piece will eventually fit together by "law," following the puzzle maker's design. The "plot thickens" as the pieces interlock, forming a story.

Stanza 4

At the start of the fourth stanza, Mademoiselle focuses on the puzzle's edges, but the speaker abruptly shifts to the future—an evening in London last December. People gather in "the library" for a psychic demonstration. The audience has previously seen an object hidden in a casket behind a panel before the psychic arrives. The psychic closes his eyes and attempts to envision the object. He perceives something from the object's past, possibly involving the felling of trees, "groaning and cracking" as they near a lumber mill.

The psychic describes the process of crafting a puzzle piece from plywood. He suggests that while the process seems intricate, it is not as complex as the "hazard and craft," the destiny ("karma"), that shaped its original material. This puzzle-making process, along with assembling the pieces to complete the puzzle, can be compared to the poet's creative journey. After identifying the piece, the psychic opens his eyes to applause. However, the speaker experiences an undefined sense of dread, potentially from reflecting on "karma," and quickly shifts his focus back to the past.

Stanzas 5–6

The following stanza maintains the theme of creation, beginning with a repeated phrase from the first line of the previous stanza, with Mademoiselle framing the puzzle's edges. The speaker implies that the pieces possess their own creative energy as they "align themselves" to form a scene of the earth or sky, taking over the creative process. He likens the straight-edged pieces to naïve scientists exploring the universe's origins, "whose views clash." Meanwhile, the "nomad inlanders" start organizing themselves into various shapes that eventually become "sophisticated unit[s]."

By suppertime, vivid images have emerged and come alive for Mademoiselle and the boy. In one cloud, they spot a sheik with a "flashing sword hilt," and in another, a "backward-looking slave or page-boy" with incomplete feet assisting a woman off a camel. Mademoiselle mistakenly assumes the boy is the woman's son. Shortly before bedtime, the speaker discovers some vital pieces that help "orient" the images. He leaves the puzzle with a yellow section that "promises" to become a "sumptuous tent."

The boy notes in his diary that he has started the puzzle and sneaks a look at Mademoiselle's letter to the priest, where she writes, "this innocent mother, this poor child, what will become of them?" ("cette innocente mère / Ce pauvre enfant, que deviendront-ils?"), likely referring to the boy and his mother. In a parenthetical aside, the speaker mentions that as a child, he never sought to learn more about Mademoiselle, who was French only through marriage. A friend later informs him that his French has a German accent ("Tu as l'accent allemand"), imparted by Mademoiselle, who was of English and Prussian descent. The speaker only discovers this years later. He reflects on how Mademoiselle must have suffered, caught between German and French cultures as World War II loomed. The narrative returns to the past as Mademoiselle bids the boy goodnight, telling him to "sleep well" ("schlaf wohl") in German and calling him "darling" ("chéri") in French. She kisses him and makes the sign of the cross, a Catholic blessing, on his forehead.

Stanzas 7–14

In these stanzas, the speaker delves into the puzzle's world as "it assembles on the shrinking Green." He describes the "noblest" slaves ("avatars") adorned with plumes, scars, and vests lined with fur ("vair"). In another part of the picture, "old wives" alleviate boredom with a narcotic derived from hemp ("kef") and sweet drinks, asserting that if Allah wills ("Insh'Allah"), their wandering husbands will tire of their mistresses or end them.

The speaker briefly veers off topic, suggesting that the discussion is not quite suitable for "the Home." He points out that the puzzle is a recreation of a painting supposedly created by an admirer ("a minor lion") of the French Orientalist artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). He asks "dear Richard" (likely Richard Howard, to whom Merrill dedicated the poem) to look into the painting's true creator.

In stanza 11, the speaker introduces Houri, one of the beautiful maidens residing with the blessed in Islamic paradise, and Afreet, a malevolent demon in Arabic mythology. Playing on the word thieves, he describes them as "thick as Thebes," alluding to the ancient capital of Upper Egypt. Both characters vie for the boy in the puzzle, who is uncertain "whom to serve" and has yet to find his footing. This suggests the boy in the puzzle symbolizes the boy in the poem, caught between two divorcing parents. The speaker wishes for the boy to find "that piece of Distance" from this difficult situation, the "Eternal Triangle" of father, mother, and child.

The puzzle is almost complete, except for the sky; the blue pieces resist being placed into a pattern, unsure of how they will fit. They face "quite a task" assembling the pieces of "Heaven," but eventually succeed. The puzzle is finally finished. The boy's missing feet are discovered under the table, and the final pieces are set in place.

Stanzas 15–18

With the puzzle finished, Mademoiselle returns to her puppet show work, and "all too soon," the puzzle is taken apart. When lifted, some sections remain intact while others separate. Each image in the puzzle eventually disintegrates, including the tent, which resembles a creamy sauce ("mousseline"). Only the green top of the table, "on which the grown-ups gambled," remains as the day concludes. The speaker, being a poet, finds analogies between the green table and the "green dusk"—a false coincidence, as he can craft his own memory of the event. He also mentions his "mangy tiger safe on his bared hearth," akin to the tiger in the puzzle. These analogies, or comparisons between dissimilar things, emphasize the boy's connection to the puzzle.

The speaker reveals that before the puzzle was packed away and returned to the shop on New York City's Upper East Side (the "mid-Sixties"), one piece "contrived," seemingly of its own volition, "to stay in the boy's pocket." Drawing further parallels between the puzzle and life, the speaker acknowledges that final puzzle pieces often go missing, much like the high notes of Maggie Teyte, an English soprano (1888–1976) renowned for her French song performances; the popularity of collies; a house; and fragments of Mademoiselle's "truth."

In the present moment, the speaker mentions that he has recently been searching in Athens for Rilke's translation of Valéry's "Palme." He discusses the challenges Rilke, or any translator, faces during translation: the extent to which the original must be altered to convey "its underlying sense"; how much of the original's "warm Romance" diminishes; and how the nouns become exaggerated and isolated, disconnected from their source. The German umlaut, symbolic of Rilke's language, can only "peep" and "hoot," likened to an immature "owlet," becoming an echo ("reverberation") that is nonetheless "filled with stars."

The speaker concludes with a series of contradictions, questioning if the original is lost or simply "one more missing piece." Yet, he asserts that "nothing's lost" because all our interactions with the world require translation, suggesting that "every bit of us is lost in it. / (Or found-." In parenthesis, he reflects on the end of a relationship with a past lover ("S"), surprised by the resulting tranquility. The final image depicts the loss of that relationship as "a self-effacing tree," perhaps within the context of a poem, "turn[ing] the waste," like the tree, into "shade and fiber, milk and memory." Here, the speaker contemplates art's ability to alleviate a sense of loss, "translating" sorrow into comforting images of shade and nourishment. This imagery connects to the boy's loss in the first stanza, where he copes with his parents' absence by assembling a puzzle for solace.