SUNSET stinging gold swarms upon the spires silver chants the litanies the great bells are ringing with rose the lewd fat bells and a tall wind is dragging the sea with dream -S With so promising a title, what barriers does the poem raise between itself and the plain reader? In what respects does it seem to sin against the common intelligence? To begin with, the lines do not begin with capitals. The spacing does not suggest any regular verse-form, though it seems to be systematic. No punctuation marks are used. There is no obvious grammar either of the prose or of the poetic kind. But even overlooking these technical oddities, it still seems impossible to read the poem as a logical sequence. A great many words essential to the coherence of the ideas suggested have been deliberately omitted; and the entire effect is so sketchy that the poem might be made to mean almost anything or nothing. If the author once had a precise meaning it was lost in the writing of the poem. Let us, however, assume for the sake of this argument that it is possible to discover the original poem at the back of the poet’s mind; or at least to gather enough material from the poem as it stands from which to make a poem that would satisfy all formal requirements, the poem that Cummings perhaps meant to hint at with these fragments. Just as the naturalist Cuvier could reconstruct an extinct animal in full anatomical detail from a single tooth, let us restore this extinct poem from what Cummings has permitted to survive.