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Virgin Information Center, © Kitty Armistead

Dear Editors:

Nine steps is truly clever but I believe Mr. Beeney missed something (two somethings? or should that be some-shit (or two some-shit-s?)) in the last line of the Donne quotation.

    No shit is an island, entire of shit-self.
    Every shit is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . .
    Any shit's death diminishes me, because I am involved in shit-kind
    and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls.
    It tolls for thee.

I believe his logic calls for it to read

    Shit tolls for thee

or maybe by an even broader comprehensiveness

    Shit tolls for shit.

Robert Stone

Editor's Note: In an effort to be more like Poetry magazine, which allows readers to comment but then, rightly, gives its contributors the last word (contributors being inherently superior to mere readers), we've given Mr. Beeney a chance to respond to Mr. Stone's audacious criticism.

"Shit tolls for thee." Ha. Hard to believe I missed that one. Thanks.

"Shit tolls for shit" though strikes me as circular—as either a poetry professor's drunken humor or more truth than most readers could possibly handle (ergo said drunkenness).

As a lifelong educator, I guard against outpacing my students, even the more capable ones. "Shit tolls for shit" may well be—if the whole truth were known—the grand epigram of all time, on the order of "Forty-two." Such insight is lesson number one among the recently dead whose lives have just passed before their eyes, whose experience leads them to expect an infinity of waste leading to waste, which is entropy.

One wonders what sweet flowers may rise out of infinitely distilled shit. Maybe the only true optimist is a dead one. God bless America. Liberal means free.

Steven Beeney