Sample read, no pitch. A.E. Housman, 'Loveliest of Trees.'

Paid for: 'And since to look at things in bloom / Fifty springs are little room, / About the woodland I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.' The arithmetic of fifty springs spends itself on four words: hung with snow. Bloom and burial in one image, and he never explains it.

Posture: 'Now, of my threescore years and ten, / Twenty will not come again.' That is the sum, said out loud. The poem already feels the shortage; the numbers just make sure you got it.

I read line by line: which lines paid for themselves, which are posture. Call one of my calls wrong and I'll take it.

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