Observing

The proof may have seemed immediately convincing. Or suspicious despite each step appearing to work. A deduction steps can be checked carefully. A particular transformation may attract attention. The conclusion may resist even when the intermediate steps do not. If the result is already known, the derivation can be followed with little resistance.

In the poem, mortality may become salient. An image may captivate. The repeated movement from appearance to disappearance may be noticed. A memory may surface, or a phrase may connect with something already important. The poem may be read for its sound, its images, or its thought. Or it may not become interesting at all.

In the proof, we can examine the derivation itself.

A line can be revisited, a substitution questioned. The relation between one step and the next can be retraced after the first reading has passed. This is reconstruction in a narrower sense.

It may not recover what happened while reading the proof. What it does recover is the dependency that leads from the initial expression to the conclusion.

The poem can also be examined. The text remains there to return to. Its syntax, rhythm, imagery, repetitions, and contrasts can be studied, as can its historical setting and relation to other poems. Parts of its structure can be reconstructed.

But what became important while reading or hearing it may involve more than those relations. This becomes especially clear when a poem is spoken by a human voice for a human ear. Pace, emphasis, pauses, and voice can change what comes forward.

What happens in either case does not belong to the proof or poem alone. It arises between what is encountered and what is already present in orientation.

In the proof, reconstruction lets us retrace how the conclusion follows from the initial expression.

In the poem, reconstruction can recover parts of the text's structure. It may not recover what became important in the encounter, and may even counteract it.

This does not divide the two examples, still less texts in general, into a proof that is reconstructed and a poem that is experienced. A proof may be accepted with little attention to its derivation, while a poem may be examined in considerable structural detail. What counts as a proof, and what counts as a poem, have both taken different forms, and many texts combine features that invite different kinds of examination. Both are encountered within an existing orientation.