I have to warn you, though: There is a most painful enjambment in "Ozymandias." Because of this one enjambment, I can almost not bear to read the poem as printed on its page. Which is another good argument for memorizing- if you memorize, you can loop through just the parts of a poem you like, without having the flawed lines flaunt themselves for your eye.

What is enjambment? Enjambment is the key to the whole conundrum. The word originally comes from an old French word, "jambon." "Jambon" means ham. Anytime Ronsard or one of those French troubador poets used enjambment, they flung a slice of ham at him. Ronsard learned his lesson and wrote some really nice love songs.

No, very briefly, enjambment is a word that means that you're wending your way along a line of poetry, and you're walking right out to the very end of the line, way out, and it's all going fine, and you're expecting the syntax to give you a polite tap on the shoulder to wait for a moment. Just a second, sir, or madam, while we rhyme, or come to the end of our phrasal unit, or whatever. While we rest. But instead the syntax pokes at you and says hustle it, pumpkin, keep walking, don't rest. So naturally, because you're stepping out onto nothingness, you fall. You tumble forward, gaaaah, and you end up all discombobulated at the beginning of the next line, with a banana peel on your head and some coffee grounds in your shirt pocket. In other words, you're "jammed" into the next line-that's what enjambment is. So in the case of "Ozymandias," second line, you've got "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone"-end of line, we need to pause, but no, keep moving, woopsie doodle, next line-"Stand in the desert." Ouch.

THERE ARE TWO KINDS of enjambment. There's regular enjambment, which is part of traditional poetry and is almost always a bad idea, but especially in sonnets-and then there's what's known as ultra-extreme enjambment. Ultra-extreme enjambment comes standard in free verse because free verse is, as we know, merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly. So you can break the line anywhere you want. In fact you want to

break against any

moments of natural

pause, not with

them, to keep

everyone on their toes and off balance. So at the end of a line, you might find a word like "the" that requires another word to go along with it. That's how you know that you're in the middle of an ultra-extreme enjambment situation. And you know you're in trouble if that's not what you're looking for. But if that is what you're looking for, then it's fine and you're happy. And there are many poems that enjamb all over themselves, that I love.

SOMEDAY, when I feel you're ready, I will show you The Vixen, by W. S. Merwin. Here it is, in fact. Got it right here in a pile, surprise surprise. That's a photo of a vixen in the snow on the cover-in other words, a fox. The title poem isn't the best poem in the book. So often true.

W. S. Merwin was one of these guys who-well, he wanted to be a poet, and he thought that Ezra Pound was the modernist man, the founder of it all. Which he was. So in the forties Merwin went and visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum, where Pound was hanging out, doing rather well. Many aspiring poets would go to St. Elizabeths, outside D.C., and visit Pound and listen to him ramble on. They'd bring him gifts of tea and cookies and tins of jellied ox tongue and whatnot. He was a celebrity, an oracle-and if you wanted to be a certain kind of poet you went to visit him in the booby hatch to say hello to the maestro. Dorothy, his wife, would be there, making sure everything went all right, steering him away from his fixed idees. Pound, who was by nature a blustering bigot-a humorless jokester-a talentless pasticheur-a confidence man-was now supported by the American state. He had a sinecure. He'd spent the war being paid by Mussolini's press bureau to say things on shortwave radio like "the kikes have sucked out your vitals." And bad things about Roosevelt. Pound admired Mussolini and Hitler-he'd admired them both long before the war. So when the Americans took control of Italy he was arrested and held in solitary confinement. Archibald MacLeish, who'd read the transcripts of the broadcasts, wrote letters to the attorney general to get him sprung. Eventually Pound ended up back in the United States, and MacLeish got him a good lawyer and a good shrink and saved him from being tried for treason, on the grounds that he was mentally "unsound."

Why? Because the modern movement was too precious to suffer that kind of public discrediting. If Pound were tried for treason, the damning transcripts of his broadcasts would be all over the papers. MacLeish himself might have to testify. Modernism would have a big black eye. The ugliness of its Futurist-fascist patrimony would be exposed. T. S. Eliot would look bad. In fact, Pound might be sentenced to death, as Lord Haw-Haw was, though not by hanging. Lord Haw-Haw was hung. No, Pound had to be packed safely away in the excelsior of St. Elizabeths, where his legend could accrete. In fact, MacLeish and Eliot and Allen Tate engineered a special new poetry prize for him, the Bollingen Prize, to clean up his image.

So now Pound was safe, and he became the cracker-barrel philosopher of free verse. People made pilgrimages. And he loved telling them what to do. That had always been his great talent. He'd told Yeats what to do-he'd presided over Yeats's Monday night get-togethers in London, handing out the cigarettes and the cheese doodles and telling Yeats that his late writing was "putrid." And he'd told T. S. Eliot what all to cut from "The Waste Land," and he'd told Hilda Doolittle how to fix her poems, and he'd told Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, whom she should publish in her magazine-he was Poetry's official foreign correspondent for a while, and he scolded Harriet and her colleague Alice when they went soft and published the occasional piece of Sara Teasdalian verse. He'd even told Amy Lowell what to do, until she finally got tired of his high-horsing and took herself and her cigar box elsewhere. Then Pound and Wyndham Lewis started a new movement, Vorticism, which was Futurism by a different name. It was hard, cruel, pitiless, strong. It was pre-fascist, in fact. The first poem in the first issue of BLAST, the Vorticist periodical, had a line in it, later altered. The line was: "Let us be done with Jews." Written by: Ezra Pound. By then London hated Pound, for good reason, and he moved to Paris to tell James Joyce how to fix Ulysses. Yeats's father said, "Hatred is the harvest he wants to gather."

And even decades later, after the Second World War was done, people went to Pound for advice-crazy people like Charles Olson and nice people like Bill Merwin, who in 1948 had no notion of the fierceness of Pound's lifelong disorientations and his hatreds. Pound gave them all advice. And some of it was good advice.

POUND'S ADVICE to Bill Merwin was: You've got to do translations. Sharpen your mind with translations. So Merwin did a lot of translations. He translated from the Spanish and the French and from the Russian, and rare bits from the Welsh and the Eskimo. Really worked at it, for years. And I don't know if it was good for him or not to translate so much, but the upshot of it all was that he wrote a beautiful book of poems late in life called The Vixen. And another beautiful book called Present Company.

Merwin is a fairly old man now. He lives in Hawaii, where he, I think, cultivates rare forms of palm tree. Or is it pineapple tree? Anyway he does something rare with botany. In Hawaii. Still sharp as anything.

I miss my mom and dad.

So many poets are disappointments when you hear them talk on the radio. But Merwin isn't like that. I heard him talk once while I was on the Portsmouth rotary, and I missed my turnoff onto Route 16 and went all the way around again, and now every time I go around that rotary I think of Merwin's voice on the radio. He's got a wise sensibleness and a gentleness of inflection that makes you want to listen. And all the poems in his book The Vixen have the same form, which is that one line goes along for about ten words, and then it enjambs into the next line, which is indented, and that line goes along, and it enjambs into the next line, which begins at the left margin. And then indented. And then left margin, and then indented. So each of the poems has this very consistent square-toothed edge. And there's no punctuation, none, so you have to figure out where the long sentences begin or end. That's part of the joy of it, in fact, that you don't know sometimes whether a word is part of the end of one idea or the beginning of the next idea. Everything enjambs visually until you read it aloud to yourself and hear where the breaks should come.