I remember the first lecture I attended when I was a new teaching assistant in graduate school, in September 1975. It was a survey of world drama, and I wondered how the professor, an intense young scholar in Romance Languages, would introduce the course in his opening lecture and get us started. The TAs had been given no preparation for the teaching we’d be doing, no meetings beforehand, no discussion of the syllabus and assignments.

The professor began with a “good morning” to the fifty students in the hall, in a tone that seemed more like a warning than a welcome. He then moved to a summary of and commentary on the “text” he said would be our point of departure: an essay by Jacques Derrida on Jacques Lacan’s essay on Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter.” A peculiar choice to you and me now, but this was the mid-1970s, and my graduate school was at the forefront of the new field of literary theory: Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, among others. The professor was “working on” these brilliant and mostly impenetrable figures, and I guess it seemed natural to him to launch his course with them.

There’s a further twist to the story, another sign of the uncanny era it was. The following month, this same professor led an afternoon faculty and graduate student seminar on the Derrida essay, and in the Q & A, I asked about a detail in the Poe story, which I had read in college. He replied he wasn’t familiar with the story; he hadn’t read it. No one seemed troubled by this. In fact, the next day I was told that some in the room considered my question to be “hostile.” I’m deferential and shy, so I was distressed I’d come across as confrontational.

I bring up this memory from fifty years ago because I’ve found that when I begin the courses I teach, I’m inclined to ask simple questions, or at least questions that sound simple.

For example: what’s the difference between a long poem and a short one?

“I have never started a poem whose end I knew,” Robert Frost said, because “writing a poem is discovering.” But how do writers know when they’ve discovered the end? How do we know when a piece of writing is done, is the way we want it, the way it must be? Perhaps that’s why the Internet teems with advice for poets seeking counsel and support for dealing with this problem. I recall a thread that had the caption, “How the hell do I end a poem?”

Let’s take a look at a poem by Louise Bogan, titled “The Alchemist,” published in 1923:

The Alchemist

I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.

It could be that Bogan intends a variation on or reply to Ben Jonson’s masterpiece, The Alchemist (1610), a brilliant satire of greed, hypocrisy, and gullibility, set in London during a time of plague. The cast abounds with con artists, prostitutes, and fools, and one of the money-making schemes is tricking people into believing that base metal can be turned into gold.

Perhaps it’s an alchemical flame—the medium and process through which transmutation occurs—that Bogan’s first-person speaker is alluding to when the poem begins: “I burned my life.” The second half of line one answers, “that I might find,” which is tentative, hesitant.

The speaker’s goal is to locate passion not in life but, rather, in mind, not body and biology but mentality and spirit. The third line clarifies this: “thought divorced from eye and bone.”

The emphasis is on sight, and on structure, the corporeal framework. Ecstasy: from Old French extasie, via late Latin, from Greek ekstasis, “standing outside oneself”: an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement; an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.

That’s the first sentence, and then, in line five, a four-syllable phrase, “I broke my life,” parallels the opening line. We might have expected the breaking to precede the burning. But Bogan reverses this: first burn, then break. Finding has become seeking—not passion, but “relief.” “Light” picks up on the burning, a light that is “flawed,” weakened, imperfect, “the flawed light of love and grief.”

“With mounting beat”: this phrase that begins stanza two implies something is happening and creates suspense. “Beat” is a noun, the main accent or rhythmic unit, the pulsation of the heart, yet it carries within it the force of the verb—to strike, or to hammer, stamp, mold, or shape. “Fire” reinforces “burned.” “Utter” means complete, absolute, to the highest degree, at the extreme limit.

In the next line, “Charred,” a single syllable, and with its doubled “r,” sounds harsh, severe, a burning on the outside, a blackening effect. “Existence and desire,” big words, large abstractions. Can this short poem do justice to them? For the speaker, it’s irrelevant what they are. What counts is what is done to them by the fire.

The fire fades: “it died low.” “Ceased its sudden thresh”: it’s a puzzle, the meaning of this noun “thresh,” a word rarely used in modern English. It’s close to “thrash,” which maybe would link it to “beat.” I associate it with the flashing of the fire that is dying low, losing heat and flame.

The speaker says she has found flesh, skin, body. The “s” sounds in the multi-syllabic “unmysterious flesh” take a moment for us to move through. Within a dash, the speaker contrasts it to mind, to which she gives “substance”: a physical shape, but also an important quality, not tangible. “Avid”: having or showing a keen interest in or enthusiasm for, an eager desire, from French avide, Latin avidus, from avere, “to crave.”

Bogan’s speaker tried, alchemically, to transform passion from body to “mind,” which in turn would govern it, not allow it to be unruly, for that has led and could lead to hurt and pain, to separation and divorce. That’s the intention, the hope. But the speaker’s effort failed. She found that flesh remains potent; her will cannot make it cede supremacy to mind.

What’s the difference, then, between a long poem and a short one? I don’t have the answer, but that’s why I like the question, especially in the classroom. It’s reassuring to students because they can think their way into it as we proceed line by line through Bogan’s difficult stanzas.

What matters is the poem, but I want to say that what really matters is the classroom conversation, the back and forth, our agreements and disagreements about the organization of the language. That’s where the poem is, maybe even more than on the page. “The Alchemist” is short; Bogan stopped after just twelve lines. Why is that?

William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.