Lose Not, Lost Not

An anaphoric catalog of dreams, solitude, fear, style, and loss, repeatedly beginning with 'This' before ending in the thought of coming apart.

An anaphoric litany in which eleven lines each begin with 'This', naming a separate dread - 'This dream that runs against the feaver', 'This child birth absolutely alone', 'This bandit at a small store', 'This holdup in the abstract' - before the catalog gathers into 'These things we think of / Of going up and down, / and coming apart'.

The repeated demonstrative points at each item as if it were in the room, so dreams, crime, childbirth, and manners all take on the same insistent nearness. Private and public catastrophes sit side by side without transition, and the late lines pair gain against loss - 'This gain of style / This loss of manner / This courage gone' - so every acquisition is shadowed by a deprivation. The shift from 'This' to 'These' turns the list into shared thought, and the doubled 'of / Of' across the line break enacts the vertigo of 'going up and down' before the poem admits 'coming apart'. The title's symmetry, 'Lose Not, Lost Not', tries to forbid loss in both present and past tense, yet the body is made of losses, so the negation reads as a vow that fails as it is spoken. The source spelling 'feaver' is preserved.