It must be admitted that excessive interest in the mere technique of the poem can become morbid both in the poet and the reader, like the composing and solving of cross-word puzzles. Once the sense of a poem with a technical soul, so to speak, is unriddled and its patterns plainly seen, it is not fit for re-reading; as with the Sphinx in the fable, allowing its riddle to be guessed is equivalent to suicide. A poem of this kind is nevertheless able to stave off death by continually revealing, under examination, an unexpected reserve of new riddles; and as long as it is able to supply these it can continue to live as a poem. Yet at some stage or other the end must come. If it is asked: “Is this really a poem?” the answer must be: “Yes, as long as one can go on discovering new surprises in it.” But clearly the surprises cannot last for ever; nor can we, as in the indestructible poem whose soul is not technical, go back to the beginning and start all over again as with a new poem. The obvious weakness in the surprise-poem is that it encourages the reader to discover many things not consciously intended by the poem. But, while there is no way of being absolutely sure that the steps taken in unravelling the poem are the same as those involved in inventing the poem, the strength of such a poem is proved by the room it allows for surprises thus improvised by the reader, by the extent to which it is tactically disposed to resist critical attacks. As long as a poem is so disposed, it justifies itself. One thing we can be sure of, that this particular poem of E. E. Cummings was not examined in this way by Mr. Untermeyer. Otherwise he would not have included it as an example of poetry that “does not provoke the reader to anything more than irritation” in an anthology whose principal aim is to soothe, not irritate. He would have left it out, because it could no longer serve as a foil to the more formal poem, seeing that it was a formal poem. How much more life is left in the poem at this point? Have we come to an end; or are there still further reasons why it should continue to be called a poem, since it is only a poem as long as there is a possibility of its yielding still more meaning? Did we not, without assuming any formal verse-pattern, give a satisfactory explanation of the poem? Did we not also find it possible to give an entirely new view of it on the basis of its being a suppressed sonnet? Did we not accept the poem as a non-grammatic construction and make sense of it nevertheless? Could we not show it to be potentially or even actually grammatic and make sense of it because it was grammatic? By reading _swarms_ and _chants_, which we have probably been regarding as nominative plural nouns, as third person singular verbs, and by reading _silver_ and _gold_ not as adjectives but as nouns? The poem would then stand grammatically as follows: