Rich, an associate professor of English atMontclair State University is the author of The Dynamics of Tonal Shift in the Sonnet. In the following essay, he discusses the key roles that structure and plot play in "The Hospital Window."

The line "I have just come down from my father" both begins and ends a poem that on the surface seems to be about a speaker who is in the street below, looking up at his father's hospital window after visiting him. He is trying to see his father behind the sun-glare reflected in the window. Upon seeing him, the speaker experiences a complex epiphany that is anticipated stanza by stanza through careful plotting. Using puns, syntactic structure, and references to movement, color, and light imagery, Dickey provides four simultaneous levels of plot—the means by which the poem gets from its beginning to its end and closure...