SOURCE: Jacobsen, Josephine. “Three Poems of Salvation.” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 32, no. 4 (October 1975): 284-87.

In the following excerpt, Jacobsen examines her poems “The Shade-Seller,” “The Lovers,” and “In the Crevice of Time.”

Talking about one of my poems makes me healthily nervous—it is such dangerous work. Dangerous to the poem, which may be destroyed by imputing to it more than it can justify, or by denigrating its irreducible core of mystery; dangerous to the poet, who can become pontifical in retrospect where she was honest in practice. Brevity can do much to curtail both dangers.

I chose these three poems not only because I care, particularly, for the poems themselves, but also because, taken together, they seem to me to represent a sort of widening circle with ripples spreading out from the initial impact to larger areas, yet still part of one initial impulse...