Think Tank

...

Because our young were drab

And slow to grow, for

Carnival we ate them,

Pennants of motley

distancing the deed

In the dechlorinated

crystal slab.

...

The harlequin all grace

and greed

Made glancing mincemeat

of the mirror kissed.

The scholar blotched with

ich

Sank into lonely

shudderings.

...

But at our best we were

of one mind,

Did our own sick or vital

things

Within a medium secured

by trick

...

Reflections over which,

day, night, the braille

Eraser glided of the

Snail

Our Servant, huge and

blind.

...

here's the AI's explanation:

"The poem uses the metaphor of a fish tank (a "think tank") to allegorize the creative process in poetry: initial ideas ("our young") are devoured in revision (like during Carnival), with figures like a graceful harlequin (perhaps playful inspiration or criticism) and a blotched scholar (the pondering poet) interacting in a confined, reflective space. The "Snail Our Servant" suggests slow, blind, ongoing erasure and refinement—tying into themes of self-editing, the interplay between creation and critique, and a contained mind at work. It appears in Merrill's Collected Poems (2001 edition, p. 415)."

that's improved from last year, but it's still missing some stuff that merrill said himself in semi-publicly-available archives like jstor articles. it's still ignoring the harlequin as a commedia dell'arte character, which is a double-entendre with the actual harlequin fish.

'glancing mincemeat' is a both a literal reference to a harlequin fish darting at its own imagine in a reflective surface, and a metaphorical callback to the old harlequinade, in which the harlequin character would end up bashing against his diminished and stupider doppelganger in the form of the clown.

that's an important inflection point in that poem, because the next image presented is ichthyophthirius, the fish disease. the 'scholar' in this case is a kind of evolved form of the greedy impulsive harlequin, which humbled itself in the previous lines by foolishly smashing into its own image and gaining nothing but woe.

the capsule AI summary gets some of this (more than before), but it still misses quite a lot, including some of the main points.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5835355&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310744#49673592)