mutability the final truth. Love may not preserve the body, alter the seasons, or reunite separated lives. It may not even free memory from sorrow. Nevertheless, it can endure as attention, loyalty, and tenderness. Marston gives this idea an intensity that is both distinctly Victorian and enduringly modern. In an age still conscious of rapid change and emotional uncertainty, the poem’s final confidence remains compelling: not because it promises immunity from loss, but because it imagines a love strong enough to remain awake within loss. That imaginative act is the poem’s deepest beauty and its most moving gift.