Each morning now, working on poetry before I get to Life Work, I redraft “Another Elegy.” It takes me many drafts to write a poem and “Another Elegy” is the all-time statistical leader. When I take questions after a poetry reading, or talk to student poets, I emphasize how hard I work and how many drafts I number. (A few weeks ago I talked in Chicago. My host in a recent letter quoted a student: “I was amazed about his overdrafts.”) Seldom do I mention “Another Elegy,” because its numbers are ridiculous. Some poems get finished, over a year or two, in twenty-five or thirty drafts; more likely fifty or sixty; several by actual count go over a hundred—but “Another Elegy,” which began in 1982, had accumulated—when I put it away in 1988, furious with it, ashamed and humiliated by failure—over five hundred drafts. At some point in 1990 this poem began to nibble at my consciousness again. I had put it away but I hadn’t destroyed it, and I began to consider a fundamental alteration in the way the poem presented itself. For a year I refused its entreaties, would not look at it; then on January 1, 1992, with the deepest of sighs, I pulled it out of the drawer. It looked good to me, and immediately I began radical revision; deep hopelessness seesawed to elevations of high hope. After ten more weeks and thirty more drafts I showed the new poem to Jane who remembered the old one; her response encouraged me.

Always I hope that I might be doing my Best Work, although I understand that it is unlikely at sixty-three and a half. I work on “Another Elegy,” manic, first thing in the day; or I work on it all day, because if I drive to my daughter’s in Concord I stop by the road and take notes. I start waking at two or three in the morning, putting on my glasses to see the clock because I want to wake and get back to this poem. (But if I get up before four-thirty I ruin my day with early fatigue.) When the coffee grinds itself at quarter to five, I am out of bed in one second.

And all the time, part of my mind keeps reminding me: “You felt like this, about this same poem, a hundred times between 1982 and 1988.”

In 1975 when we first moved here my cousin Paul Fenton told me a story that I made into a poem and a children’s book. Now I tell the story again to make a point. Paul the storyteller was a farmer, a good Democrat who accepted federal preferment when the Democrats were in power, a UNH graduate, a teacher and educational administrator—and he resembled his uncle, my grandfather Wesley, especially when he remembered a story and the skin crimped around his eyes. “Did you ever hear the one,” said Paul as he sat on our sofa, “about the fellow—used to live around here—who filled up his ox-cart every year with everything his family made or grew that was left over? Maple sugar I suppose, wool and woolens, maybe linen or flaxseed, shingles, birch brooms, potatoes. Every year he filled his cart and walked by his ox to Portsmouth Market—once he went all the way to Boston—and sold everything out of his cart. Then he sold his cart. Then he sold his ox.” This was the climax and surprise of the story; when Paul saw my happy response, he grinned again. “Then he walked home and started getting next year’s ox ready, building a new ox-cart I guess …”