Observing

Different readers may have observed different things.

Some may have found the proof immediately convincing.

Others may have resisted the conclusion.

Some may have checked every step.

Some may have simply accepted it.

What readers do here is probably well described by reconstructing the steps that lead to the result.

The poem is harder.

What exactly do you do while reading it?

Some readers may have found themselves confronted with mortality.

Others may simply have lingered on the images.

Yet others may have noticed little at all, or experienced something else entirely.

Here it is less obvious how to describe what the reader is doing.

Perhaps the best description is simply that the reader experiences the poem.

The distinction is probably not absolute. Both proof and poem usually participate in a larger field of changing convictions, and also changing questions, about both the text and its topic.

Now turn the proof into a poem.

Turn the poem into a proof.

What survives?

What changes?

What is lost?