A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation… - Randall Jarrell

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A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The significance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.