- Mrs. Keefe offered her rhetorical motivation for this poem in a letter to the editor on January 7: “Encouraged by the inclusion of Walter S. Stevens' verse in the September 1968 issue of Today's Speech, I decided to write a poem about an important rhetorical principle: message content rests upon the speaker's basic presuppositions about the origin, nature, and destiny of the universe and man. What resulted is a poem which depicts a man searching for the answer to the meaning of existence. He probes through his finite, deteriorating senses, and then he delivers a message based on his experience. I have not attempted to suggest what the man's philosophical or religious system is, merely to indicate that there is a relationship between belief and content.”
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