, or construct them out of a series of images. "Form in a poem," he made a note to himself, " is like the performing acts in a circus." He continues to write in sentences and prefers an everyday language, words that know hard use and gives good value (Poets & Writers).CABBAGEShe was about to chop the headIn half,But I made her reconsiderBy telling her:"Cabbage symbolizes mystrerious love."Or so said one Charles Fourier,Who said many other strange and wonderful things,So that people called him mad behind his back,Whereupon I kissed the back of her neckEver so gently,Whereupon she cut the cabbage in twoWith a single troke of her knife.The "mistress" of Simic's poem is about to "chop the head" of cabbage "in half," just as the mistress in Donne's poem prepares to kill a flea. The Cabbage is Simic's emblem for love, like Donne's conceit, but also brings to mind the "vegetable love" of Marvell's peom. Simic's narrator makes "her recondider" just as Donne "stays" his mistress's hand, temporarily. Simic's poem reduces the rhetorical seduction, so elaborate in bothe Donne and Marvell, to only one line: "Cabbage symbolizes mysterious love." Simic's line, however, is still "a line," and appropriately cavalier in its formal and hyperbolic tone andin its allusion to charles Fourier, not exactly a cavalier lover, but a late-eighteenth-century Frech socialist. Yet Fourier is a fitting hero for Simic's late-twentieth-cavalier, who wishes to impress upon a woman the mysteries of love and other "strange and wonderful things" still associated with the "mad" French. Of course, his language would be veiled in "romantic suggestiveness" rather than mock argumentation. In fact, Simic's contemporary lover trusts actions more than words, and his attempted suduction shifts quickly from the rhetorical to a physical attempt to seize the day, "Whereupon I kissed the back of ther neck/Ever so gently."The love emblem--the globlelike cabbage head--(like Donne...
