Lost in Translation (poem) the key clue here. The four lines come from that "lost" German translation by Rilke of Valéry's "Palme". (Merrill's own English translation of "Palme" is the source of the translated quatrain above. See Merrill's "Paul Valéry: "Palme"" in "Late Settings", 1985.) The original in French: from Paul Valéry, Charmes (1922) Palme classical dizain 7th Stanza The solution to the puzzle of the poem is hidden in plain sight all along. "Nothing's lost", Merrill suggests, when it comes to translating experience or memory, at least according to the way Merrill understands our human experience. The poem's coda salutes the power of
Of Modern Poetry is ongoing. These non-sentences also stress that the mind must act, not passively wait for inspiration or intuition. And the mind must seek to find "what will suffice." What that says of modern poetry will be addressed metaphorically in the poem, the organizing metaphor being that of a new stage on which the modern poet will perform. The lines of the poem, non-traditional "free verse," do not rhyme and are not metrical. They range from ten syllables to fourteen. One striking thing about the sounds of the poem is that three of the lines have weak endings; that is, the