On No Work of Words
On No Work of Words - meaning Summary
Poverty and Poetic Obligation
The speaker describes a prolonged silence from writing during a seasonal and bodily poverty. He wrestles with the obligations of giving and receiving art, seeing creative output as both gift and costly payment that exhausts the self. The poem frames artistic labor as tied to hunger, value, and eventual decay, with images of debt, enforced surrender, and ancestral force urging decisive action about whether to burn, return, or renew the world through work.
Read Complete AnalysesOn no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven, The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft. To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark. To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.
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