Come To My Cantilations - Analysis

An invitation that starts by throwing something away

The poem’s central move is a cleansing: it asks its own songs—its cantilations—to gather a community only after a violent inner purge. The speaker doesn’t negotiate with resentment; he wants to dump our hatreds into one bunch and be finished. That blunt, almost physical image makes hatred feel like waste matter, something that can be hauled off. From there, the poem turns into a summons—not to repentance or quiet, but to a vivid, newly selected way of living.

Nature as a refusal of the modern street

The freedom the speaker wants is concrete and local: Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind. These aren’t metaphors so much as conditions of breathing. Against them, the city appears as confinement: pavements are hard, flat, imposed routes, and the line Let me be free of pavements sounds like someone stepping off a grid. The natural world he names is stripped of ornament—sun, water, wind—suggesting that what he seeks is not scenery but a bodily reset, a different climate for thought.

Freedom from the printers—and the strange fact it’s said in print

The poem’s most charged rejection is social rather than scenic: Let me be free of the printers. Here, the enemy isn’t only urban space but the machinery of publication—pressure, schedules, the market’s handling of words. Yet the speaker can only make this demand through language shaped like a poem, which creates a tension: he wants to escape the systems that circulate speech even as he uses a public utterance to do it. That contradiction gives the tone its edge; the desire for purity is real, but it’s not innocent.

A utopia of style: raw silk, wit, and insolence

When the poem begins calling people in—Let come beautiful people—its ideal world takes on a sharply aesthetic character. The chosen crowd is marked by surfaces and social gifts: raw silk of good colour, graceful speakers, those ready of wit. This is not a retreat into solitude; it’s a curated salon, and its virtues are performative. Even the welcomed temperaments—the gay of manner, the insolent and the exulting—suggest that the speaker’s peace is not meekness but a kind of proud, lively poise.

Hard clarity: lakes and air like metal

The closing images sharpen the poem’s dream into something almost severe: burnished lakes and dry air as clear as metal. Clarity is the goal, but it’s a clarity with hardness—burnish and metal imply polish, glare, and resistance. So even after hatreds are dumped, what replaces them isn’t softness; it’s a bright, exacting world where speech, air, and manners are meant to gleam. The poem’s final insistence is that liberation is not simply absence of ugliness—it is the making of a new, demanding standard of radiance.