All All And All - Analysis

A chant that tries to make the body big enough

The poem’s central move is an incantation: it keeps saying All all and all as if repetition could force the mind to accept what it would rather split apart. What it wants us to accept is a startling unity: the human body and the so-called dry worlds of rock, ice, oil, metal, and machinery belong to the same cycle of making and unmaking. The speaker talks to his own body as a companion—my flesh, my naked fellow—and tries to persuade it not to panic at the world it wakes into, a world where love, violence, industry, and death share the same tools.

Even the grandest images don’t float above the body; they press down into it. The earth is a wheel of fire, but the body is also a lever, a lock, a vice—an engineered thing. The poem doesn’t soothe by offering purity; it soothes by insisting that nothing is pure.

Section I: The universe as a machine, the body as its counterpart

The first section opens with cosmic, almost geological scope—ice, solid ocean, oil, lava—yet the language keeps slipping into the vocabulary of work and mechanics: lever, stage, governed, wheel. Calling the world a dry worlds lever is strange and forceful: the planet becomes a tool that pries and turns, and the speaker’s imagination treats creation as torque and pressure rather than as gentle growth.

But spring is here too, and it arrives in an equally controlled way: City of spring, the governed flower. Spring is not a pastoral refuge; it’s an organized district inside the same turning system that carries ashen towns around. That word ashen drags the image toward aftermath—burned-out places, cinders—so the turning earth becomes both seasonal renewal and a conveyor of ruin.

The pivot into the body is sudden and intimate: How now my flesh. The body is described with marine and parasitic images—Dug of the sea, Worm in the scalp—as if our origins and our decay are both already inside us. The speaker calls the self the corpse’s lover, a phrase that makes desire inseparable from mortality: to love flesh is to love what will be a corpse. The tension here is blunt: the poem wants the unity of All, but it achieves it by yoking together what we prefer to keep apart—spring and ash, flower and worm, lover and corpse.

The turn: from cosmic inventory to direct instruction—Fear not

Section II changes the poem’s posture. The first section piles images; the second starts commanding the body how to feel. Fear not the waking world, my mortal is not serene reassurance; it’s a stern coaching voice. The phrase waking world suggests shock—opening your eyes into something harsh and modern—and the speaker responds with a repeated refusal of fear.

What exactly is the body supposed to stop fearing? Not just death in a traditional sense, but the mechanized, manufactured texture of living: flat, synthetic blood; heart in the ribbing metal. The poem implies that modern life makes even our insides feel engineered, as if the heart has been bolted into place. And the threats listed are both industrial and intimate: tread and seeded milling (a factory rhythm that also echoes agriculture), then trigger, scythe, and the chilling bridal blade, which splices marriage imagery with cutting. Even tenderness is dangerous: the lover’s mauling makes sex and injury indistinguishable.

Locks, vices, and screws: the body isn’t innocent, either

The second half of Section II deepens the argument: the problem isn’t merely that the external world is metallic and violent; the body itself has its own mechanisms of harm and compulsion. The speaker addresses Man of my flesh and then O my bone, as if stripping identity down to material parts. He insists: Know now the flesh’s lock and vice. Flesh is not only soft; it clamps, traps, grips. The poem’s comfort is bracing: don’t fear the world’s screws, because you are made of screws too.

This is where the poem’s central contradiction becomes most alive. The voice wants fearlessness, but its chosen imagery is claustrophobic: cage, vice, screws. The reassurance doesn’t come from imagining an escape; it comes from imagining a perfect fit between the body and its conditions. Even the screws that turn the voice suggests that speech—what we think of as personal expression—is a driven mechanism. The poem nearly erases the boundary between being alive and being operated.

A harder question the poem won’t let go of

If you truly should fear not, what replaces fear—love, consent, or numbness? When the poem pairs bridal with blade, it dares the reader to ask whether intimacy in this world can be anything other than a sharpened bargain. The speaker’s chant sounds like courage, but it might also be the mind rehearsing its own surrender.

Section III: coupling as contagion, then as flower

The final section tries to resolve the poem’s conflict by returning to All all and all, but now through the idea of coupling. The language is eerie at first: dry worlds couple, Ghost with her ghost, contagious man. Union is depicted as transmission—catching and spreading—rather than as pure communion. Even the collective body is unstable: the womb of his shapeless people suggests an origin that can’t hold a clear form.

Yet the poem insists that shaping happens anyway: All that shapes from the caul and suckle. Birth imagery (caul, suckle) sits right beside the phrase mechanical flesh, and the speaker describes a Stroke of that mechanical flesh on his own. The poem’s earlier harshness becomes a kind of geometry: Square in these worlds the mortal circle. Mortality remains a circle—inescapable recurrence—but it can be squared, made workable, like fitting a living body into the angles of the world it inhabits.

Ending on Flower: a fierce, collective kind of hope

The closing lines shift into a brighter vocabulary, but not a softer one. The poem repeats Flower, flower the way it earlier repeated Fear not—as an order to perception. The flower now belongs to everyone: the people’s fusion, the coupled bud. Even at this peak of light—O light in zenith—the poem keeps its industrial bloodstream: the drive of oil, brassy blood, Socket and grave. The socket suggests machinery; the grave insists on the end point. And still the poem returns to its first mantra, ending with all all and all, as if the only viable faith here is inclusion.

So the poem’s final claim is not that the world is safe, or that the body is holy, but that life is survivable only when you stop pretending you can separate spring from ash, lover from mauling, flower from oil. The chant doesn’t beautify the modern, mechanical, mortal condition; it tries to make it total—so total that fear has nowhere left to stand outside it.