hasized in "globed fruit," as if it were a globe, a world unto itself. "Dumb/ As old medallions to the thumb" gives us another impression related to the apparent stories which these "inanimate" objects might tell us if they could or would. The fruit is mute and the medallion is dumb. What they tell us is a tactile story---we have all held a shiny, juicy-looking apple in our hand; we have all run our thumb over a cold, metallic-smelling medallion and wondered at the many hands it has passed through. And suddenly---as we contemplate the stillness of the fruit, the medallion, the stone and the moss---a flock of birds
startles us as it takes flight. We read: "For all the history of grief/ An empty doorway and a maple leaf" (19-20), which is how the poem describes in metaphor the suffering and loneliness of human loss.
A true poem does not set out the psychological steps of grieving, but rather presents an image or two which represents that suffering, that loss, that grief. MacLeish is suggesting to the reader that a poem can only be experience
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