To see a rule (in this case, the rule against an abundance of modifiers) skillfully broken is more of a delight than to see it skillfully upheld. My heart soars like a contrarian hawk as I savor that succulent triple treat of adjectives -- "spiced and complex and tart" -- in line 10. The poet turns words on the tongue to tastes on the tongue, all the while talking neither about language nor about flavor, but about a philosophy for living, a way of apprehending the world.
And that final line, which smacks of both a cri de coeur against and a graceful acceptance of mortality, resonates for me like Wilbur's "The world will swim and flicker and be gone" at the end of "This Pleasing Anxious Being."
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Hybrid Mode
