Page 123
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Change" argues that inwardly nothing changes very much, because youth and age, smiles and blank faces, thought and thoughtlessness all continue inside the same national life of war and those who oppose it.
The page keeps flattening distinctions that people usually rely on to tell themselves history is moving. The handwritten The Wallet and Guilty annotations make the civic judgment feel more accusatory, while MANY and FEW I sharpen the contrast around Americans the speaker has known. The bottom replacement leaves the poem with people who still stay alike, making change feel more like repetition than transformation.
Change: inside nothing changes. Some have heart as one thing, some are separate and don't know how to think. As long as there is war.