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             <p>There’s still a problem with language, however, to which Hass speaks by the end of his poem, with those repetitions of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry,” in that, as Jack Gilbert says in his poem “<a href="http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/theforgottendialect.html">The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart</a>,” “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / but frightening that it does not quite.” There is still that “<a href="http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html">irritable reaching</a> after fact &amp; reason” that language, as communication, requires—I think Keats would agree that he wrote about a near-unattainable ideal in his letter that only Shakespeare and maybe Coleridge and a few others could achieve, this “Negative Capability.” Gilbert furthers Keats in asserting that no matter what we write, “the words / Get it wrong,” that utterance is itself that irritable reaching.</p>
             <p>In Gilbert’s poem, though, he does reach after something. In the second half of the poem he begins to imagine what the “mysterious Sumerian tablets” could be as poetry, instead of just “business records:”</p>
             <blockquote>
-            <p>[…] My joy is the same as twelve<br />Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light.<br />O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,<br />as grand as ripe barley under the wind’s labor.<br />Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts<br />of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred<br />pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what<br />my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this<br />desire in the dark.</p>
+            <p><span class="line">[…] My joy is the same as twelve</span><span class="line">Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light.</span><span class="line">O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,</span><span class="line">as grand as ripe barley under the wind’s labor.</span><span class="line">Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts</span><span class="line">of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred</span><span class="line">pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what</span><span class="line">my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this</span><span class="line">desire in the dark.</span></p>
             </blockquote>
             <p>This is my favorite part of the poem, and I think it’s because Gilbert, like Hass, reaches for the specific in the general; he brings huge ideas like the Lord or Love or Joy into the specific images of salt, copper, or honey, or like he says at the end of his poem: “What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.” This, ultimately, is what Keats was getting at, and Hugo, too: that the real subject of any poetry is not capturable in the words of the poem, but that rather a poem speaks around its subject. To be honest, all <a href="art.html">art</a> may do this. What sets a poem apart is its honesty about that fact.</p>
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